Title: 'Caprice' (c.1894) and 'Masked Woman with a White Mouse' (c.1894)
Location: Tate Britain, London
Description:
I absolutely loved encountering this surprising and rare painting by the iconic illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (most famously the illustrator of Oscar Wilde's 'Yellow Book'). I came upon it at Tate Britain last year, quite by chance. It is, the only known painting by the artist. But, in fact, it is two paintings in one: a two-sided painting. Both paintings depict women: one shows a woman and a dwarf (pictured) and the other shows a masked woman with a white mouse. It was not possible to view the latter, but I have read that the Tate intends to create a special frame that would allow visitors to view both. Neither painting is complete and, according to the Tate description, it is therefore considered experimental. Personally, I love the idea that a reversible painting exists in the world. And, knowing that it is also the one and only painting by Beardsley makes it all the more special.
On seeing William Blake’s ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea’ (c.1805) in the flesh as it were I was taken aback by the fact that it is all the more astonishing the more closely you look at it. The dragon grows more terrifying the longer you stay with it. It is another depiction of a state of metamorphosis: his hands are webbed and his shins have fins. I think it is in the strange areas where Blake imaginatively pictures the impossible—with these creatures with multiple heads, for example, it is the neck lines that are the source of peculiar strangeness—that the work comes to life. It compels us to look again, more closely and for longer at the marvel that is Blake’s imagination materialised in idiosyncratic line and splendid colouration. Incidentally, he was much less successful as a painter. Drawing, with its curious tension between the fictive and the descriptive, may be the reason Blake was so drawn to it as an expressive medium. His poetry aside, Blake’s contribution to art continues to be evaluated... it is a gift that keeps on giving.
William Blake’s ‘The Triple Hecate’ (1795) takes for its subject the Roman goddess of magic and the underworld consulting a book of spells as creatures attend on her: a thistle-eating ass, an owl, crocodile and a cat-headed bat. Visually, it is believed to be influenced by Michelangelo’s figures and literarily by the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which had returned to popularity at that time. Blake’s relationship with women generally and witches in particular was one of fascination, but also suspicion and even misogyny. Personally, I love the rendering of the spell book as the unknowable in this work, which extends to Hecate and is on the side of fascination. It’s one of the more interesting depictions of a book, of the many that appear in this work.
How to draw a whisper, how to render the moment of silence between two people, alternately caught in the act of speaking and listening? And the tenderness of it, the fingers combing the translucent water... No doubt William Blake was a sensitive soul and a true genius, but even he struggled with rendering his imagination onto the page. This drawing is part of an unfinished project, 'Tiriel', an illuminated poetry book which Blake could not satisfactorily complete during his lifetime. The manuscript was published posthumously in 1874 by another poet, William Michael Rossetti, but we will never know what heights of artistry Blake might have achieved if he could have realised his vision for 'Tiriel'.
It is incredible to witness the sensitive treatment Blake gave to the smallest details in his drawings and etchings. Take, for example, the superb colouration of the sole of the foot of the man in this study: you can almost believe it is flesh. What's more, Blake uses this one detail to suggest a whole story. In combination with the flowing robes, this falsh of a red raw foot makes us think of a man who is fleeing something or heading somewhere and in a hurry! Though his feet are tired, he lunges forward toward some unknow destination. He is forever caught in suspended animation, at the same time showing us both Archilean vulnerability and great strenght.