03 August 2016
'A Lifelong Touchstone': Delacroix and Shakespeare
Shakespeare was a lifelong touchstone for the painter Eugène Delacroix’s reflections on art. This was first inspired by the French Romantics’ espousal of Shakespeare as a ‘modern’, his drama, passion, lyricism, crudity, mix of genres and swings of dramatic mood seeming, to the generation of the 1820s, a refreshing counterweight to the symmetry, restraint, understatement and generic absolutism of French neoclassicism. Soon after his visit to London in 1825, he drafted notes on the beautiful in which Shylock, Caliban, Iago and Gloucester – characters in the very plays that he had seen there – serve as models of the power and beauty of ostensibly repulsive characters, a trait which he compares to the paintings of Rembrandt (Journal, 1476).
Eugène Delacroix, portrait from Amédée Cantaloube, Eugène Delacroix, l'homme et l'artiste, ses amis et ses critiques (Paris, 1864) 10663.bb.11.
But Shakespeare remained with Delacroix long after the Romantic vogue of the 1820s. Right up to the end of his life he thought about Shakespeare: in his very unevenness, his mix of tragic and comic, Shakespeare transmitted, in Delacroix’s view, a powerful sense of the real, and developed the passions and the action in such a way as to create a logic or unity more natural than the false conventions of neoclassicism (Journal, 893-94, 25 March 1855). He believed that Shakespeare’s characters seem to us individuals rather than abstract types: when Hamlet, amid declaiming about his grief and his plans for vengeance, starts joking with Polonius or amusing himself instructing the players, he behaves with the changeability and impulsiveness of someone we know in the world, not with the coherence and conformity of a fictional character (Journal, 893, 25 March 1855). Although Delacroix painted neither of these scenes, he did depict the similar episode of Hamlet’s bantering with the gravedigger in Hamlet Act V, scene i. Shakespeare taught him that ‘life’ was a primary element of beauty (Journal, 1479).
Eugène Delacroix, Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard, 1839. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
Delacroix stated repeatedly that this quality was unique to Shakespeare and that imitators never succeeded. ‘Shakespeare has an art completely his own’, he wrote in 1857 (Journal, 1074); ‘Shakespeare has a genius proper to himself’ (Journal, 1225, 23 February 1858). One wonders how this most ‘Shakespearean’ of artists, as Delacroix was frequently characterized in his lifetime, thought of his own activity as a prolific interpreter of Shakespeare. For this activity did not subside. Indeed, an 1855 performance of Othello, which reminded him of his London stay, did, as he predicted, ‘bear fruit in his mind’, sparking a renewal of interest in Shakespeare in his final years: He he filled a sketchbook with drawings from the performance and later painted a Death of Desdemona, left unfinished at his own death.
The Death of Desdemona (unfinished), 1858. Oil on canvas. Private collection (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
In 1860 he Delacroix reread Antony and Cleopatra and noted quotations from it in his journal; he had already treated the subject of Cleopatra and the Peasant from this play three times, including a stunning version from 1838. Also in 1860 he drew up a long list of subjects from Romeo and Juliet, a play from which had previously drawn just two paintings
Above, Cleopatra and the Peasant, 1838. Oil on canvas. Ackland Memorial Art Center, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Image from Wikimedia Commons). Below, Les Adieux de Roméo et Juliette, 1845. Oil on canvas. (Courtesy Christie’s New York, and with thanks to Deirdre Spencer)
In 1863, when a new staging of Jules Lacroix’s verse translation of Macbeth (Paris, 1840; 11764.p.36) relaunched the public debate in France about Shakespeare – whether he could be adequately translated, how he should be staged, how he related to French ideas of ‘taste’ – Delacroix, despite his failing health, followed it closely, praising the translation and discussing the production with a friend (Journal, 1409, 17 April 1863). In one of the last notes in his diary, he is still thinking about Shakespeare’s force, the clarity of his intentions and the grand scale of his creations, qualities which ensure, in his view, that aspects shocking to the French, such as the mixture of comic and tragic, seem right, whereas they fail utterly in works by lesser writers (Journal, 1410, 4 May 1863).
