Dali House

From 1849, “The Shipwreck (The Wreck of the Hope)” by the Irish-born Francis Danby (1793-1861), whose career was built on Bible scenes and purer fantasies but triumphed with “Sunset at Sea, After a Storm”, sometimes referred to as “Shipwreck Against a Setting Sun”, in 1824, only to lose ground in a row with the Royal Academy after Constable topped him for the presidency by a single vote. Danby fled to the continent but returned to favour with “The Deluge” in 1840, and never again strayed far from the sea, though he fell well short of Turner’s popularity.

In “The Wreck of the Hope” Danby emphasises humanity’s helplessness in the face of monstrous nature, his ship all but demolished and the crew chaotically close to doom, a lifeboat capsized and nothing but a battery of rocks to offer meagre hope of salvation.

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900), whose gripping scenes opened Part 1 of this post, also painted “The Ninth Wave” in 1850, above and detail below. More than half of his output was seascapes, beginning with views of all the coastal towns in his native Crimea and ultimately winning him a commission with the Russian Navy and a favoured place in the Turkish court.

As Wikipedia notes, he was the most prolific Russian painter of his time, with more than 6,000 works — and is believed to be the most forged Russian ever as well. The three paintings on these pages are all in private collections.

Down on the vale of Death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes
In wild despair; while yet another stroke
With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak:
Till like the mine, in whose infernal cell
The lurking demons of destruction dwell,
At length asunder torn, her frame divides;
And crashing spreads in ruin o’er the tides.
— More from Falconer’s “The Shipwreck”. Like him, Percy Bysse Shelley lived by the roaring waves and died by them.

William Adolphus Knell painted his “Shipwreck” in 1856 and showed his sons the way. If historians are confused today about whether he was born in 1802 or 1818, it’s probably because there were at least four well-known marine painters in the Knell family, all living the same London address, but unclearly related. The family tree was “at sea”, as it were. See the rest.

We’ve seen how and why history’s first beauty pageant became an enduring theme for three millennia of artists. The smaller story bookending it is almost as intriguing.

Paris, for all his faux shyness in womanly things, had been around. Mostly around the place shown above — Mount Ida, from whose summit the gods watch and diddled with the horse race in Troy. There is snow in the heights in this Google Earth image, not quite the fine summer’s day seen in the Judgement paintings, but matching, by one tradition, the death of Paris and his first wife, Oenone.

Today Mount Ida is known as Kaz Dağı, the Goose Mountain, 1,800 metres tall and ringed with hiking trails that ramble past waterfalls. Those climbers who are wheezing are here for the oxygen cure. Şahin Deresi — Hawk Valley — is a canyon that funnels pine-scented air out to the gulf and breathes in the iodised sea breeze.

Troy today is called Troia, not to be confused with nearby Truva, a bit of a tourist trap cashing in on the war story, complete with a giant wooden horse on which the kids can play. The archaeological site itself has been dug up and looted so many times that it’s been described as “a ruin of a ruin”. Thank the gods Mount Ida still has her mysteries.

Mount Ida was once home of the Mother Goddess, Cybele, chockfull of sibyls and soothsayers, and a tremendous make-out spot for young couples in lust.

As a tot Paris was suckled here by a she-bear. It’s a long story but loads of fun.

When Paris was born, his mother, Hecuba, had a horrific (and accurate) premonition that he would one day be responsible for the destruction of Troy. She told her husband Prodarces, who everyone called Priam simply for confusion’s sake, and he called in Aesacus, the dream decipherer. Best get the boy the hell away from here then, said Aesacus. Get him out way in the countryside someplace. Paris’ big brother Hector wanted to go too, but they were still working out the movie script at this point and casting was causing problems.

Agelaus, a family servant, dumped Paris on Mount Ida, where a sympathetic bear loaned him a teat for five days. Agelaus came back, found that the toddler had done alright for himself, and decided to raise him as his own son on his nearby farm. A shepherd was born from a castaway prince. See the rest.

I was admiring this painting Deang Buasan of Thailand and realised I liked it so much because it reminds me of Edmund Dulac’s illustrations.

Deang and his disparately minded fellow artists Thaweesak Srithongdee and Chakkrit Chimnok had a show in Bangkok recently that had been previewed last year at the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan. If you look up “FT3D” on the Web you might find more.

Deang’s brother drowned when they were children, so there’s always a water element in his paintings, as well as evident grief. In Fukuoka he showed a painting of himself as a child gazing at a lifeless dummy on the floor, seedpods strung between them as if they were both drifting in water.

“Lotus under the Moonlight” – designed, like all of his two-dimensional work, from a 3D model – does wonderful things with reflections and angles, illusion and visual effects in every corner, including beneath the water’s surface.

Compare it to Dulac’s illustration here for “The Voyage of the Basset”, written by James C Christensen with Renwick St James and Alan Dean Foster. This wasn’t anywhere near the best work by Dulac but, as we’ll see when we get to sizing up different people’s water nymphs, he was a marine genius.

Edmund was born Edmond in Toulouse, France, in 1882 and raised for the bar, but instead of going into law, he raised the bar in illustrating books, and “Golden Age” children’s books in particular.

