arts, books, other reviews

art

The Tragic Genius

of Joseph Michael Gandy

31 March – 12 August

Admission free; donations welcome

The John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is currently holding an exhibition of the paintings of John Gandy (1771–1843). Gandy was a rather unsuccessful architect, but a brilliant and inspired painter of architecture and panorama. He worked with Sir John Soane for over thirty years, painting both his finished buildings, and giving his ideas and architectural projects an almost passionate intensity and beauty.

Gandy came from a simple background (as did the extremely successful Sir John Soane). His father was a waiter at White’s Club, but his phenomenal drawing skills were noticed early. He studied in Italy, and was influenced and inspired all his life by this classical background and training.

He came to work for Soane as quite a young man. The combination of brilliant draughtsmanship, architectural background and classical learning made him uniquely qualified to understand and interpret Soane’s vision of London as the new Rome. Their partnership lasted until Soane’s death.

Gandy’s paintings of Bentley Priory, in Middlesex, one of Soane’s commissions, show how his sense of drama makes the architectural studies vivid and interesting. He makes the Entrance Hall quite dark, lit by a ray of light, while the Music Room, by contrast, is full of lights and shadows, giving a sense of vitality to the room.

Six little sketches, made by Gandy for his own pleasure and instruction, are delightful, showing him, as ever, fascinated by the effects of light, either glinting in sunset on a river, or gleaming through industrial smoke.

Many of the paintings, both in this exhibition and in the museum, are of buildings conceived but never completed. One such was a design for a Royal Residence in Hyde Park – a fantastic creation with facades of caryatids and columns, and vistas designed to do justice to the capital city of the largest empire in the world.

Many of Gandy’s paintings can be seen in the museum, and viewed alongside those in this exhibition they give a vivid impression of a man of towering imagination and immense technical skill. Alas, after John Soane died, and their fruitful partnership came to an end, he drifted into insanity and an early death. His memorial, however, is in these paintings which enable us to share in the vision and enthusiasm of two remarkable men.

theatre

Trafalgar Studio 1

until 16 May

When Hilary is offered the opportunity to return to the old country on reasonably attractive terms, a year or so in an open prison, an internal exile in some Gloucestershire village, a round of chat shows and documentaries, he prefers not to go but to remain in the constrained and claustrophobic world of his Moscow office and country dacha. The littleness and the regimentation of his life are exemplified by the position of his summer house in the middle of a forest plantation of trees planted in straight lines and unvarying vistas.

However, the choice he was offered by his brother-in-law Duff (Simon Williams) was an artificial one. Hilary was no longer important or significant and was to be exchanged whether he wanted it or not as a makeweight for someone of infinitely more worth.

In Hilary’s long and eloquent speeches we are, perhaps, dealing with an essay rather than a drama.

Hilary dominates the scene and the text and Timothy West is magisterial in his command. His outward assurance and his intellectual power are given eloquent testimony but are subtly undermined by a body language of constriction and failure.

books

DLT, 247pp, pbk

0 232 52651 6, £12·95

Discovering the Reality of God’s Love

DLT, 172pp, pbk

0 232 52623 0, £10·95

Only the first, and longest, essay in this book is new. It is entitled, simply, ‘Hell,’ and in it, the author asks what has happened to the conviction which lay at the heart of not only Catholic, but much more widely Christian, teaching until recently that, in the words of Ronnie Knox, ‘once a man or woman has attained the age of reason he is bound for one of two ultimate destinies, fixed and eternal – hell or heaven.’

Christina Rees does not, I suspect, imagine that anyone is going to hell, although frankly going to heaven with her would be a pretty extraordinary prospect, judging from her description of the beatific vision in the penultimate chapter of her new book. In heaven, there will be ‘endless sandy beaches and oceans full of beautiful fish, none of which will want to eat me.’ There will be ‘love-making with no shame or shyness, and no being left wanting more.’ (Phew!) There will be ‘strutting peacocks, silly Labradors, heavily scented flowers and turquoise seas.’ There will be laughter, and, believe me, there is a lot of laughter to be had reading this book.

