Sermon: Gospel in the Gallery - Lecture 4

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Thursday 27th October 2011

The Wallace Collection

Richard Wallace, Baronet, was born in 1818, an art collector known in his youth as Richard Jackson, inherited in 1870 from his putative father, the Marquis of Hertford, the magnificent collection of pictures and objets d’art which his widow bequeathed to the British nation in 1897.  Having spent most of his life in Paris, he returned to England shortly after the siege in 1870 and was created a Baronet.  In Hertford House, which became his London home, he arranged the collection, adding to the Hertford inheritance many pictures and treasures, including the European armoury.  After Lady Wallace’s death the house was bought on the recommendation of a Government commission and adapted as a public museum, and thus it has remained.

Its most famous stipulation that nothing should be loaned to other galleries or exhibitions, so to see the paintings you must go there, and the most famous painting of all, housed in the great upstairs gallery at the back of the museum, is Nicolas Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time, and with this painting we will begin, because, after all, in all these talks we’ve been thinking about time, time past and time present.  T S Eliot in The Dry Salvages:

‘Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;

And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,

Clangs

The bell.’

Eliot’s musical figure, the clanging of the bell, leads us to the Wallace Collection’s most famous painting.

Four dancing figures represent human life, or rather the cycle of the human condition.  In the background is Poverty, on the right Labour, in the foreground Wealth and on the left Pleasure.  The implication of the round dance is evident.  Through labour man acquires wealth, wealth permits pleasure, pleasure indulged to excess ends in poverty – the dance expresses a perpetual cycle.  Poussin seems to have drawn the symbolic attributes for his figures from what was then the standard reference work on visual symbols, the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa.  He was faced with the problem of incorporating attributes sufficient to express his meaning without encumbering the dance.  For Poverty he selected Ripa’s description of Povertà as invented by Doni, a woman lying on dried branches, but he used the branches here as a wreath on poverty’s head.

The symbolism is at one level straightforward since the poorest of Italian shepherds have been observed making their beds of dried branches, even in quite recent times, but for Ripa the dried branches carry the meaning of the incapacity of the destitute to be productive, thus Poussin perhaps meant to distinguish unproductive poverty from productive labour.  According to Bellori, on the other hand, the dry leaves signify lost possessions.  This would be equally appropriate, since here poverty is also the effect of pleasure indulged.  The fact that poverty is male while the other dancers are female remains to scholars unexplained.

The figure of labour on the right of the group is taken from Ripa’s Fatica Estiva (Summer Labour) and this explains the perplexity of those in the 18th century who thought she represented winter.  Ripa proposes a sturdy young woman in a light, short dress, with bare arms, holding a scythe and a flail.  Poussin represents Labour simply as a muscular young woman, with bare arms and shoulders.  Ripa describes Wealth as a woman in rich garments decked with jewels holding a crown and a sceptre, with a golden vase at her feet.  Poussin retains only the attributes of dress, showing the figure with pearls in her hair, with white and gold draperies, and an arm-band of gold and pearls.

The identity of the fourth dancer for a time was mysterious.  Bellori called her Luxuri but there seemed to be no description in editions of Ripa, which Poussin could have consulted.  Another writer describes her as Pleasure and the crown of roses is certainly taken from Ripa’s Piacere.   At an earlier stage in the evolution of the composition, recorded in a drawing now at Edinburgh, Poussin has given this last figure a peacock headdress.  It seems possible he intended at first to show Luxury, and this could explain Bellori’s confusion.  On the other hand the peacock is an attribute both of pride and prodigality, either of which would have been appropriate.

Poverty and Labour go barefoot, Wealth and Pleasure wear sandals of gold and white respectively. Pleasure is dressed in the primary colours blue and red, Wealth is in gold and silver, Poverty and Labour in earthier colours. The latter’s dull brick-red is daringly close in hue to the gold of Wealth, but lacks its lustre. The poses and facial expressions are also telling.  Poverty gazes longingly at Labour, while Labour strains to catch a glimpse of Wealth.  Wealth seems to disdain the hand of Labour, and her own self-conscious dignity contrasts with the glowing face of Pleasure.