When I was a kid we had a massive edition of “The Snow Queen and Other Stories from Hans Andersen”, which had originally come out in 1911, and as I grew older Dulac’s pictures (this one from “The Nightingale”) scared the hell out of me, then fascinated me, then charmed me, then … well, some of the mermaids are kinda hot.

Dulac chucked law school in favour of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and started collecting prizes for his watercolours, then in 1904 – freshly divorced from an American woman 13 years his senior – shipped off to London.

A year later, in “Rip Van Winkle”, Arthur Rackham became the first to use a new process, now called colour separation, to mass-produce his illustrations. It was a huge success, Rackham ingeniously capturing the quirks of Washington Irving’s characters (see the story and pictures here), and the colours were beautifully faithful to his original paintings thanks to being printed on sheets of specially coated paper that had to be “tipped-in” to the book rather than bound in with the rest of the pages.

These pages were forever falling out of our Hans Andersen book and threatening to migrate with the wind that was so vigorously illustrated on many of them. Below is another memorable image from that tome, illustrating “The Garden of Paradise”.

The new process also meant that the illustrations didn’t require heavy ink lines to hold the coloured washes in place – the lines covered up ovelaps in the colours – and Dulac’s work was perfectly suited to it. He was hired to do 60 illustrations for “Jane Eyre” and other works by the Bronte sisters, and was soon contributing to Pall Mall magazine alongside Rackham, to whom he would forever more be compared. They both have their argumentative devotees.

Rackham’s “Rip” and equally popular “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” a year later were published by Hodder & Stoughton, and when Rackham jumped to another house, Hodder jumped on Dulac to illustrate “The Arabian Nights”.

In an arrangement that would remain in place for years, the paintings were commissioned by the Leicester Gallery, Hodder got the reproduction rights and put out the book, and then the gallery sold Dulac’s paintings. Shown here, “The Princess and the Pea”. There was something new every year, perfect for collectors: “Shakespeare’s The Tempest”, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”, “The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tale”, “The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe” …

In 1913, two years after remarrying (Elsa Arnalice Bignardi, who was shy despite being Italian-German, and evidently not much fun intellectually, so Edmund would later complain), Dulac discovered the Far East, about the same time as our post-impressionist friends, and showed it off to the rest of the West with “Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights” the following year.

During the Great War he did a lot of fund-raising with illustrations for “King Albert’s Book”, “Princess Mary’s Gift Book” and “Edmund Dulac’s Picture Book” for the French Red Cross, but by the time his “Tanglewood Tales” came out just after the armistice, nobody was much interested in these sort of gift books anymore. New techniques in printing had enabled photography to take hold, and rather than his illustrations, it was Dulac, all of 35, who was in a bind.

Portraits and his caricatures for the weekly newspaper The Outlook paid the bills, but only just. He illustrated the 1920 history “The Kingdom of the Pearl” and got into product design (he was the master of postage stamps for a while) and, for his friends WB Yeats and Sir Thomas Beecham he did theatre design.

In 1923 Dulac and Elsa separated and soon after his friend Helen de Vere Beauclerk moved in with him. She stayed with him for the rest of his life. Third time lucky.

This is one of three illustrations in this post from “The Snow Queen and Other Stories from Hans Andersen”.

Yeats dedicated his 1933 poem “The Winding Stair” to Dulac, and four years later Dulac returned the favour by composing the music that accompanied readings of Yeats’ pieces on BBC radio.

Unfortunately it was a mess and the two had a row, but it was resolved, and after World War II, when Yeats’ body was moved from France home to Ireland, Dulac designed a memorial for the poet’s former grave in Roquebrune.

Through the ’40s he did loads of drawings for Hearst’s American Weekly. He also managed to remain the busiest of book illustrators, when the jobs appeared. He did “Treasure Island”, “The Golden Cockerel” and was working on “Comus” when a third heart attack killed him on May 25, 1953, at the age of 70. It was published posthumously.

I was talking about mermaids, and look what’s there was when Dulac wasn’t around to help.

Two by Rackham:

Below left, John William Waterhouse’s “A Mermaid” from 1900, and on the right, an artist best left unidentified but, you know, typical.

Edmund Dulac, who possibly belonged underwater.

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“Pietà” by William Bouguereau, 1876 (detail)
You must see the whole painting – click the image.

The denizens of Dali House have taunted William Bouguereau from the second-storey windows before upon seeing him saunter by in the street with his top hat and walking stick, but you know we’re just jealous. Bouguereau (1825-1905) was no second-storey man but a talent of the first order. (Some of his paintings take on a life of their own, literally – read on further down about the sultry nymphs of New York bardom.) See the rest.

“Une âme au ciel” (”A Soul in Heaven”) by William Bouguereau, 1878
Click the image to see it much larger.

Pretty feisty bunch down at the Art Renewal Centre, where they’re giddily passionate about the 19th-century realists and won’t spare a poop for anything more modern. Cantankerously building barricades in preparation for an anticipated jihad against the Establishment is Fred Ross, the centre’s chairman, who’s got a major rant going on that seems almost perverse in the way it’s trying to turn art history upside down. But, he has his points (and some terrific art to back him up). See the rest.