Rees laughs, she tells us, when she thinks of an inscription she wrote beneath an old piece of fencing which she took home and stuck onto her wall. It read, ‘I took a fence.’ Go on, say it aloud! How you’ll laugh too. She smiles when she sees a poster of ‘a huge ice cream sundae, smothered in whipped cream, with a cherry on the top.’ Ice creams are like compliments. Everyone is hungry for them, and we need to give them away! But not everything is so sweet. Not long after landing a part in a promotional video for Oil of Ulay, Rees has to walk across Times Square. There, she ‘has to withstand a constant barrage of lecherous looks.’ These are not like the ‘brazen wolf-whistles of the building-site workers’ which she occasionally enjoys. These men make ‘little gestures, such as sticking their tongues out or licking their lips.’ They make ‘obscene low sounds.’ Inside Rees, a cauldron of anger bubbles away.

But there is lots of good sex – earthly as well as heavenly – to be had on Rees’ journey through life. As a student, she finds an older male friend to give her ‘delightfully sensual’ massages. Other men want to give her massages too, but she has to practise monogamous massage, as, with the others, the ‘relationships would have escalated sexually.’ Rees shares with us a poem she writes aged eighteen. She is not sure whether it is about physical love or spiritual longing. The last lines are, ‘But only I saw and came, / Only I felt and came.’

Chatto & Windus, 430pp, hbk

0 701 17602 4, £20

This work explores the whole life of Cooke, from his humble beginnings as a farmer’s son from Leicestershire, to his studies at Oxford and the Inns of Court. Robertson’s great success in this work is to identify that Cooke’s achievements lay in the whole of his legal career, not merely in his work at Whitehall in January 1649. Cooke was a political visionary; he was the first to suggest a legal aid system, a land registry, a national health service and numerous legal reforms that would only come to pass centuries later. His concern for social justice is clearly identified in his insistence that poverty was a cause of crime. This is a gripping biography and the drama of this sensational man is brought to life by Robertson’s use of Cooke’s own moving speeches and letters. Robertson’s style is compelling, and the structure of his book provides for easy reading into what is a complicated period of English history.

One of the weaknesses of this work is the epilogue, which is a piece of self-indulgent literature. Robertson does not provide an adequate conclusion to his work; he fails to evaluate Cooke’s actions and motives, but rather seeks to use the trial of Charles I as a precedent for trials of modern war criminals and leaders – Goering, Pinochet, Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. Although Cooke did indeed argue that brutal action by a head of state justified ‘regime change,’ it is extremely difficult to associate those arguments presented in the seventeenth century, under substantially different circumstances, to the modern war trials held in Nuremburg and The Hague. Robertson fails to identify that there was a tremendous amount of religious motivation behind the removal of Charles I; it was not only his political actions, but his religious convictions which drove the Puritans headed by Cromwell and Ireton to rise against their sovereign. The epilogue lacks any substance; it merely provides Robertson with an opportunity to espouse his own uninformed historical argument.

SPCK, 172pp, pbk

0 281 05667 6, £12·99

The words ‘new age’ in the title of a book fill me with dread and foreboding. They represent all that is transient and ephemeral, trivial and inconsequential. They connote all that I loathe and despise: the fashionable, the meretricious, piffle and flannel. They are the talisman for that lack of confidence in a tradition and a history that has shaped and forged a society. Yet here is a book that, by and large, confounds its title.

Graham James, Bishop of Norwich, touches on this lack of inclusion in a wider context in the course of an accomplished conspectus of the various faces of a cathedral and its mission beyond its walls: ‘The cathedral, itself a community of communities, becomes the home, temporarily, of many other communities, somewhere many feel they belong. This is a powerful witness to social harmony and a telling testimony to the Christian belief that all people are made in the likeness of God himself. But are there limits to this inclusion? Is it made feasible only by a diminished sense of Christian distinctiveness?’