In this year in which London has hosted major exhibitions of on Delacroix (National Gallery, closed 22 May) and Shakespeare (British Library, 15 April-6 September), it is worth recalling that France’s foremost interpreter of the bard was a painter whose vision was profoundly affected by his experience of the London stage in 1825.
Michèle Hannoosh, University of Michigan
References/Further reading:
Eugène Delacroix, Journal, ed. Michèle Hannoosh, 2 vols, (Paris, 2009) YF 2009.a.27250
Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix. A Critical Catalogue, 7 vols (Oxford, , 1982-2000). X.425/2163; Cup.410.g.771; YC.2003.b.2380
Une Passion pour Delacroix : la collection Karen B. Cohen, ed. Christophe Léribault (Paris, 2009) YF.2010.b.1019
01 August 2016
To the British Museum Library with the Author’s compliments: Dragoș Protopopescu’s Shakespeare translations
The British Library holds a collection of ten Shakespeare plays in Romanian translation by Dragoș Protopopescu (1892-1948), a Romanian academic, writer and translator. This collection has the distinction of having been donated by Protopopescu to the British Museum Library in 1947. One title (King Lear) was presented to the Library in two editions (1942 and 1944); the other nine titles in the collection were published between 1940 and 1944 by various Romanian publishers. On the front cover of each book the donor inscribed: “To the British Museum Library with the Author’s compliments”.
Title page of William Shakespeare, Henric V. Traducere din limba engleză de Dragoș Protopopescu. (Bucharest, 1940). 11768.aaa.2.
The British Library’s collection of Protopopescu’s published Shakespeare translations is the most complete in any known public collection in Britain or Romania. The National Library of Romania holds five of Protopopescu’s translations of Shakespeare plays, and the Romanian Academy Library holds seven.
Front cover of William Shakespeare, Tragica poveste a lui Hamlet Prințul Danemarcei. Din și în forma originală de Dragoș Protopopescu. (Bucharest, 1942). 11768.d.26.
Between 1940 and 1945 Protopopescu published 12 translations of Shakespeare plays: Hamlet, The Tempest, Henry V, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, King Lear, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Two of Protopopescu’s published translations are not in the British Library: Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream both published in 1945. The former is held by the Romanian Academy Library and the latter is not currently listed in any publicly available online catalogue.
Front cover of William Shakespeare, Tragedia lui Othello. Din englezește de Dragoș Protopopescu. (Bucharest, 1943). 11768.aaa.1.
Translations of Shakespeare have a long tradition in Romania dating back to the mid-19th century. Julius Caesar was the first to be translated (from the French) and printed in Romania in 1844. From then until 1940 at least 27 Romanian authors translated Shakespeare plays into the Romanian language. Notable among them were Petre P. Carp, Adolph Stern, Scarlat Ion Ghica, Dimitrie N. Ghika, Victor Anestin, Margărita Miller, Verghi and Ludovic Dauș, among others. The National Theatre in Bucharest produced 18 Shakespeare plays and staged about 850 performances between 1884 and 1931.
The ongoing project of the Contemporary Literature Press of the University of Bucharest in cooperation with the British Council, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and the Embassy of Ireland aims to publish Shakespeare’s plays in the original and in parallel Romanian translations, which were published in Romania between 1840 and 1920.
Protopopescu was one of the most prolific Romanian translators of Shakespeare. Apart from his 12 published translations, he prepared an additional 25 Romanian translations of Shakespeare plays by 1948. Unfortunately only five manuscripts of these translations are known to be in existence today. Four are held at the National Library of Romania: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1945), Macbeth (1945), Julius Caesar (1945), Much Ado About Nothing (1948). The manuscript translation of Richard II is held at the National Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest.
Half-title page with Protopopescu’s autograph dedication. From William Shakespeare, Doi domni din Verona. Din și în forma originală de Dragoș Protopopescu. (Bucharest, 1944). 11768.cc.11.
