Not Every Picture Tells a Good Story

It's a great idea for an exhibition: Inspired! at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London brings together paintings and sculpture for which artists found their inspiration in literature, music and the theatre. 

It's a great idea, but the execution is underwhelming. Two of the four sections in this show, drawn entirely from the Guildhall's own collection, are absorbing. The other two are pretty dull. It's a bit like when you've gone to see a poor production of a favourite play; you come away feeling somewhat dissatisfied. 

There are some fine artists on show: You've got Jan Steen, Thomas Lawrence, Duncan Grant, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. But the painter with most work on display here is John Gilbert. We think you may need to look him up. And he's certainly not very inspiring. He's one of those 19th-century artists whose work is largely forgotten; so are some others here, but at least a few of them have some good stories to tell. 

Let's start with the poetry section, where the narratives are engaging. The painter Joseph Severn was a friend of the poet John Keats, and he accompanied Keats when he travelled to Italy in 1820, seeking to recover from consumption. They were in Rome when the poet died in 1821, aged just 25. More than 20 years later, Severn recorded the moment when Keats's attention was caught by the song of a nightingale on Hampstead Heath, said to be the inspiration for the poem Ode to a Nightingale (My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk....). 

According to Severn's brother, Keats had disappeared while spending the evening with friends; the painter went to look for him and discovered him lying under the trees, listening to the song of the bird, which in the painting is up in the corner, framed by the moon. Now, nobody's going to suggest that this is a great painting, but it's the story the curators relate in the wall text that makes it compelling and charming.

You may well have seen that Pre-Raphaelite classic, John Everett Millais's painting of The Woodman's Daughter, with its curiously stiff-armed little boy, before. But do you know the story behind it? It is of course a Victorian melodrama, based on Coventry Patmore's poem of the same name. The rich squire's young son is fascinated by innocent Maud. In the painting he offers her strawberries, but as they grow up he seduces her, their illegitimate child drowns, Maud descends into madness and the squire's son carries on as if nothing were amiss. 

If it looks strangely as if the figures are standing against a backdrop, there's a reason for that. Millais was persuaded to repaint parts of the work in the 1880s, and over the year the repainted sections have discoloured, producing a shadow effect. 

There's considerably less oomph in the adjacent music section. There are portraits of music-makers -- a prim Victorian young lady in her high-necked dress poised to play the violin and an unmistakable Beethoven in bronze. But how do you reproduce your favourite tune or the sounds of the violin in a medium that is focused on the eyes, not the ears? Maybe that's why we were more in tune with Jan Steen, with all those typical Dutch Golden Age references that hint at something libidinous happening beyond the music session that's the supposed subject of this picture.

A half-full glass, the boy touching the bulbous part of the lute, the parrot out of the cage, the dog sniffing itself, a lemon being peeled. Need we go on? 

There's a vaguely intriguing tale here about how the artist Edward Matthew Hale doubled as a war correspondent, but his painting Les Trois Princesses, based on a French chanson, is dreadful Victorian pseudo-Medievalism. 

For more drama, move on rapidly to the theatre section, the best in this show. And if we're doing drama, let's go for Shakespeare. Here's the actor/manager Sir Henry Irving as Hamlet, life-size and in wonderful detail, by Edward Onslow Ford. While Irving was perhaps rather middle-aged to portray the Prince of Denmark, he was said to have brought a new simplicity to the role, which he played for 200 consecutive nights. 

Another actor/manager renowned for his Hamlet was John Philip Kemble, but he's depicted here by Thomas Lawrence in a massive larger-than-life canvas as Coriolanus (nearly 4 metres high!). It does seem to scream: "I'm an actor!" at you. Lawrence had a bit of a theatrical talent himself, we learn from the caption; when he was small, his father, an innkeeper, taught him to recite passages from Shakespeare, among others, and to perform them standing on a table for his customers. 

If you didn't see the Troy exhibition at the British Museum a couple of years ago, you shouldn't miss John Collier's over-the-top Clytemnestra hidden round the back from Coriolanus. She stares out as if from a stage curtain, holding a bloodied axe after murdering her husband Agamemnon in Aeschylus's Oresteia. Modelled, apparently, on a young man in a student production. 

Among all the 19th-century works, there was the surprise of a bronze head of that renowned star of 1950s and 1960s British comedy films, Terry-Thomas, by Jamaican-born self-taught sculptor Ronald Moody. But you don't have to show an actor or a stage to be inspired by a play or a film. Back to the Bard, and Cymbeline, set in ancient Britain: Peter Graham's picture puts onto canvas lines that describe how Britain "stands/As Neptune's park, ribbed and paled in/With rocks unscalable and roaring waters". 

And perhaps the theatre just inspires a memory. In Augustus Mulready's small and poignant oil work, a little match girl and a crossing-sweeper stand in the snow, looking at a torn pantomime poster. 

Now that really is very Victorian. We might have been hoping for a bit of Dickens, the Brontës or Wilkie Collins in the final section, devoted to novels and the popular press, but there was, alas, nothing remotely as exciting. Instead, quite a lot of John Gilbert's rather dull illustrations of Ivanhoe and Don Quixote, among other lengthy works, with some overlong wall texts going into turgid detail about plots of novels now generally little read. 

 
And the most puzzling picture in this section? Police Constable Harry Daley was painted by Duncan Grant in his best dress uniform in 1930. Daley, who was openly gay in an era when male homosexual activity was illegal, came into contact with a wide circle of artists and writers. He was briefly the lover of the author E.M. Forster, who found him far too indiscreet. Grant preferred Daley to Forster, we learn, but given that Daley's memoirs weren't published posthumously until 1987, we couldn't actually work out what the picture was doing in the show. Good story, though....

We've seen some excellent exhibitions at the Guildhall -- including The Architecture of London in 2019,  Atkinson Grimshaw back in 2012 and William Powell Frith a few years earlier -- but this one wasn't up to those standards. It's clearly not a crowd-puller so far: On a weekday lunchtime, we spent 90 minutes exploring this show and only saw four other visitors the entire time. 

Practicalities

Inspired! is on at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London until September 11. It's open daily from 1030 to 1600. Full-price tickets cost £8 and can be bought online here, though based on our experience you can probably just turn up at the ticket desk. The gallery is right next to the Guildhall itself, just off Gresham St, and Moorgate, Bank and St Paul's are the nearest rail and Tube stations.

Images

All artworks from Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London:

Joseph Severn, Keats Listening to the Nightingale on Hampstead Heath, 1849
Sir John Everett Millais, The Woodman's Daughter, 1851

Jan Steen, Musical Company, c. 1661-64
Edward Onslow Ford, Sir Henry Irving as Hamlet, 1883-85
Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus, 1798
Peter Graham, Ribbed and Paled in by Rocks Unscalable and Roaring Waters, 1885
Augustus E. Mulready, Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away, 1873