Cathedrals provide ‘the opportunity for people to explore and perhaps to cross the awkward boundary between the secular and the sacred.’ This is a theme (‘cathedrals perch on the edge, between the Church and the world’) referred to by several contributors. The growth in numbers of worshippers, as well as casual visitors and tourists, is cited as evidence of an engagement with the sacred in a space and environment that offers something different from a parish church: and that is right. There is a degree of anonymity and there are fewer demands on congregations in cathedrals. But part of being a Christian is being part of a family and a community, with a sense of obligation one to another. I am not sure how successful, however fine the liturgy or the visitor centre or restaurant, these are in inculcating those fundamental building blocks of Christian faith and commitment. These limitations are fairly acknowledged in parts of the book.

Overall, the book is worth reading and provides much to provoke and stimulate. None of the essays is outstanding but, equally, none is without some interest. In addition to Graham James and Christopher Lewis (who also provides a brief look to the future: ‘hope based on experience’), there are good essays from John Inge on education, portraying cathedrals as the success story of the Church of England in the twentieth century (it is rare to read the words success and Church of England in the same sentence: cherish it) by bringing their historical role into the modern world, commissioning works of art, staging exhibitions, providing educational and resource centres, not least for school projects, and forging links with academic institutions. The anxiety must be that the balance may tip from an educational experience into a theme park.

Jeremy Fletcher writes about the place for experimental liturgy and the interplay between tradition and innovation; and how large-scale celebrations can filter down to parishes. Few parishes (there are honourable exceptions) can provide daily sung Offices. But the religious observance of Evensong is probably in safer hands with musicians than with the modern clergy. Stephen Platten, as well as his introduction, writes about cathedrals and universities from their monastic beginnings as centres of learning. In relatively short compass he provides a detailed and fascinating historically rooted survey and outlines current developments and connections. Michael Sadgrove is similarly interesting and historically based in his survey of the parish church cathedrals, of which he had particular interest in Sheffield, and he links cathedrals with urban life. Philip Thomas offers a thoughtful piece on archaeology and conservation, dealing with the vexed question of the care and maintenance of these huge buildings.

James Atwell’s chapter ‘Les grands projets’ takes its title from President Mitterand’s vision for France expressed through new buildings and most spectacularly accomplished in La Grande Arche (like it or loathe it). Here he considers in some detail, and compelling it is, the triumphant completion of Stephen Dykes Bower’s Gothic vision for St Edmundsbury Cathedral after forty years and more of endeavour. He rightly comments that ‘the Church builds today from weakness not from strength’ and shows how this translates into the bureaucratic nightmare into which he was plunged. Yet it is a story of persistence which ended happily. The distinguished sociologist Grace Davie writes about cathedrals in a European cultural context, and everything she writes is worth close consideration.

Cathedrals stand at the heart of our great cities, if not at the heart of their lives, and it is admirable to see thought and commitment given to them as evidenced in this book. Despite the occasional crazy initiative, they still have a substantial witness. My anxiety is not with their survival as buildings of architectural significance (the National Trust or English Heritage could always broaden their remits). Rather, it is with the survival of the Christian religion at all. In any event, cathedrals will long outlast me and I hope outlast my pessimistic fears for their future as places of worship giving glory to God.

Charles I and his Art Collection

Macmillan, 456pp, hbk

1 4050 4152 8, £25

What is your favourite painting? After much sifting, mine is the stunning triple portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck in the Royal Collection. It was commissioned and painted as a template for a bust of the King by Bernini, now lost as a result of a major fire in the Palace of Whitehall on 4 January 1698; but it is more than that and stands as a major achievement in portraiture. It is majestic yet intimate, regal but searching. It is both propaganda (there was no monarch more conscious of his image, not even Queen Elizabeth I) and a probing insight of character. You learn as much, if not more, about the King’s strengths and weaknesses from this portrait as from several biographies.