Protopopescu had a life-long association with the English language and Britain, from his early translations of contemporary Irish and British playwrights in 1913 to his doctoral studies in Paris and London in 1920-1923 and his professional work. His doctoral studies focused on the English dramatist William Congreve. Protopopescu was the first professor of English studies at the University of Cernăuți in 1925 and held the Chair of English language and literature at the University of Bucharest from 1940. He served as a press attaché at the Romanian Legation in London from 1928 to 1930.
While researching at the British Museum Library, Protopopescu discovered in the Sloane Manuscripts a previously unknown Congreve poem entitled “A Satyr against Love” (Sloane MS 3996). He presented this discovery to the British public in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement of 8 November 1923, which received scholarly appreciation and praise. Protopopescu’s first translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was also researched at the British Museum Library in 1928.
On the evidence of his 18 book donations, Protopopescu had a working relationship with the British Museum Library spanning almost 30 years. These donations range from his first collection of poems Poemele restriştei (Bucharest, 1920; 11586.bb.49.) , presented in March 1921, to his English grammar Gramatica vie a limbei engleze (Bucharest, 1947; 12974.aa.70), which was donated together with his Shakespeare translations between June and October 1947.
Front cover of William Shakespeare, Regele Lear. Din și în forma originală de Dragoș Protopopescu. (Bucharest, 1944). 11768.d.27.
In Romania and Britain Protopopescu was not only known as a professor of English studies, a vice-president of the Anglo-Romanian Society in Cernăuți, and a translator of Shakespeare into Romanian, but also as a member of the Legionary Movement, a Romanian fascist organisation active between 1930 and 1941. Protopopescu was editor of the Movement’s newspaper Bunavestire in 1937-38, in which he also published pro-British articles. Although Protopopescu later distanced himself from the politics of the Legionary Movement, his controversial social and political engagement on the Romanian far right ultimately led to his arrest by the communist authorities and suicide in 1948.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator South-Eastern European Collections
References/further reading:
Dragoș Protopopescu, Un Classique moderne. William Congreve. (Paris, 1924). 010856.i.32.
ibid., Caracterul de rasă al literaturei engleze. (Cernăuţi, 1925). 011840.d.17.
ibid., Pagini engleze. (Bucharest, 1925). 11854.s.31.
ibid., Teatru englez. Traduceri. I. Bernard Shaw, Eugen O'Neill, John M. Synge. (Bucharest, 1943). 11783.e.14.
William Congreve, A Sheaf of Poetical Scraps. Together with A Satyr against Love, Prose Miscellanies and Letters. Edited by Dr. Dragosh Protopopesco. Second edition (Bucharest, 1925). 11633.ee.9.
Marcu Beza, Shakespeare in Roumania. (London, 1931). 011761.f.18.
Two of Protopescu’s books are freely available online from the Contemporary Literature Press of the University of Bucharest:
Gramatica vie a limbei engleze, with a chronology of the life of Dragoș Protopopescu in Romanian by Andi Bălu.
28 July 2016
Petrus Cuniculus, Noisy-Noisette and Frau Tigge-Winkel: Peter Rabbit’s foreign friends
Of all the fortnightly pieces which Paul Jennings (1918-89) wrote for the Observer between 1949 and 1966, few are funnier than ‘Babel in the Nursery’, collected in Golden Oddlies (London, 1983; X.958/20513). Glancing at the translations of Beatrix Potter’s works listed on the jacket on one of her books, Jennings reflected on the role of translators (‘heroes or fools’) in opening up the ‘transcendentalized English village’ set firmly in the Cumbrian countryside to young readers throughout the world. Even the characters’ names undergo changes which transform their bearers into very different figures: ‘Sophie Canétang , a Stendhal heroine … the awful Mauriac Famille Flopsaut … Noisy-Noisette, the Mata Hari of the twenties, as depicted by Colette … Tom Het Poesje, a kind of Dutch Till Eulenspiegel … Il Coniglio Pierino, the swarthy Sicilian bandit.’
Today, as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter’s birth, we may well admire the ingenuity of translators in tackling these challenges and giving her works to the children of the world in multilingual versions, many of which appear in the British Library’s catalogues.
