The artist and the saint

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Puvis de Chavannes, born in 1824, is a painter virtually unknown in this country, yet he was greatly respected by such younger contemporaries as Cezanne and Seurat, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, and after his death, by Picasso and de Chirico. He is difficult to place in any of the defined sectors of painting in the second half of the 19th century; he has no connection with Impressionism or any form of proto-Impressionism; though he lived and worked until 1898, he is no Post-Impressionist; he showed no interest in colour theory or any intellectual debate; his large, slow-moving, works do not conform to any classical canon or academic norm and are certainly not Romantic in spirit or attack; nor are they narrative in any conventional sense.

Though his early working life overlapped for two decades that of the overwhelmingly important Ingres, and his later life all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, none of these made the slightest difference to his work. Puvis is usually dubbed a Symbolist, but even in this category he does not fit with ease, for as a poetic visionary his work is too stilted, formal, slow, statuesque and slightly ludicrous. If we look for English parallels we find them in Millais (1829-96), Leighton (1830-96), Burne-Jones (1833-98) and Watts (1817-1904), all of whom were both better and worse than he.

Puvis was for the most part a mural painter, working in oil on canvas, but achieving something of the pale, dry look of fresco, his subjects evoking an "anaemic idealisation of antiquity or allegorical representation of abstract themes". The National Gallery owns two small easel paintings of this type, Death and the Maidens, in which girls dance in a meadow apparently unaware that Death lies shrouded in their path, and Summer, which, in small, offers the sum of almost all his vices. Think of the music of Cesar Franck (1822-90), his themes centred on a single note, his intervals growing ever longer, and you have the perfect accompaniment to Puvis's pictures or, alternatively, in these pictures the perfect illustration to Franck's evasive melodies.

By chance, since it is part of the Hugh Lane Bequest (a matter disputed with the National Gallery of Ireland and too complex for discussion here), the National Gallery also has in its possession the vast Beheading of St John the Baptist, some eight feet tall and 10 feet wide, and it is this that is the subject of one of those small, scholarly, probing exhibitions that are occasionally done revealingly and well in Room 1 of the old building in Trafalgar Square.

The great canvas is to some extent unfinished and unresolved. We have no precise date for it, but the bracket 1865-70 will do, for in 1869 Puvis signed and dated an alternative, smaller and finished version, and exhibited it at the Paris Salon the following year; it is now in the Barber Institute, Birmingham. The year 1870 may not be quite the terminal date for the London version, for it remained in the artist's studio for the 28 years until his death and no one knows when work on it was finally abandoned. The exhibition consists only of these two paintings, a handful of relevant drawings and, from a private collection in Paris, an even less finished and resolved painting of a marginally earlier moment in the tale of the Baptist's death.

For all three canvases the setting is the same - not the subterranean prison cell of most depictions of the narrative (and of the opera by Richard Strauss of 1905), but a courtyard with an old and much furcated tree that both holds a balance between the figures and lends emphasis to the movements and directions inherent in the composition.

The Paris picture must be the earliest; it establishes the position of Salome on the right, holding the charger on which the saint's head will rest when she carries it to Herod's banquet table; this is the most convincing of the three Salomes, for she stands apart, seeming by thought and emotion to be separated from the event that is about to happen - which is that the Baptist will kneel, lower his neck onto the block that lies between them, and be beheaded by the almost naked, brown-skinned, executioner - another constant of the theme. Executioners were often depicted with little more than a loincloth and with brown skins - the first a practical measure of realism when it came to washing off the gouts of blood, the second an indication of lowest social status, for only workmen bared their bodies to the sun. In the National Gallery version Salome is appropriately pallid, indeed exaggeratedly so, palely loitering, her pallor enhanced by her white and fashionably (in a late 19th century sense) embroidered dress.

With the positions of the executioner and Salome more or less established in the Paris picture, Puvis then abandoned that canvas and the idea of the executioner's block. In the London and Birmingham pictures the Baptist has been moved to centre stage and, kneeling, drops his shoulders as though with the weight of his arms to increase the exposure of his neck to the circling blow of the scimitar. Here lies an obvious practical difficulty; the executioner, at standing height, has to strike off a head significantly below the near horizontal line described by his weapon and has only, at most, four inches of neck at which to aim; he should cut through the carotid artery and cause swift death from exsanguination, even if he does not, at the first blow, sever the spine, but a high mishit will catch the skull and make a mess of the presentation at the feast, and a low mishit will be embedded in the shoulder. The correct angle is all and the whirl of this blade suggests that, at best, it will top the Baptist's skull like a boiled breakfast egg.

No wonder Salome, in the National Gallery version, looks a trifle pensive, fingers to her cheek and chin. Here she is at her greatest importance, a step adding to her stature, nearer the ghastly event than in the Birmingham version. At some late stage, Puvis added as her companion the figure thought to be Herod (though it is odd for a king to be barefoot), his great red cloak seeming a metaphor for the Baptist's blood. It has for so long been claimed that Herod is a portrait of the writer Anatole France that we should not dismiss the identification out of hand, though in 1870 he was only 26 and did not resemble this Herod until much later - but this is perhaps an indication that, many years after its commencement, Puvis was still inspired to work on the unfinished canvas. Nothing in France's douce melancolie could have provoked the personification as Herod and no other source supports the claim. Even so...

It is clear from x-rays that the London and Birmingham pictures were once closer in composition than they are now, with only three figures. Apart from changes in costume and sword (a scimitar in Birmingham, perhaps a straight blade in Trafalgar Square), the executioner is much the same, the overlong-left arm extended to enhance the twisting movement through the torso, the profile pure in the larger canvas. The greater differences lie in the figure of the Baptist, frontal and iconic in Birmingham, an unreal light illuminating him, a halo emphasising the too large head; in the London picture there is neither a halo nor supernatural light, the contrasts of light and shade are far less dramatic and the setting conjured in so much glaucous green (characteristic of so many of Puvis's paintings) is less specific than in the smaller picture; the saint's body is slightly turned from the fully frontal and his head significantly to the right, both in submission to the sword and in contemplation of the luminous cross that hovers so insecurely and unconvincingly from his left hand.

Which came first? The National Gallery's picture is of Salon scale and was probably intended as the exhibition version; logic dictates that the Birmingham version was a preparation for it, yet what seems to have happened is that they developed in some measure concurrently and that each provoked amendment and adjustment in the other, sometimes worked out in careful drawings, sometimes, more impetuously, on the canvases.

The purpose of the exhibition is to make us look more minutely and speculatively at these pictures, treating their genesis and development as one, urging us to study the differences between the two, to associate the drawings with one or the other (and sometimes both), to see the point of evident alterations and to interpret subtle shifts in the position of such emotional elements as hands, to decide what is finished and what is still inconclusive.

Put simply, this exhibition asks us to pause in our stride and, as a reward, offers us insights into the mind of the painter and the process of painting; it demonstrates how the act of painting is to some considerable extent a conversation between the painter and the emerging image; and we are the wiser for it and can apply the lessons learned to any painting and its associated drawings, sketches and precedents. National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, WC2. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission free. Until 27 October.

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