Dali House

Sotheby’s sale of Old Master Paintings coming up in London tomorrow is relatively small but promises a very loud boom when the hammer drops on three of the works included. The presence of any one in a public auction might cause global tectonic quivers — to have all three is rather astonishing. And this is ignoring a pair of Brueghels also on the block.

Least of the three is “Storm Clouds over Hampstead”, a fine watercolour by John Constable, one of his wonderful big-sky pictures. Then there’s Francisco de Goya’s “Equestrian Portrait of Don Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia”.

Both of these have compelling stories behind them, which I’ll relate in an upcoming post, but the best yarn of all belongs to JMW Turner’s “Virginia Water”, seen above. The watercolour was loaned out for a show at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2004 — its first public appearance since the 1880s.

Dali House gave Turner a special welcome early on, and seeing a rarity like this painting emerge from a private collection seems historic. Someone needs cash badly. Someone else ought to have it. The price it’s estimated to fetch: £500,000 to £700,000.

In 1828 Turner hurled himself at the feet of King George IV and grovelled like a chimney sweep. He left his self-esteem hanging in the wardrobe back at his studio on Queen Anne Street and took the buggy out to Virginia Water so he could sit on the shore of the lake, swatting off the midges of late spring, and sketch the monarch fishing. He needed to sell His Maj a painting — badly.

Embarrassingly, this was not a new experience for Turner.

Six years earlier he’d trekked all the way to Scotland in the dead of August and filled two sketchbooks with glimpses of the king’s visit to Edinburgh and other spots. The plan was to do a series of engravings, but interest — royal or otherwise — was not forthcoming, and Turner abandoned the project in the form of four unfinished paintings.

Then in 1823 a friend at Windsor Castle pulled some strings and got Turner the job of painting HMS Victory engaged in the Battle of Trafalgar. The work was completed the following year, truly magnificent and the biggest canvas he ever produced.

The royal court said, “No, thanks.” It just wasn’t quite right.

So in 1828 Turner tried again to catch the king’s fancy, and he tried real hard. See the rest.

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.

With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around was, at first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed … Amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and — going down.
— Edgar Allan Poe, from “MS found in a Bottle”. (Read about his actual demise in Dorseyland.)

“Explore the world’s oceans — shipwrecks galore!” says ShipwreckCentral.com, and Wikipedia records the details of hundreds of them, anywhere there’s water this side of your Jacuzzi. How many? Three million, reckons the United Nations.

That’s a lot of journeys interruptus, many pilgrimages aborted, myriad dreams denied entry by the bouncers of the bounding main. Noah barely made it, having blown a kiss to the sinners left behind on the boarding ramp, “those doomed antediluvians left to perish”, as Julian Barnes put it in “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters”.

A couple of chapters along, Barnes fretted over the survivors aboard Theodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” (crucial Dali House post here) — and what they represented. “We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”

Ivan Aivazovsky’s “The Shipwreck”, from 1871, and here a detail from his earlier “Moonlit Seascape With Shipwreck”.

Noah has been painted since, well, biblical times, but the very real possibility of shipwrecks seemed to particularly haunt French and British (and Russian) artists across the bridge of the 18th and 19th centuries, probably because man’s position in the universal hierarchy had been diminished by scientific discoveries, and as a result of the emerging spiritual awareness that he was perhaps not God’s pet project after all. Nature’s awesome power, fresh evidence of which turned up in every new place he explored, became a metaphor for his new sense of helplessness.

Géricault’s hero-less raft, tossed upon the public consciousness in 1819 amid horrific newspaper accounts of the catastrophe it depicted, was merely the most celebrated of the shipwreck paintings. JMW Turner, 16 years his senior, offered a much more frenzied scene, “The Shipwreck”, in 1805, above, and, living by the sea, couldn’t let the subject go. In 1810 he painted “The Wreck of a Transport Ship”, in 1823 — by which time Géricault was already dying of tuberculosis — “The Storm (Shipwreck)”, in 1825 “Shipwreck off Hastings” and in 1835 “Fire at Sea”, sometimes referred to as “Disaster at Sea”.

His creativity always in danger of subsiding in a doom of its own making, Turner nevertheless managed to live far longer than most of his species in those wretched times. See Dali House’s Turner biography.

The 1823 picture reproduced above, now at the British Museum in London, came three years after Géricault’s “Raft” was shown at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where Turner joined the 40,000-strong throng who came to see what all the fuss in France was about. JMW may well have been impressed by the younger artist’s forceful composition as well as its subject matter. At one point Turner was crossing the sea himself when a gale blew up and he ventured on deck, sketch pad in hand. Warned off by the crew, he told them to lash him to a mast so he could watch the fury in relative safety.

And so he did, for four hours, spinning in the vortex of the wind, and that’s how he depicted all the elements of his hurricanes. What had to be aligned on the canvas was aligned in spirals askew, and with sharp diagonal elements almost forcing the viewer to lean to one side as if on a sloping deck.

The ship staggered under a thunderous shock
That shook us asunder, as if she had struck and crashed on a rock;
For the huge sea smote every soul from the decks of The Falcon but one;
All of them, all but the man that was lash’d to the helm had gone.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, from “The Wreck”. See the rest.

A silver horn mimics a horse in Dali’s 1936 oil on wood “A Trombone and a Sofa Fashioned Out of Saliva”, or is that horse supposed to be a sofa, and is the trombone not more like a tuba?

The image resolution and my knowledge of wind instruments are unfortunately poor, but the ruined hull of a boat at the lower right is intriguing, as are the visages in the clouds. The smaller one reminds for all the world of JMW Turner’s “Sea Monster” (detail below).

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation has “Saliva” at the moment, though it’s attributed to the collection of noted connoisseur Eugene Thaw of New Mexico, ever since a Sotheby’s auction in 1997. Jason Kaufman has an interesting 1994 interview with Thaw on his website.

I think the news media may have got a little carried away with a scientific study of Claude Monet’s paintings of the British Houses of Parliament, the the preliminary results of which were published last month.

So far, environmental scientists are merely hoping that the pictures might be read as a pollution chart. I’m not really sure why they want to do this, but I suppose having a big name like Monet at the top of your research proposal makes it a hell of a lot easier to get funding.

His series of depictions of the scene on the Thames between 1899 and 1901 have always enthralled because of the scintillating impressionistic style, which helped open the door to the relative fireworks of pointillism.

But now researchers Jacob Baker and John Thornes at the University of Birmingham are wondering if the paintings were in fact faithful depictions of the Victorian weather. See the rest.