Dali House

Back in July I declared that Sotheby’s had quite a hat-trick on its hands for its London sale of Old Master Paintings, with JMW Turner’s “Virginia Water”, John Constable’s “Storm Clouds over Hampstead” and the oil above, Francisco de Goya’s “Equestrian Portrait of Don Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia”.

Turner did well, no one wanted the Constable, and the Goya sold for £2,617,250, right in the middle of the pre-sale estimate. Whoever took it home has more than a conversation piece — this painting won’t shut up.

It’s believed to be an elaborate sketch for a proper portrait that seems never to have been done, but Goya (1746-1828) certainly gives us a sturdy depiction of a sturdy nobleman on a sturdy steed. This military man, though, was more indebted to love than war.

What a character, Manuel Godoy y Alvárez de Faria! He was born poor and died poor, but in between he was the most powerful man in Spain. This came courtesy of the woman he loved, Doña María Luisa of Parma, who was the Princess of Asturias when they met but then became the wife of King Charles IV — and kept him around as her paramour.

As queen, María Luisa stepped on the gas pedal of Godoy’s career, rocketing him from a low rank in the Royal Life-Guards to Brigadier, to Field Marshal, to Duke of Alcudia and a slew of other titles, and finally to Prime Minister. From 1792 to 1808, Godoy was a third of what Queen María Luisa called “the Trinity on Earth”. Charles was nominally the head of state, but Godoy and Maria Luísa ran the country. As prime minister, he negotiated the Treaty of Basle with France, earning the title “Prince of the Peace”.

Goya’s “Queen Maria Luisa on Horseback” from 1799 is the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Below is Godoy’s eventual wife, María Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga, later Condesa de Chinchón, who was the niece of Charles IV. The queen arranged the wedding, supposedly to get Godoy away from his latest mistress, Pepita Tudó. (He ultimately married Pepita anyway, after Maria Teresa died.) Goya, who became official court artist in 1786, painted the original Senora Godoy both before and after her marriage.

“Equestrian Portrait of Dona Maria Teresa de Vallabriga”, from 1783, is in Florence’s Galleria degli Uffizi.

Sometime between 1797 and 1800, Goya also painted Pepita, or at least many people think it’s her. Godoy certainly bought it quick. The work is called “La maja desnuda” (”The Nude Maja”) and is well known, primarily because it’s supposedly the first time a European artist clearly showed female pubic hair. My online image-storage service gets fidgety when I upload naked women, so go see the picture at the Prado or on this Wikipedia page.

The equestrian painting of her husband was done in 1794, and Goya did another, in 1801, after Godoy defeated the Portuguese in the War of the Oranges. This one called for some editorialising, Goya seems to have thought: The Duke is hardly triumphant, and perhaps the artist felt he had no cause to be jubilant, having undone the social and political progress achieved by Charles III and embraced immorality and warfare under Charles IV, jailing and exiling dissidents, including some of Goya’s friends.

“Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia, ‘Prince of the Peace’” is at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid.

After 1801, Godoy climbed into bed with Napoleon and led Spain back to war with England, which ended in the naval disaster of Trafalgar, and then the virtual French occupation of many Spanish towns. Goya was there to record, in “The Third of May” and other poignant works, the bloody uprisings in Madrid. King Charles was tossed off the throne and Godoy was nabbed by a lynch mob, but the French pulled him free and took him home. He died in obscurity in Paris in 1851, and currently tries to get some rest in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

“The Virgin and Child”, Tyrolean School, circa 1490

“The Virgin and Child”, follower of Rogier van der Weyden, circa 1450

I remember reading once that mediaeval artists never did get the hang of painting children, but I’ve forgotten their excuse.

On the casually conversational blog Scatterplot, one poster suggests that adult models were used because kids wouldn’t sit still long enough, and another that, in an epoch before the divisions in human development were recognised, babies were viewed as untamed adults.

Or is it more to do with the way Jesus was perceived? asks still another.

But there’s also a reference to Philippe Aries’ 1962 book “Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life”, in which it’s surmised that, in the Middle Ages, there was no fond reminiscence of childhood, no “loyal remembrance”, to use his term. Until the Renaissance, the infant and juvenile face and physique had no special significance.

“The Miracle of Saint Francis Xavier and the Crab” is yet another painting I stumbled across that made me wonder whether my Catholic education, with all its Bible indoctrination, was really worth wearing a crown of thorns for the rest of my life. Not that Saint Francis Xavier ever figured in the Bible, of course, but in school we did get the saintly virtues hammered into our skulls, so how did I miss out on the crab episode?

