Desk Notes No.15

Summer with the Rossettis; the Archipelago; and Virginia Woolf (again!)

Jun 25, 2023

Dear friends,

Lately my head has been stuck in books about the Pre-Raphaelites, the women in their circle, William and Jane Morris. Like many of you, I’ve long admired Morris’ intricate designs for fabric and wallpaper; their intertwined foliage, birds, fruits and flowers. Among my favourites are the medieval Daisy (1864), the abundant Fruit (1862), the heavy, lush Blackthorn (1892) and the delicate, optimistic Meadow Sweet (1904). I’m drawn to how the life and work of the Morrises - William, Jane and their daughter May - was shaped by the changing seasons and by their access to nature, by the English garden, by the plants and flowers they saw from their windows or picked in local fields. In her book, How We Might Live, Suzanne Fagence Cooper writes that:

“As William and Jane showed in their personal letters, the turning of the year could affect their health and happiness. It was worth noticing. They rejoiced in the building and the blooming, the harvesting and resting times.”

As I’ve become more involved with my own garden I’ve noticed similar shifts. I look forward to the periods of intensity - the pruning, the sowing, the potting-on - and feel myself relaxing as buds and fruits begin to swell with little more than a weekly feed. Nature’s calendar brings time into sharp relief; years pass more quickly. I pay more attention to the weather and realise, now more than ever, that no two years are the same. The garden is all about timing.

This month, storms arrived just as the late-spring flowers were losing their buoyancy — a recipe for dishevelment. From the windows, the garden became an impressionist painting gone wrong; incongruous blobs of pink, purple and white disturbing the green geometry of the lawn. Poppies snapped and smashed. A cluster of peonies, their bowed heads weeping a puddle of petals.

My penchant for these big, blousy flowers would disappoint Morris. Fagence Cooper reminds us that he warned against, “double flowers,” which are less accessible to bees. Instead Morris preferred simpler, traditional blooms like the sunflowers featured in so much of his work, whose large, open centres are, “clogged with honey.” In sympathy with Morris, the weather has been kinder to the flowers he would have liked best — those of the towering ‘mock-orange,’ a mass of frothy white blossom breaking over the garden like a crashed wave. When it blooms well, as it has this year, the ‘mock orange’ is among my favourite things in the garden. In the late, fading light of long summer days its brilliant white flowers take on a glowing quality, a luminescence — to attract night pollinators perhaps? By day, in the cloying atmosphere of a heat-wave, its sweet, heady fragrance lingers and builds until it becomes almost stifling. Clinging to the hot air, its perfume drifts through open windows and doors, bringing the outside in. There are few nicer smells. Sitting under the blossom, eating ice-cream and reading How We Might Live I imagine myself at Kelmscott one hundred and fifty years ago:

“In the summer, the garden did indeed seem like ‘part of the house,’ as William desired. The doors were open, so friends could wander in and out as they wished. Jane enjoyed al fresco meals in Italy, their sense of informality and warmth. At Kelmscott, she hoped to recreate the same calm, easeful hospitality: ‘We have tea out of doors most days,’ she told a friend; ‘in fact laziness reigns supreme.’”

In this edition of Desk Notes you’ll find the things I’ve been thinking about in June.

Pictures - The Rossettis at Tate Britain until 24 September 2023

Screen - Archipelago directed by Joanna Hogg (2010) now showing on MUBI. With a little chat about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse

Pictures

‘The Rossettis’ at Tate Britain until 24 September 2023

The intense romance and sensuality of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portraits often overshadows the work of those around him; the art of his wife Elizabeth Siddal, and the poetry of his sister, Christina. The Rossettis at Tate Britain attempts to redress this balance, to put their work in context, exploring their relationships and attitudes to society. Lizzie is herself often preceded by the tragic story of her demise, her opium addiction and suicide, not to mention the macabre exhumation of her body (to retrieve a book of Gabriel’s poems he hastily buried with her). This new exhibition is an antidote to such sensationalism, allowing Lizzie’s work to speak for itself, revealing how her art often inspired Gabriel’s own.