Besides the dancing figures, Poussin introduced several references to the passage of time; the elderly, bearded, nude, winged figure of Time (but it is very unusual to see him playing the lyre rather than wielding a scythe), time is represented here not as the reaper, nor of the revealer of truth, but as cosmic power.  Then there’s the stone term, with young and old heads looking forwards and backwards, an attribute of Janus, the god of gateways, and in the sky Poussin has Apollo in his chariot with Aurora and the Hours, the symbol of the cycle of the day; Aurora, the goddess of dawn scattering flowers, behind her flutter the dancing Hours with their insect wings.  Then, finally the two children in the foreground, one blowing bubbles, the other contemplating the hour-glass – the vanity and brevity of life.

I mention so much detail of this painting, and there’s more that could be said, because I think the details illustrate the value of looking attentively, especially when we’re dealing with time, that most frustrating of human experiences.  How when bored or ill we wish time away and how when we’re old time seems to fly by, full of regret for the unaccomplished, the un-attempted, the knocked down!  Thus, in the Christian spiritual discipline of going to Confession, the value of the examination of our use of time, and how terrible is that phrase ‘to kill time’, for time is where in the very old-fashioned, but telling expression, we are given the opportunity to ‘make our souls’.

Now compare and contrast!  In the same room at the Wallace Collection is Sir Thomas Lawrence’s wonderful painting of the Prince Regent when he had become George IV, another great collector, but a man of immeasurable vanity, self-absorption, a waster of time.  Here he is as he wasn’t, but as he wanted to be.  Next, someone who observed time passing and time future, the end of chronology and the time of judgement, St John and the Heavenly Jerusalem by Alonso Cano, 1601-1677.  Next, St Joseph and his Brethren by Murillo (note the shepherd’s staff from which we get the Bishop’s crosier), and Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds.  Let’s contrast Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds with the Adoration of the Shepherds by Philippe de Champaigne, painted between 1602 and 1674, the bound lamb and the enlightened faces, and again the shepherd’s crook. 

Murillo, incidentally, can seem over-sweet to our tastes (but there’s more to him than that) and Philippe de Champaigne too academic, too formalised.  But let’s look at his Annunciation, painted in 1648, where, despite the aristocratic air and formality, there is in the background a simple interior.  Both Murillo and Philippe de Champaigne are trying to set their Counter-Reformation faith in the realities of human existence.  And the reality of human existence brings us to Peter Paul Rubens, and this painting, Christ’s Charge to Peter, made between 1613 and 1615, the power to bind and loose exemplified by the keys, but the Church founded upon the rock of a man whose loyalty was rocky and who denied his Saviour; Peter, a figure of immense and fundamental importance to the Papal Counter-Reformation sweeping through Europe and producing such painters as Murillo, Philippe de Champaigne and Poussin.

Then, a glance at Cima de Conegliano, who we know from the National Gallery and The Incredulity of St Thomas, and his painting of St Catherine, and (there’s so much else we could look at in the Wallace Collection) Rembrandt’s son Titus.  In 1656 Rembrandt had been declared bankrupt and the fifteen year old Titus and his stepmother, Hendrikje Stoffels, forced to administer the sale of Rembrandt’s pictures and the production of his etchings.  Titus died in the year of his own marriage in 1668 before the birth of his daughter Titia.  Rembrandt died in the following year.  It’s a painting, this picture of Titus, on a different key from so much in this great Wallace Collection.  It is like that late self-portrait of Rembrandt we looked at in the National Gallery last week.  It is a painting of utter reality. 

In different ways the artists we’ve been examining have been dealing with reality.  Either, through trying to understand it via allegory, as in the Dance to the Music of Time, or confronting it face on in the lovingly painted picture of a greatly-loved son, a son who suffers.  And religion deals with reality through, of course for us in Christianity, the Son who suffers, revealing God Himself, the God who suffers in the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ.  But the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ is not the end for the Christian believer, but the beginning.  An attentive examination of painting can often be a beginning for us.

Let’s end with familiar words from T S Eliot’s East Coker:

Home is where one starts from.  As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living.  Not the intense movement

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise.  In my end is my beginning.

I hope that this brief examination of the wonders of those great Enlightenment Galleries, the British Museum and the National Gallery, and those two great monuments to Victorian confidence, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection, have enabled us to see something, freely available, but demanding, right here in our own capital city, London, of the insights and achievements which help us enter into the mystery of time, that mystery to which Scripture and Christian doctrine again and again return.  Perhaps also these wonderful museums and galleries help us to approach the nature of God and who it is who calls us by His grace, for who He is is revealed in the Cross, and in the expenditure and effort of Creation and Redemption.

‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart’.

Many of the pictures can be found on the Wallace Collection website: www.wallacecollection.org