Beatrix Potter, Histoire de Pierre Lapin (London, [1921]) British Library 12800.a.55, Peter Rabbit’s first outing in French
The French translator Victorine Ballon was one of the first to attempt the task of presenting Peter Rabbit in a new guise. Her Histoire de Pierre Lapin was the first of several versions of Potter’s works in French, followed by Histoire de Jeannot Lapin (London, [1921]; 12800.a.56), translated in collaboration with Julienne Profichet, as were Histoire de Poupette-à-l’épingle (London, [1922]; 12800.a.57) and Histoire de Sophie Canétang (London, [1922]; 12800.a.54). While Peter’s cousin Benjamin Bunny was rechristened as the typically French Jeannot, Jemima Puddle-Duck presented more of a problem. Ballon’s clever solution combined ‘caneton’ (duckling) and ‘étang’ (pool), preceded by a first name recalling the French idiom ‘faire sa Sophie’, aptly suggesting the prim old-fashioned airs of Potter’s Jemima.
Beatrix Potter, Le tailleur de Gloucester , translated by Deborah Chataway (London, [1967]) X.998/1267
Young readers in Germany were soon able to enjoy Potter’s tales too with the appearance of Die Geschichte des Peterchen Hase, translated by Clara Röhn and Ethel Talbot Scheffauer (London, [1934]; 12800.a.69.). Before long Peter had been joined by his relatives the Flopsy Bunnies in Die Geschichte der Hasenfamilie Plumps, translated by Hildegarde M. E. Marchant (London, [1948]; 12830.e.15), imagined by Paul Jennings as ‘a lesser version of the Krupp dynasty, an endless succession of stern characters extending the family factories in the Ruhr’. When the same translator set to work on The Tale of Mr. Tod, she found a more straightforward solution, replacing the Cumbrian dialect word for a fox with a name recalling the mediaeval beast epic and Goethe’s Reineke Fuchs in Die Geschichte von Herrn Reineke.
Title-page from Beatrix Potter, Die Geschichte von Herrn Reineke (London, 1952) 12830.a.120.
Translations into Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish also followed, issued, like the French and German ones, by Potter’s London publisher, Frederick Warne. Slavonic languages were slower to follow suit, and none are to be found in the British Library’s holdings, presumably because Warne did not publish any. But alongside the more familiar Western European languages, some surprises can be found. Who, for example, is mevrou Kornelia Kat, sunning herself on the stoep as she waits for her guests to join her for tea? Why, it is none other than Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, mother of Tom Kitten (now Gertjie Kat – short for Gerhardus) and his sisters Pootjies and Oortjies (Mittens and Moppet), mysteriously transported to the veld in an Afrikaans translation by Louise Promnitz (Cape Town, 1970; X.990/4885). The disobedient kittens come to grief after an encounter with the Puddle-Ducks: ‘meneer Hendrikus Plassie-Eend’, Rebekka and Meraai – Jemima in the South African identity which she retains in her own story, Die Verhaal van Meraai Plassie-Eend, also translated by Promnitz (Cape Town, 1971; X.990/4883). Indeed, some of the earliest translations in the British Library’s collections are those into Afrikaans by Antoinette Elizabeth Carinus-Holzhausen, dating from the 1930s, where Benjamin Bunny features under a new alias in Die Verhaal van Bennie Blinkhaar (Pretoria, 1936; 12800.a.64) and Mrs Tittlemouse in Die Verhaal van Mevrou Piefkyn (Pretoria, [1936]; 12800.a.66). Peter had already pipped them to the post in Die Verhaal van Pieter Konyntjie (London, [1930]; 12800.a.65).
Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle-Duck in Afrikaans
Closer to home, Welsh-speaking children were able to read the adventures of Jemima Puddle-Duck as Hanes Dili Minllyn, translated by ‘M.E.’ (London, [1925]; 12800.a.61), followed by those of Peter Rabbit, Hanes Pwtan y Wningen (London, [1932]; 12800.a.62), an anonymous translation, and those of his cousin Benjamin Bunny, Hanes Benda Bynni (London, 1930; X.990/5922) by K. Olwen Rees, as well as Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (Hanes Meistres Tigi-Dwt; London, [1932]; 12800.a.63). More recently, just over a century after his first appearance in 1902, Peter Rabbit addressed the world in Scots, courtesy of Lynne McGeachie’s The Tale of Peter Kinnen (London, 2004; YK.2006.a.4550), in which the murderous ‘Maister McGreegor’ finally gets to speak in his own ‘Scots tung’ as he pursues the intruder with a rake, ‘waggin a scartle an roarin oot, “Stop briganner!”’ For those of a scholarly bent, there are even three Latin translations, Fabula Petro Cuniculo (London, 1962; 012845.g.28) by E. Walker, Fabula de Jemima Anate-Aquatica (London, 1965; 12846.t.15) by Jonathan Musgrave, and an anonymous Fabula de Domino Ieremia Piscatore (London, 1978; X.990/10193), where the characters speak in effortlessly Ciceronian language (even Dominus McGregor as he chases Peter with cries of ‘Cessa, fur!’).
Some of Potter’s characters in (l.-r.) Scots, Welsh and Latin
Though her marriage to William Heelis was childless, Beatrix Potter had a great love of her many young friends and correspondents (several of the books began as illustrated letters), and would no doubt have been delighted that her work was available to readers throughout the world. She never condescended in her use of language or compromised in the artistic quality of her illustrations for children’s books (C.S. Lewis, for example, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy ([London], 1959; 4921.cc.28), recalled those to The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (London, 1903; Cup.402.a.5) as epitomizing the essence of autumn for him as a boy). On her 150th birthday, she would surely have wished to celebrate the efforts of those who had helped her creations to travel, like Pigling Bland, ‘over the hills and far away’.
Susan Halstead Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
27 July 2016
Facsimile editions of works by Taras Shevchenko with artistic designs of Volodymyr Yurchyshyn
2016 marks the 155th anniversary of the death of the outstanding Ukrainian writer and artist Taras Shevchenko. The writer’s works published during his life became rare even by the middle of the 19th century, which led to the reproduction of Shevchenko’s original editions as photographic reprints.
Shevchenko's self-portrait from 1847 (From Encyclopedia of the life and works of Taras Shevchenko)
One of the main sources for the study of Shevchenko’s life and artistic heritage are his manuscript books. Almost all of them, the manuscript series Try lita (‘Three years’), Mala knyzhka (‘The Small Book’), Bil'sha knyzhka (‘The Larger Book’), Shchodennyk (’The Diary’), novels, autograph copies of some poems, letters, and albums, are now kept in the Department of Manuscripts and Textual Criticism of the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. This material is completely inaccessible for a wide audience. That is why the photographic reproductions of the original material have such enormous importance, allowing many people to study Shevchenko's writings, his editorial work, sketches in the margins of his manuscripts, and so on.
In 1963 for the 150th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth there was published a facsimile of his ‘Small Book’ (the so-called ‘top-boot booklet’) – a manuscript collection of his poems written during the first four years of his exile (1847-1850). Later editions followed in 1984 and 1989, issued by the publishing house Naukova Dumka in an edition of 50,000 copies. Their introduction was written by the well-known Ukrainian philologist, literary historian, and director of the Shevchenko Institute of Literature Evhen Shabliovs'kyi. The excellent artistic design of these editions was created by the artist Volodymyr Yurchyshyn. The book and the separate introduction to it appeared in a slip-case decorated by red and black floral ornaments and thorns characteristic of his works.
Mala Knyzhka. Facsimile edition of 1989. YA.1992.a.4330
The original edition of Kobzar (1840) from the collection of the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine was used for the 1974 reprint by the Dnipro publishing house. This book was published in an edition of 25,000 copies. The introduction was written by Vasyl' Borodin. The facsimile and the separate booklet containing the introduction in a slip-case (picture below) were also designed by Yurchyshyn, with black, red and white lace-like patterns created by lines, dots and ornaments. The artist used other colours as well in a delicate graphic style.
Volodymyr Yurchyshyn (1934-2010) was an eminent Ukrainian graphic artist, creator of scripts, master of book design, Honoured Artist of Ukraine (1990), winner of the Shevchenko National Prize (1990) for the artistic design of The Primary Chronicle (1989).
