Rowling’s Passion For Gainsborough

My personal computer failed today so I am writing this on a spare Dell laptop with Windows 7 and its own issues. I’ll keep it short, consequently, while I try to bring the new computer online.

Sunday’s London Times ‘Culture’ insert had a celebration of the top 100 bestsellers on The Times’ bestseller list of the last 50 years. I wrote about the deceit involved on that list here; Rowling’s Philosopher’s Stone was the only one of her books to make this anniversary party and at only #23 when her seven Harry Potter novels, a heavy finger not being on the opposing scale, would have been in the top ten.

Regardless of that dishonesty on the part of The Times back in the day and currently, the anniversary article featured a Q&A session with Rowling that HogPro backchannel moderators think was just unused “leftovers” from the previous Times conversation with The Presence (same picture, etc.). Five of the fourteen questions were about Philosopher’s Stone, so I have my doubts about that theory.

The most interesting answers that Rowling gave were about Stephen King, trivia about Philosopher’s Stone, and her thoughts about Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. I’m working on a longer post about her answer to “What’s the first piece of art you loved?” but it allows me to review an answer she gave more than twenty years ago to the question, “Do you enjoy art?” in which the Caravaggio painting is mentioned.

That was in Lyndsey Frazer’s Conversations with J. K. Rowling, a juvenile Q&A rather than a proper biography though the book cover still proclaims truthfully “The Only Authorized Biography of J. K. Rowling.” Join me after the jump for her full answer to that question — and the artist and painting she mentioned before Caravaggio.

Rowling’s answer to this deceptively simple question is worth reading in full with annotations:

Do you enjoy art?

I loved art at school and I still draw for pleasure. For some reason – maybe it was because I knew I would never make a living out of it – I never minded showing people my drawings and paintings. I never show my writing to anybody. My editor will tell you! I find it so hard to let go. It’s too important. I hate it when people ask to see my rough drafts – they’re too personal, somehow.

Rowling’s first answer to the question is “I enjoy creating art myself” with a long aside about the difference in her relationship to her “drawings and paintings” as opposed to her written artistry. This is a subtle poke at the interviewer at their almost certainly unintentional suggestion that Rowling was just a hack writer; “I am a creator of art, both on canvas and on the page, not just a consumer.”

There is also the mention of “paintings.” Outside of the color illustrations of the astrological charts she did for a married couple and their young child while she was writing Stone, I didn’t know that she painted. Are these just colored sketches or does she have enough proper paintings for an exhibition? She’s already hanging in the National Gallery, but as the subject of a humiliating piece not as an artist.

I love art galleries. I’ve now been to New York on book tours several times – it’s one of my favorite places – and I’ve yet to visit any of the fabulous galleries there. I’m always desperate to go but there’s never an afternoon free.

She shifts here from challenging the premise of the question to asserting that she is a bona fide student of art. She loves “art galleries,” which statement again is a deliberate counter to the suggestion in “Do you enjoy art?” that art, real art, is a bit of a stretch for her, lower middle class woman just off the dole that she is (still the prevalent narrative in 2001). She knows which fork to use at the fete! Rowling throws in that she’s been overseas more than once, New York City is one of her “favorite places,” and she’s just so busy she cannot follow her own desires to spend at afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sadly, of course, in trying so hard not to seem lower middle class, her insecurities about her caste status in 2000, shifting wildly due to her new fame and fortune, still show themselves in this answer. Which is not to say that she hasn’t always loved art galleries and doesn’t “enjoy art” today…

In my early twenties, I had a passion for Gainsborough, especially a painting called The Morning Walk. It is of the most extraordinary couple – the man is very striking while the woman is quite wishy-washy – and the explanation was that this painting was done for their marriage. I wondered how that marriage worked out and something told me it hadn’t.