In the exhibition catalogue, Jan Marsh explains that:

“This landmark exhibition is the opportunity to correct this longstanding myth of Elizabeth Siddal as a ‘meek unconscious dove’ and a sad victim of misogyny and drug addiction. She was not meek, nor invalid, but active and assertive, and her fatal opiate overdose was likely the result of post-natal psychosis after her daughter was born dead.”

There’s a mesmerising darkness to many of Lizzie’s works. At first, The Haunted Wood (1856) tricks the eye. A dark void pulls us into the depths of the forest until we realise it is, in fact, the skirt of a much larger, elongated female figure whose auburn hair brushes against the tree tops. She is reaching out to another figure camouflaged in mushroom shades, emerging from the trees. From Shakespeare Lizzie chooses the scene in which Lady Macbeth takes hold of the bloody dagger; from the ballad The Gay Goshawk, the moment, “molten lead is dropped on the heroine’s breast to check if she is dead.”

As a group, the Rossettis challenged Victorian ideas about gender and exposed how society was stacked against women. Before the Married Women’s Property Act (1882), economic power imbalances left women open to seduction and a ‘fall’ into notoriety, immorality and prostitution. Christina’s poetry explores the tragic consequences of coupling of love with property. Extracts from No, Thank You, John and Cousin Kate greet visitors in the first room, colouring the exhibition with a female perspective.

He lured me to his palace home—
Woe’s me for joy thereof—
To lead a shameless shameful life,
His plaything and his love
He wore me like a silken knot,
He changed me like a glove;

I’ve long been fascinated by Gabriel’s picture, Found, which shows the attempted rescue of a fallen woman on the streets of London. Like so much of Gabriel’s work, which is drenched in references from the biblical to the legendary and literary, the background is laden with symbolism — an innocent calf caught in a net, a bridge, gravestones (fallen women were reputed to throw themselves into the Thames). Gabriel’s feelings about the issue were so complex that the work went through many revisions and was left ultimately unfinished. I was excited to see versions from the 1850s and 1870s displayed alongside preparatory works and sketches, allowing us to see how Gabriel’s attitudes towards the subject shifted over time. Works on similar themes, The Gate of Memory (1853-4) and Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (1858), further reveal the development of his ideas. I will be heading back to the exhibition soon, to spend more time with these works. Interestingly, Glenda Youde highlights the connections between Lizzie’s Pippa Passes and the iterations of Gabriel’s Found, describing a two-way exchange of ideas that was common among the Pre-Raphaelite group.

Gabriel’s images of the fallen woman suggest the possibility of redemption. Attitudes carried over from the eighteenth century were changing: it was now perceived that women might ‘fall’ as a result of poverty rather than greed. The curators explain how Gabriel’s relationship with working-class model Fanny Cornforth shaped and altered his ideas about ‘fallen’ women. He paints her as Babylonian princess Alatiel in Bocca Baciata (1859):

“Misfortunes and adventures lead Alatiel to sexual experiences with men in several parts of the world. Alatiel overcomes her trials, symbolised by marigolds, and eventually returns to her betrothed and marries him. The title comes from a quote on the back of the painting: ‘the kissed mouth loses not its freshness, but rents itself like the moon.’ The picture is an early example of Gabriel’s mature style and the ideas of the aesthetic movement.”

Of all Gabriel’s models, this portrait of Fanny Cornforth draws me the most - her full cheeks, the softness of her expression, the ornaments in her hair. This painting of Fanny feels more restrained, more natural than many of his later works. One of my favourite pieces on display is a pencil sketch of Fanny from 1862. She’s resting against a pillow, her mass of hair pulled up and under her head, cascading down her right shoulder. The left is bare, exposed in a simple, curvaceous line, a jewelled droplet dangling from her earlobe. Fanny’s right hand rests gently on her chest, she looks down dreamily, her lips gently parted. It’s a relaxed, intimate drawing, both warm and alluring.

