I tease my much younger co-workers about their relationship with their ‘Smart’ phones; most are using an Apple product but have become ‘android’ users nonetheless, if you catch my drift. Customers at the store who leave their phones behind inadvertently at the register or in their shopping cart call the store when they realize “I don’t have my phone!” in a panic akin to the realization they have left behind one of their children. Too frequently they exclaim on being reunited with the pocket technology, “It was like losing my brain.”
As something of Luddite with respect to phones — I have a flip phone that I rarely carry with me except when traveling — I shake my head with wonder and judgmental disapproval at this dependence.
I was confronted yesterday with the risible hypocrisy of that posture when my laptop failed. I have had to purchase a new personal computer and face the fact that I have been at least as dependent on this technology as my young cohorts are with their phones. I just don’t carry the PC around with me and consult it every few minutes. Uploading software and regaining access to accounts online will be the better of my day today which drives that point home.
Yesterday I wrote what I thought would be a simple filler piece about Rowling’s “passion” for Thomas Gainsborough’s paintings in her “early twenties,” something she discussed briefly with Frazer in the 2001 Q&A, Conversations with J. K. Rowling. I pledged in that post to write a promised piece today about her love for the Caravaggio painting Supper at Emmaus that she mentioned both in Frazer and in last Sunday’s London Times Q&A. I will be working on bringing my new computer up to speed (and putting my working life here back on track) instead.
Today, though, after the jump, I share three more notes about Thomas Gainsborough and Rowling’s “passion” for his paintings during her formative “early twenties” in London, discoveries I didn’t include in yesterday’s post for lack of time.This morning, I’m wondering if these neglected thoughts are not the more important points about Rowling, the National Gallery, and what the young author saw in the eighteenth century painter.
(1) Rowling’s Greater Education as an Artist
In my search yesterday for confirmation that admissions to art galleries in the UK was free during Rowling’s years in London post Exeter, I stumbled upon the remarkable Lord Jenkins of Putney and his defense of keeping open admissions to the gallery when this policy was threatened in 1986. Jenkins was a child of the lower middle class, even the working class, a firebrand socialist who fought against nuclear weapons well before that became fashionable, and, incredibly, was elevated to the House of Lords, a ‘bully pulpit’ among the aristocracy of which he made extraordinary use.
Here are his thoughts about the importance of keeping a no-charge policy to UK art galleries and museums to foster a true education for the citizenry:
A few years ago, one of the Sunday papers had the idea of asking some people to write a piece saying which great painting they most admired and why they would like to possess it. I found no difficulty in announcing my love for Manet’s (sic) Water Lilies which is in the National Gallery—a wonderful painting. You can go in on a dull cold day and warm yourself body and soul in its hazy sunshine. You can even lose your fear of death in it. The difficulty arose when I said that I did not want to move the painting as I already owned it and wanted it to stay on the walls of the National Gallery where it would be well looked after. The Sunday Times did not follow this at all. It was not possession as they saw it and so I lost my £50, or whatever it was, for the article. However, when the charges were abolished we all gained the Manet (sic), and much besides, which belongs to me and to everyone else—and no one must be charged money to see it.
I was interested to follow the end of the previous debate on universities. I do not quite go along with George Bernard Shaw, who said that he never ceased to thank God that his mind was never crippled by a university education. My university, as I left school at an unconscionable early age, was the Enfield Public Library, the British Museum, and the National Gallery. Later I discovered the V & A, the other Kensington museums, and the Tate. I wandered around London day after day, going from one to another, amazed and astounded at the richness that was mine and at my endless discovery. I found the world and all that was in it. I began to grasp the extraordinary achievements of the species to which I belong: its history, its glory, and its terrible failures. I obtained a perspective on the universe, and I could have acquired that in no other way.
Museums and Galleries (Prohibition of Admission Charges) Bill [H.L.], HL Deb 05 March 1986 vol 472 cc261-91
(2) The Joanne Rowling-Thomas Gainsborough Connection
Nick Jeffery is the leading voice in Fourth Generation Rowling Studies because he understands and explains better than anyone else both the class system of the UK and Rowling’s point of origin and formation as a member of the lower middle class. This perspective is the setting of Rowling’s ‘Lake,’ not the unresolved personal crises that give her the inspiration of her stories, but the depth, colors, and atmosphere of that body of subconscious water.