This wasn’t another case of censorship, as it was with Lot’s nocturnal escapades with his daughters (see this post). No, I suspect that I was never taught about Saint Francis Xavier’s crab because he (Francis, not the crab) is the hero of the Jesuits, and the priests who decided what I should know were Franciscans or Chicagoans or something.

Probably any Jesuit-schooled person, if he’s willing to admit that much, can tell you the crab incident occurred while Francis Xavier, a high-achieving Basque missionary, optimised paradigms-wise, was furthering his mission to show Asia what a fine fellow Jesus was, much better than Muhammad or the Buddha or any of those confusing Hindu gods.

Peter Paul Rubens’ “Miracles of St Francis Xavier” from 1617-18 is at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Plenty of healing and raising from the dead, but no crabs.

Having succeeded in transforming Goa on India’s west coast into a magnet for Western backpackers, Francis set sail for China in 1546. A storm came up en route to Malacca, which would become a state of Malaysia but at the time was a Portuguese outpost. The actual setting of this incident is, however, subject to a debate that would be better spent deciding whether female Catholic priests should be allowed to have abortions.

The first website Google pointed me to for an explanation of Francis and the crab was The Jesuit Gourmet, where contributor “Jhaw” relates the story and then whips up some Baked Eggplant Stuffed with Crab Meat. I’m not kidding.

“Jhaw” says Francis prayed to God to soothe the rollicking waves, and flung a cross into the water as a sacrifice. Sure enough, the storm abated.

Over at The Real Presence.org, Father John A Hardon (still not kidding) clarified that Francis didn’t toss a “cross” into the ocean, but a crucifix, so that helped.

Tourism Malacca.com quotes from “A Stroll Through Ancient Malacca” by Father Pintado to say that, no, Francis Xavier was in a small boat, just tooling around offshore, and was merely holding his crucifix over the water to calm the waves when he accidentally dropped it.

The Union of Catholic Asian News says people in Goa believe Francis was dipping his crucifix into the waves to settle them down, but it slipped from his grasp.

It’s a piddling point, but one of many disputed angles in the saga. See the rest.

Gustave Courbet’s “La Trombe” from 1867

Gustave Courbet came from Ornans, lodged thick in the hills of eastern France against the Swiss border, and after that toiled in Paris. He was 22 before he first laid eyes on the sea, but it grabbed him, as it will. He became a shoreline junkie.

In 1867, when Courbet was 58 and famous, his neighbourhood pharmacist, Monsieur Fourquet, invited him along to his summer house at Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer on the Norman coast, spotted above on Google Earth.

Gustave and Zelie, one of the artist’s three sisters who’d long been his models, stayed for 10 days beginning on August 24. The other sisters, Zoe and Juliette, were left behind in sweltering Paris to keep an eye on his latest exhibition.

From the rise above the beach, Courbet painted “La Trombe” (”The Waterspout”), seen above.

And here, “La Plage de Saint-Aubin”, which has “1867″ written right on it but, according to at least one art historian, was done in 1865. Why Sarah Faunce thinks so, I don’t know, but she argues that Courbet often didn’t sign and date his work until it left his studio, and that was often a year or two after the painting was finished. In 2005 this piece sold at auction for $307,000.

In Trouville in 1865, another tide-minding village on the English Channel, Courbet had painted “Portrait of Countess Karoly”, a vacationing Hungarian royal. It was such a hit that visitors to the “splendid” seaview apartment that the local casino loaned him wouldn’t let him get on with his job.

“More than 400 ladies” came to see the “princess”, he wrote home (and perhaps to compare noses). They also offered him plenty more work — everyone now wanted her portrait done too, at 1,500 francs a pop. “I’ll paint another two or three to satisfy those who are most anxious.”

To be sure, noted travel journalist Adolphe Joanne, Trouville was “the meeting place of the sick who are perfectly healthy, it is Paris transported for two or three months to the sea coast, with its qualities, its absurdities and its vices … It is sad to say that most of the women go there to parade a senseless luxury.”

An aerial of Trouville showing the casino, the large building, still on the spin.

Also sweating it out back in Paris, his soon-to-be-former friend Jules Fleury-Husson — the art critic signed Champfleury — was moaning that Courbet had “lost his way” and was by now merely “trying to please”. Huge bodies of water do have a way of mellowing people out. See the rest.

Werewolves! Seen ‘em with my own eyes!