Jerry Brotton is something of a revisionist here. In a rather loosely written passage, he maintains that ‘the sale was not the act of barbaric cultural vandalism by a bunch of iconoclastic zealots assumed by many subsequent royal historians and dismayed connoisseurs.’ But this is to underplay and to underestimate the religious dimension of the English Civil War: it was about religion as well as the exercise of power and authority, about taxation and representation. There may well have been pragmatic, financial, administrative reasons for the sale of the King’s goods and they may have been the primary and the governing motives, but there was also a potent ideological framework that would make the puritan victors predisposed to the disbursement of the collection. Their pragmatic need to raise money would have been bolstered by their puritan reaction against the lavish, the ‘popish’ and the decadent nature of Charles’ court exemplified by his art collection. Even if some of the victors, like Colonel Hutchinson, bought some of the pictures, this did not absolve most from an ideological disposition.

Charles built up his collection through judicious, as well as one major and significant, purchase, the acquisition of the Gonzaga collection from Mantua; and also by commissioning works of art from the leading painters of the day, not least among them Rubens and Van Dyck. Viewed as conspicuous consumption and criminally lavish by his opponents, his collecting may have contributed, however marginally, to his downfall. After his execution, the republicans dispersed by sale or gift a vast number of works of art from the royal collection. Some two thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings and tapestries were snaffled up throughout Europe. Present day collections in Madrid and Paris (the French and Spanish Ambassadors being particularly adroit at cherry-picking the sale) owe much to King Charles’ eye and the republican’s philistinism.

Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Charles grew up in the shadow of his elder brother, Prince Henry. It was Henry’s untimely death at an early age that thrust Charles into the limelight and onto the throne. Charles was never able to inherit his brother’s ease of social relationships, his political grasp, nor his popularity. Charles did, however, acquire Henry’s artistic eye and he transcended it.

By any standards an astonishing collection was accumulated, housed and exhibited, and the break-up of the collection was a tragedy and a scandal, although Mr Brotton seems more sanguine about its fate and applauds the opening up of the art market and the wider distribution and dissemination of the pictures, sculptures and other artefacts beyond the confines of the court.

After the failure of the republic and the restoration of the monarchy, Charles II recovered in a ‘remarkable act of artistic restitution’ the majority, but not all, of his father’s pictures. This repatriated element returned to join the nucleus of the collection that had not been sold but the comprehensive integrity of the collection and the glory of its totality was forever gone, although many individual glories remained or were returned.

Oliver Cromwell had eventually halted the sale of the late King’s goods. His decision was motivated by the political and the financial failure of the enterprise. It could hardly be judged an unqualified success, although it did succeed in inflicting irreparable damage. Nor did it add as much as had been anticipated and hoped to the national coffers of the Commonwealth. Nor had it succeeded in dispelling and extirpating the memory of the King and the image of the monarchy. The dispersal of the royal collection provided tangible reminders of the martyred King.

The tone of the writing is not always entirely to my taste. It can err on the side of the demotic rather than the verbally fastidious. His opinions are firmly held, strongly expressed and usually emerge from the left field. However, my personal foibles should not deter you from enjoying this exploration of a remarkable byway in the English Civil War and English art history. If nothing else, and it offers much more, it cannot fail to bring a greater appreciation of the skill and greatness of Sir Anthony Van Dyck.

Gracewing, pbk

085244 273 4, £9·99

There is an interest to be declared. Arthur Middleton, the voice of classical Anglicanism, is a member of the Editorial Board of this journal and a frequent contributor. It is not for this periodical to provide free advertising space for one of its number. But, equally, simply because he is a mainstay of this publication, it would be unfair not to notice the re-publication of his important contribution to our understanding of the priesthood. Such a consideration ought to be key to the debate which currently occupies the place of women in the Church of England as priests and bishops.

