An examination of the artist’s image is an excellent idea for an exhibition, and it has been thoroughly and effectively realised in this new show of some 70 exhibits at the National. Brainchild of Alexander Sturgis, who has written much of the useful catalogue (£25 in paperback), it explores the ways in which personality and originality have been bound up together in the art of the past 200 years. We are all familiar with the romantic idea of the starving but ennobled artist in the garret; this exhibition questions the plausibility of that myth.
As you enter the subterranean galleries of the Sainsbury Wing, you are greeted by a magnificent self-portrait of the worldly-wise and immensely successful Sir Joshua Reynolds, dressed in the velvet cap and scarlet robes of a Doctor of Civil Law. As the founding father and first president of the Royal Academy, Reynolds did a great deal to promote and augment the change of status enjoyed by artists. No longer should the painter be considered a lowly workman, he must forthwith enjoy the dignity and earning power of the gentleman. This translation from Artisan to Artist was a complex one, and not achieved over-night. And there were special clauses built into it. Artists wanted due respect for their divine creativity, but they also wanted to be free from the constraints which bedevilled most mere mortals. They required a latitude of behaviour which was often shocking to the respectable bourgeois, and frequently acted as if it was theirs by right. So the myth of the bohemian began to take root; the individual who was in some ways a cursed outsider, in others a fortunate rebel.
To Sir Joshua’s right is the superb self-depiction of Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, stylish and elegant with palette in hand but not a dab or flick of paint astray on her costume. Further round this first room is Eckersberg’s pellucid 1838 image of the Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, one of the most famous artists of his age. Into the second room for a change of gear from Establishment to rebel: confrontation with Courbet, looking mad in this self-portrait of 1843 known as ‘The Desperate Man’, in which he tears dramatically at his hair with eyes staring. To his left, the saturnine James Barry, to his right a marvellous Fuseli drawing.
Further round the room is the oddly pathetic but beautifully painted ‘Self-Portrait at the Easel’ by Victor Emil Janssen, in which he is stripped to the waist and strangely scooped and curved. (He was to die aged only 38 from bone disease.) Here is the artist as suffering victim, martyr to his art. The intense but modest painting of Friedrich by Georg Kersting has a contrastingly meditative quality — the light pouring in the high window enhaloes Friedrich and his mutton-chop whiskers, rendering the whole scene somehow sacred. Overbeck’s mock-mediaeval monastic portrait of Franz Pforr takes this queasy religiosity to further heights.
Is this going to be an exhibition predominantly of self-portraits? In room 3, the death of the young poet Chatterton, a Pre-Raphaelite icon by Henry Wallis, reassures us that the subject-matter will in fact vary a little. Indeed, in this room we enter the Symbolist dream-world of Gustave Moreau, with his ‘Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice’ looking a little like a Max Ernst forest-scape. Also his bizarre watercolour of a seated and youthful Giotto, moody in a pale cloak, drawing in the sand with a stick. Here, Delacroix makes his majestic appearance, with three views of the artist as solitary genius: the poets Tasso and Ovid, and Michelangelo in his sculpture studio.
The next room probes the notion of bohemia, dominated as it is by Courbet’s great painting (much reprised by other artists), ‘The Meeting (“Bonjour Monsieur Courbet”)’ of 1854. Here we are presented with the artist as defiant and independent bohemian, as radical in politics as he was in painting, though in Courbet’s case his art eventually suffered from his political involvement. To the left of this masterpiece hangs a tall Manet, a full-length portrait of Marcellin Desboutin simply called ‘The Artist’, a powerful depiction of a raffish figure filling a pipe while a dog feeds in the background. It’s an image of fine careless informality — no airs and graces here — which packs a considerable painterly punch. The Degas next to it doesn’t have anything like the same presence, and one turns to the festive Renoir inn scene and Picasso’s jaundiced dandy on the opposite wall for further refreshment.
There’s an argument that the self-consciously bohemian almost inevitably tend to be second-rate as artists (the real artists are too busy getting on with the business of painting), but someone like Courbet must prove the exception. Certainly the portrait of Cézanne by Pissarro included in this room does nothing for his image as the hero of modernism: it makes him look like a simple-minded peasant. More relevant is Cézanne’s own painting of the stove in his studio, based on Delacroix’s picture of a similar subject from the Louvre, which we are lucky enough to have hanging next to it; the stove also brings to mind Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre (in part inspired by Cézanne and Manet), which caused the end of his friendship with Cézanne. The way that artists see themselves is not always echoed by partial or impartial observers.
Room 5 features a classic Manet, ‘Music in the Tuileries Gardens’ (1862), depicting the apotheosis of the flâneur — the passionate spectator floating with the crowd, the bohemian idler in his element. Next to it is Fantin-Latour’s very proper portrait of Manet, and, better still, Manet’s supremely assured oil sketch of George Moore. As regards presentation, a brilliant and instructive trio, and a splendid bit of hanging. Nearby, Degas in his portrait of Tissot is endlessly beguiling, while elsewhere in this room Whistler and Beardsley fight it out for the position of arch-dandy.
The pictures in the sixth room look slightly subdued because they’re mostly smallish and the room is spacious. Here we have Gauguin and van Gogh — not represented, as one might expect, by the self-portraits they exchanged before their ill-fated attempt at communal living in the Yellow House in Arles, but by other pictures. Since this pair really do embody the quintessential mythical artist, you might suppose they would form the hub of the show, but nothing so obvious has transpired. Gauguin comes off better, represented as Christ in the ‘Agony in the Garden’, and a subversion of Courbet in ‘Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin’ (both 1889). Amongst other good things are a marvellous Segantini charcoal drawing on canvas, the artist as prophet in the wilderness, a couple of barmy Ensor prints and a solid and confrontational Hodler self-portrait. There’s range for you.
The exhibition ends on a high note: another Moreau, oddly carpet-like, beside a tough Modersohn-Becker and lush Lovis Corinth. A couple of Rodin sculptures set off perhaps the strangest painting of all: ‘The Inspiration of the Painter’ by Jacek Malczewski, a little-known Polish Symbolist. Quite evidently, the self-image of artists is not just a matter of painting a self-portrait. Maintaining artistic activity in the face of an uncomprehending and at times hostile public needs great determination and reserves of self-belief. How artists bolster that belief is individual to them all, but if it takes a little self-delusion, strong drink or madness, who are we to complain? Particularly if the resulting art is of the standard shown here. A rich and various show, much to be recommended.
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