The drawing is displayed in a room dedicated to Gabriel’s aesthetic works, exploring the Victorian idea of the femme fatale and his growing obsession with Jane Morris who he paints time and again as the goddess Prosperine. These paintings are gorgeous, sensual, intoxicating, loaded with opulent fabrics, jewellery and flowers, a celebration of female beauty. And yet their magnetism is eclipsed by the personal objects that reveal the truth behind the images: a lock of Lizzie’s red hair; a rare manuscript containing a private portrait; the gold bracelet from The Beloved.

Screen

‘Archipelago’ directed by Joanna Hogg (2010) now showing on MUBI

Whenever I sit down with a new Joanna Hogg film I wonder how I’m going to survive something so still, so slow, so lifelike. I can’t pin-point exactly when, but something always shifts, the layers begin to unfurl and I’m taken, I’m drawn in, I forget myself. The credits roll with my brain on fire, a pool of emotion in the pit of my stomach. Hogg’s films are intimate and considered, focussed on the minutia of human relationships: small-talk, awkwardness, silences, raised voices, the things left unsaid.

Her second film, Archipelago, might just be my favourite. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Virginia Woolf this year, but when adult siblings, Edward and Cynthia, are forced together with their mother in a remote cottage on the Isle of Scilly, the fractious family dynamics put me in mind of To The Lighthouse. The Archipelago - meaning a group of scattered islands in a large body of water - is the perfect metaphor for these individuals grown apart, held together by the nebulous concept of ‘family’. The pressure to have a nice time, to create the perfect family holiday - painting, walking, eating - is the mainspring of its failure, culminating in the shattered politeness of an expensive dinner in a fancy restaurant: a frankly masterful scene.

I’m fascinated by the way Hogg and her actors build character. The sedateness of her films comes in part from allowing us to observe them alone — shuffling belongings on a bedside table or wiping down kitchen worktops — and from incidental conversation. Meanwhile, scenes in which the ‘action’ happens are curtailed, reduced to snapshots. The full story emerges only with time. Hogg’s dialogue plays out with a realism rarely encountered elsewhere. Here in Archipelago, self-consciousness materialises in the presence of young live-in cook, Rose, who is hired to take care of the family and the cottage. Edward refuses to treat her like staff, engaging her in small-talk, drawing her into detailed conversations about her own family and the death of her father. In other hands, this might form a burgeoning romance. Not here. Instead, Rose exposes the differences between the siblings — Cynthia’s jagged edges, Edward’s humanity. Cynthia can’t help but see him as, “ridiculous, the burning martyr.” She is furious with his efforts to do something, to make a difference in the world. An explosive argument erupts through the walls.

Hogg is exploring emotion, how much we feel and how we deal with it. I see myself in Edward, who lacks assertiveness, whose mother says he has, “too much empathy.” Like Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay, “nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.” The unifying force comes from a painting tutor and friend of the family, middle-aged Christopher. “You’ve got to toughen up,” he tells Edward — advice I’ve received more times than I can count. At forty and having taken a regretfully convoluted path towards writing myself, I find great comfort in the advice Christopher offers Edward:

“It’s not really what you do, its more the intensity by which you do it. Just by the conviction of your reality that you believe in, you make others believe it, and then people get convinced, and even you yourself get convinced. There’s no one hidden track that’s there waiting for you, you’ve just got to step into it, whatever that is. You know, one does all sorts of things, you do all the things that are not right, but they all contribute to the thing that will be right in the end. It’s never lost, it’s all accumulating, building up in intensity.”

Like Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, Christopher has given his life up for his art, never marrying or having children. Taking Edward into his confidence, he speaks about the fragility and delicacy of talent and passion in a sensitive heart, about the dangers of exposing it to criticism: “You can’t reveal it to others in its full worldly sense.” These words make sense to me. They reach to me through space and time, like those of Lily Briscoe:

“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself — struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: ‘But this is what I see; this is what I see’, and to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance…

“He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes, when Lily, rousing herself, saw what he was at, and winced like a dog who sees a hand raised to strike it. She would have snatched her picture off the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to stand the awful trial of someone looking at her picture. One must, she said, one must. And if it must be seen, Mr Bankes was less alarming than another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her thirty-three years, the deposit of each day’s living, mixed with something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this month’s issue and what you’ve been doing this June. Let me know in the comments.

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