If I understand Nick correctly, Jo Rowling was largely unaware of her class status, or, better, not confronted by it as she would be in the world beyond Church Cottage (her Rowling cousins, after all, were sent to ‘public schools’ rather than state-sponsored ‘comprehensives’), until she went to the University of Exeter. Sean Smith in his J. K. Rowling: A Biography describes the shock the new undergraduate must have felt on arriving as an undergraduate, a provincial lass bumping into the world of public school ‘Sloane Rangers:’
At Exeter the former public school students were known as ‘Welly’ and the rest, which would include Joanne, were ‘non-Welly.’… She had not taken a ‘gap year’ after leaving Wyedean, so was plunged straight into student life on campus. It was not at all what she expected. She also had to contend with the big fish/small syndrome. At Wyedean she had been head girl. At Exeter she was a nervous undergraduate, just turned eighteen, from a provincial state school. One of her tutors Ray Davison recalls, ‘She had problems settling down here.’ (80-81)
She lived in the “soulless little rooms” of Jessie Montgomery Hall her first year and Lafrowda her second year “which was full of self-catering apartments, rather like a ski lodge,” a place to which she would return after her year in Paris. The rooms there were “small cubiles with single beds, basic university fare.” The ‘Wellys’ of her class at Exeter, in contrast, were in Thomas Hall, a mansion house on the edge of the campus exclusively for women and with an identity and dormitory-like atmosphere all its own” (Smith, pp 81, 84). Yvette Cowles, the Exeter student most like Rowling I think in terms of her program of study, observed that Joanne adjusted quickly so that by her second year no one could have guessed she was from “such a provincial back water” (82).
It was at Exeter, then, that Rowling was confirmed in the latent knowledge that she was not “manor born” and that she was a relative nobody and outsider. After her graduation in 1987 and her subsequent move to London to work for Amnesty International in her “early twenties,” when she developed her “passion for Gainsborough,” she may have been looking for a model, a successful artist who rose from a lower middle class status and who felt the English class distinctions keenly.
She couldn’t have found a better model in this than Thomas Gainsborough.
Born the ninth and last child of a successful miller in textile-driven Sudbury, Suffolk, was not from a working class family but not from anything like landed gentry or aristocracy, either; he attended a Grammar School of which a relation was the master and was sent to London at fourteen to apprentice with Human Gravelot, a French illustrator.
Gainsborough’s patrons, however, and the subjects of his portraits were decidedly wealthy — and he had little but disdain for them and their pretenses. As quoted in the wikipedia article about his life, he complained to a friend while making his way in Bath about the men he had to deal with as patrons and admirers:
… damn Gentlemen, there is not such a set of Enemies to a real artist in the world as they are, if not kept at a proper distance. They think … that they reward your merit by their Company & notice; but I … know that they have but one part worth looking at, and that is their Purse; their Hearts are seldom near enough the right place to get a sight of it.
I struggled to see the connection between Rowling the young artist and this painter until I read that passage of lower middle class disdain for the English aristocracy. But, as telling as that may be, I think there is more in the Rowling-Gainsborough “passion” and influence than just class sympathy.
All I know about Thomas Gainsborough I have learned from your internet searches in the last forty-eight hours and watching a few YouTube videos from the National Gallery. I am, in other words, not qualified to speak about the artist or Rowling’s “passion” for his work as a young woman. Invite those who are expert or even just ‘much more familiar’ with this subject than I am to share your thoughts on this topic.
Having acknowledged my ignorance about all things Gainsborough, I offer still for your consideration the thoughts of Christine Riding, the Head of the Curatorial Department at the National Gallery, about Gainsborough and his dynamic relationship with the Grand Master tradition of his time. Starting at about 31:00 in this video exploration of The Morning Walk, the Gainsborough painting with which Rowling claimed in 2000 to have been especially enamored in her “early twenties,” Riding discusses first the painter’s great admiration for and indebtedness to ‘Greats’ like Van Dyck and Rubens and the “heroic” tradition of portraiture.
She then jumps to how Gainsborough intentionally broke with that tradition for something at once more realistic and impressionistic, i.e., that he was building on the ‘Greats’ he admired rather than slavishly mimicking them. Riding concludes by noting that Gainsborough painted portraits for profit but worked to make landscape paintings, art that he had to make without any surety that it would sell, a legitimate ‘taste,’ a selfless effort that created the demand for painters coming after him, most notably Turner.
“You can see all these artists that these artists are learning from in a kind of lineage but updating the tradition that they’re engaging with to create a contemporary work of art.”
So, the last bit I want to talk about, really, is about Gainsborough as an artist sitting in the context of the British art scene of that period, but also about the way that Gainsborough operated in the context of the Old Master tradition.
So, just delving into this painting a little bit more, we’ve talked about the fact that Gainsborough really wanted to be a landscape painter, that was his real passion, he was absolutely an exemplar for the likes of John Constable at a moment when landscape really wasn’t achieving much purchase in terms of the British market. So, what he would do in terms of the annual exhibitions when he was exhibiting was actually exhibit many more portraits, many of which were commissioned, he was going to be paid for them, and for double portraits like this he would have been paid 120 guineas, which is about £126, which is an enormous sum of money. A single portrait would be about 100 guineas, about £105, the dog was just chucked in for good measure, a horse would be additional. So, presumably, because it’s a small creature, it’s fine.
So, there was lots of money to be made in portraiture, but not in landscape, and every exhibited landscape by Gainsborough was speculative, in other words, he didn’t have a buyer when he made it. But he was hoping, teasing the market a little bit to see what might fly eventually. And I think, really, the battle that Gainsborough fought and other people interested in landscape, the battle that he fought by the end of his career in 1788 absolutely made way for the likes of Turner and Constable going on into the late 18th, early 19th century.
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