Life studies
ROY STRONG
Pictures in the Royal Collection: Later Georgian Pictures Oliver Millar (Phaidon, 2 vols £12) Pietro Longhi Terisio Pignatti (Phaidon £12) Chardin Georges Wildenstein (Faber £12) In the field of research, the history of art will always be regarded as one of this century's major achievements. And in this sphere no work has been more lasting and valuable than the vast, seemingly boring. catalogues raisonnes of individual artists and collections, both public and private. As one who slaved eight years compiling one, I can appreciate what it represents to gather together every single morsel about an ob- ject: its size, colour, where it came from, what it means, its condition and so on. I have, therefore, nothing but respect for the three major catalogues to which all too little space can be given here: Oliver Millar's Pictures in the Royal Collection, Terisio Pignatti's Longhi (a translation) and Georges Wildenstein's Chardin (another translation).
Oliver Millar's final saga of the English pictures in the royal collection takes us, with his usual meticulous precision, to the accession of Queen Victoria. My only critic- ism is the quality of the plates, which make the pictures all look as though they are by the same artist but are probably evidence of the deadening work of a poor photo- grapher. Otherwise the volumes are a splendid and invaluable quarry, furnished with an introduction which takes us through the ups and downs of royal taste, mainly during the reigns of George III and IV. Domestic life bursts through for the first time in royal portraiture in Zoffany's pictures of George III's children romping; and both George and Charlotte have an understandable predilection for Gains- borough and a dislike of stuffy old Reynolds who indulged in 'the foolish custom of . dressing people like scaramouches.'
Best of all there is George IV, the greatest royal interior decorator, a man who, how- ever indolent, extravagant, lecherous or downright disgraceful, had the most per- ceptive taste from a very early age. Ad- mittedly Turner and Constable were be- yond his range, but the Regent's collection of pictures by Stubbs are the great jewels of the royal collection in this particular volume. There is Prinny himself, skimming by in the crisp cold morning air, or his phaeton and horses attended by their grooms. There is louche Lady Lade and, my favourite, John Gascoigne, an ordinary groom taking oats to feed a horse. Some- how this portrait of a very ordinary person performing a quite menial act is worth all the yards of ermine and velvet, jewels and swagged curtains and tassels of the rest of them wrapped up together.
I have never been a fan of Pietro Longhi as an artist. But one is rather a fan of the
world he depicts. His is the world of the Venetian aristocracy of the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century. For the social historian or the stage designer, what a quarry he offers: those empty rooms with. heavy curtains and elaborate fireplaces in which doll-like figures go through the charade of an introduction, a singing lesson or the toilet. Practically everyone has an effect of mild surprise on his face and there is a total absence of any incipient movement. Little apparent thought connec- tion exists between the people who make up Longhi's scenes. Nonetheless one is grate- ful for a peep into a Venetian apothecary's shop with its bottles, drug jars and potted plant, for the rhinoceros standing in his pen munching straw while Longhi dolls stare blankly into space, or the quack rant- ing away while, in the foreground, a Vene- tian lady in panniers, tricorn and cloak has her skirt lifted by a black muffled gentle- man.
Longhi neither satirises nor ennobles these scenes of Venetian life; he is a reportage painter. Looking at these pictures one can understand, and indeed applaud, the sensa- tional rise in price of our own Arthur Devis, Longhi's contemporary, who depicts Eng- lish country gentry with a much more tell- ing wit. The pictures, incidentally, contain costumes and sets for practically every de- tail in The Merchant of Venice, and wouldn't that be the most delectable spectacle ever!
There is little one can add to Proust's wonderful pronouncement on the art of Chardin: 'He has taught us that a pear is as much alive as a woman, that a kitchen jug is as lovely as a jewel. The painter pro- claimed the divine quality of all things before the spirit which holds them and the light which enhances them.' Daniel Wilden. stein translates and fuses two books of his father's on Chardin, making the definitive book in English. Like Vermeer's, his art is something intangible. It was so even to his contemporaries; Diderot wrote in 1763: 'There is a magic in this art that passes our understanding'.
Although he essayed both domestic scenes and portraiture, it is as a still life painter that Chardin reigns supreme. What he paints is not at all smart; it is the basics of life. and he reminds us that the best meals take place in the kitchen of plain fare from plain utensils. Somehow he makes worn earthenware jugs, half-empty tumblers of water, kitchen pans, piles of ripe peaches and plums, joints of meat or a bottle of preserves tell us all about life. In his greatest still lifes he invests these common- place objects with a sense of human grand- eur and tragedy. His genre scenes can be affected and stagey, with ladies delicately sealing letters or a little boy piling up a house of cards. The ones which are marvel- lous are kitchen maids washing up in tubs or a boy scouring out a jug or a plump mid- dle class lady taking tea off her red lacquer table.
In these he invests ordinary tasks with a tranquil heroism. Honesty is the keynote to his art and his own self-portrait in old age has the frankness of a late Rembrandt self-portrait: he scratches himself in pastels, a plump-faced man, with unbecoming eye- glasses, his head wound up in old white cloth with a ribbon and a green eyeshade.
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