Rowling’s “early twenties,” let’s say age twenty to twenty-five, put us in the years 1985 to 1990, the outside edge there being her year in Manchester, the Harry Potter inspiration on the delayed train, and in late December the death of her mother. In 1986, however, she’d graduated from Exeter and moved to London to work for Amnesty International. It is more than credible, I think, that she was haunting the National Gallery the several years she lived there before moving to Manchester with Michael. She said that she traveled to London “on my own” from the University of Exeter I assume when “19 or 20” to visit the National Gallery in last Sunday’s Q&A:

What’s the first piece of art you loved?
I visited the National Gallery on my own when I was around 19 or 20 and was absolutely mesmerised by Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. I had a battered print of it on my wall for years afterwards and it featured on my first ever website.

The National Gallery has been free to enter since 1970 so I don’t think this claim to have been haunting the galleries while a poor student and then a new member in the work force, secretarial level, is posturing on Rowling’s part. It seems to be instead an honest revelation of her love of fine art and her appreciation of the best of painters and painting. 

Her comments about Gainsborough’s The Morning Walk, however, in this context are curious. She sounds very much like a person totally unschooled in the intricasies of lighting, contrasts, backdrop, and stroke qualities, all of which the art school afficianado would recall if he or she “had a passion for Gainsborough.” Instead, she writes a story in her own mind about the aristocratic couple, a mismatch it seemed to her, and their doomed marriage (she was wrong in this, by the way; according to Wikipedia at least, “the marriage was reportedly a happy one,” lasted forty-eight years, and ended at the wife’s death).

Perhaps she was remembering her off and on again relationship with Michael at this time and how it ended in 1991, a break that prompted her exodus to Portugal?

Here is how a curator at the National Gallery talks about The Morning Walk for a study in contrasts with Rowling’s story-teller’s perspective:

I hope you watched to the end, the very end, when she explains that the name of the painting was changed to The Morning Walk from Mr and Mrs William Hallett in the 1880s because of a popular poem of the period, James Thomson’s The Seasons (1727, ‘Summer‘):

Falsely luxurious, will not man awake,

And, starting from the bed of sloth, enjoy

The cool, the fragrant, and the silent hour,

To meditation due, and sacred song.

And is there ought in sleep can charm the wise?

To lie in dead oblivion, losing half

The fleeting moments of too short a life?

Total extinction of th’ enlighten’d soul!

Or else to feverish vanity alive,

Wilder’d, and tossing thro’ distemper’d dreams?

Who would in such a gloomy state remain,

Longer than nature craves; when every Muse,

And every blooming Pleasure wait without,

To bless the wildy-devious morning walk?

— ‘Summer,’ ll. 66-79

How shall I then attempt to sing of him,

Who, Light Himself, in uncreated light

Invested deep, dwells awfully retir’d

From mortal eye, or angel’s purer ken;

Whose single smile has, from the first of time,

Fill’d, over-flowing, all those lamps of heaven,

That beam for ever thro’ the boundless sky:

But, should he hide his face, th’ astonish’d sun,

And all th’ extinguish’d stars, would loosening reel,

Wide from their spheres, and chaos come again.

— ‘Summer,’ ll. 177-186

A friend in the UK whom I wrote for thoughts about this painting expressed surprise at Rowling’s choice of this Gainsborough painting rather than the more celebrated (and interesting?) Mr and Mrs Andrews. Good question; Andrews was part of the National Gallery collection from its purchase at private auction by the family in 1960. That makes it a relatively recent addition to their Gainsborough gallery but it was there when Rowling lived in London.

My suspicion is that she preferred Walk to Andrews because of what the curator discussed, namely, the composition in contrasts, especially light and dark, black and white, of the newlywed pair. Unlike Andrews, Walk does not carry as much landed gentry baggage and is a much larger canvas with a greater narrative focus. Rowling mentions none of that to Frazer, perhaps because she realized she was already sounding somewhat effete in her previous comments — or just that this was a Q&A book for children.

That she had “a passion for Gainsborough,” though, from the beginning of her life as an independent woman establishes that she really does “enjoy art,” and that it has been a major part of her adult life as a human being and as an artist herself. Her Potter stories, after all, include paintings that come to life, are alive, portraits which speak to their audience from their frames. I wonder if any of the portraits in the Headmaster’s Office as Rowling imagined it were painted by Gainsborough?