For those of us who find these developments highly problematic and ecclesiologically poorly grounded, we need to be clear about our understanding of the priesthood. Fr Middleton provides an exposition of the Christian priesthood in the light of historical precedents in the Fathers of the Early Church and also in the light and in the tradition of the great Caroline Divines, Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes and George Herbert, who so informed the thinking of the Fathers of the Oxford Movement, and still have much to say to us today. We forget our history and our formative antecedents at our peril.

This is an admittedly short study but within that relatively short compass Fr Middleton offers a powerfully argued critique of the contemporary debate and the headlong descent into a remorselessly secular culture. He retains throughout a positive and lively assertion of the continuing value of the priesthood as something beyond the merely functional, which is a satisfying contradiction to the trends of the day.

Those of you who value his writing for this journal will find a similar grace of expression and sanity of tone in this contribution to a debate which often generates more heat than light.

Monarch, 176pp, pbk

1 854247 37 9, £6·99

If you or a loved one were facing death. how would your Christianity come into play? Chichester diocesan priest, Kevin O’Donnell’s attractively illustrated book marshals spiritual encouragement from Scripture, tradition and experience, which includes near-death stories. It is a book written out of pastoral experience, one that yearns to see people transformed by Jesus, as well as wide-ranging knowledge of the Bible and church tradition spanning from New Church to Orthodoxy.

Throughout the book there is powerful witness to the resurrection, love and mercy of the Lord Jesus and gentle invitation for readers to commit their lives to him as the best preparation for crossing over in death.

endpiece

Immediate, intimate, indiscrete, illegible are the attributes that the late Alan Clark ascribed to a successful diary and a compelling diarist. He exemplified them all to a frightening degree. I have just finished reading the diaries of Duff Cooper. He held a higher office than Clark; he was First Lord of the Admiralty and later was Ambassador to France post World War II, but he shared with Clark a keenly observant eye, a graceful literary style (perhaps more considered and shaped than Clark’s prose), and an astonishing promiscuity (even out-doing Clark in the infidelity stakes) while remaining utterly devoted to his wife, the stunningly beautiful Lady Diana Cooper. However, he never attained one of the great offices of state and shares with Clark and with ‘Chips’ Channon (in my view the greatest political and social diarist of the twentieth century) minor political celebrity but enjoyed a highly significant entré to the seats of political and social power.

If Cooper shared with Clark a promiscuous private life, he shared with Channon the very best of social connections. His diaries on the eve of the First World War, when he was a coming man and a hardly overworked Foreign Office junior mandarin, catalogue the dinners, parties and country house weekends of the long Edwardian summer. Thereafter, month after month, sometimes week after week, we read of the deaths, one by one, of virtually his entire male social circle. It makes moving reading.

But where are the great Anglo-Catholic diaries? Canon Liddon wrote a full and fascinating travel diary but beyond that his diaries are retrospective appointment books, with few comments or insights of historical significance. Others I have seen (all unpublished) include those of Canon Freddy Hood, sometime Principal of Pusey House and later Canon of St Paul’s. He lists assiduously enough the names of the eminent and distinguished with whom he was friendly but without comment or without reporting anything they said or did. Another Anglo-Catholic diarist, Tom Parker, the historian of the Reformation, wrote extensive diaries, but in a crabbed and difficult hand that almost defies transcription and he seems overly concerned with his bowel movements and ‘sorting things.’

However, there is one diarist whose journals are a gold mine of trenchant observations, detailed and acidic comment, immense insight into character. The writer is still very much with us: let me in a breathtaking moment of originality call him Father X. He has been at or near the heart of things for many years and has kept a full diary, sometimes written as events unfolded. From the few extracts I know about, they are magnificently vivid. They will be denied to this generation but future historians have a treat in store and will find them the most brilliant sustained analysis and running commentary of Anglo-Catholicism in our time: immediate, indiscrete, intimate, and far from illegible. Oh to be alive at that hour.

Meanwhile, it is greatly to be hoped that Alan Titchmarsh does not keep a diary and does not seek to immortalize his commonplace thoughts in deathless, platitudinous prose. No doubt each entry will end ‘And so to flower bed.’