Photo of Volodymyr Yurchyshyn by H. Potiahailo (From the Yurchyshyn family archive. Reproduced with kind permission of the family).
A deep knowledge of Ukraine’s past and of folk art, a mastery of graphic techniques, the skilful creation of fonts and ornaments – these are the qualities of Yurchyshyn’s heritage which add his name to the the greatest followers of Heorhii Narbut, Vasyl Krychevsky, and Olena Kulchytska. These famous predecessors of Yurchyshyn created a new Ukrainian style of art in the first half of the 20th century; Yurchyshyn himself, whose artistic activity covered the period 1960-2010s, created contemporary Ukrainian book design.
Yurchyshyn always worked with the book as a unit, creating not separate elements, but a harmoniously unified design of the whole book. The elements of the book (slip-case, dust-jacket, cover, title-page, section-titles etc.) and its design (type, ornaments and illustrations) are always skilfully unified in his work into one complete artistic object – the book.
The largest collection of the artist's works and documents in Ukraine is now preserved in the Museum of the Book and Printing of Ukraine in Kyiv. In 2015 the Museum organized an exhibition entitled ‘Volodymyr Yurchyshyn. Book Art. Selected Works’ to mark the 80th anniversary of the artist’s birth. The exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue in Ukrainian and English, was the first comprehensive presentation of the heritage of this master. Among many other original works by Yurchyshyn included in the exhibition was the sketch for the slipcase for Shevchenko’s Mala knyzhka: Avtohrafy poezii Shevchenka 1847–1850 rr. (Кyiv, 1984 (paper, indian ink, gouache, quill pen, brush. Drawing. – 40×48,7сm.). The Museum collection also includes the facsimile of Shevchenko’s Kobzar (1840), published in 1974.
Volodymyr Iurchyshyn. Mystestvo knyhy = Volodymyr Yurchyshyn. Book art (Kyiv, 2015). YF.2015.b.1834
These facsimile editions give us the chance to study some of the manuscripts and the artistic heritage of Shevchenko, revealing to us the hidden secrets of his creations, and Yurchyshyn’s masterly artistic designs bring to these editions the true aesthetics of the Book.
Nataliia Globa, Leading Research Assistant of the Museum of the Book and Printing of Ukraine.
References/further reading:
Pokazhchyk vydan' Shevchenkovykh tvoriv: pershodruky i okremi vydannia ta spys literatury pro nykh. Zibrav i vporiad. V. Doroshenko. 2-e vydannia, perehlianute i znachno dopodnene. (Chicago, 1961).
T.H. Shevchenko: bibliohrafichnyi pokazhchyk (1965-1988). Uklad.: L.V. Beliaeva, N.M. Myslovych. (Kyiv, 1989). 2725.e.1288.
Vydannia tvoriv Tarasa Shevchenka ta hrafichnoi Shevchenkiany: kataloh. Muzei knyhy i drukarstva Ukrainy. Uporiad. M.A. Korniichuk, H.V. Karpinchuk, N.V. Globa, L.P. Poriis'ka. Peredmova M.A. Korniichuk, L.P. Poriis'ka. (Kyiv, 2011).
Vydannia tvoriv Shevchenka u fondakh Shevchenkivs'koho natsional'noho zapovidnyka: kataloh. Upodiadnyky, O.O. Solopchenko, L.H. Silenko. Avtor proektu ta peredmovy I.D. Likhovyi. (Kyiv, 2004). YF.2005.a.29902.
Volodymyr Iurchyshyn. Mystetstvo knyhy. Vybrane. Z kolektsii Museiu knyhy i drukarstva Ukrainy = Volodymyr Yurchyshyn. Book art. Selected works from the collection of the Museum of the Book and Printing of Ukraine. Uporiadnyky katalohu: Viktoriia Belyba, Nataliia Hloba, Anna Dovbush, Halyna Emets', Hanna Sokyrina. Vstupna stattia: Ihor Dudnyk, Valentyna Bochkovsʹka. (Kyiv, 2015) YF.2015.b.1834.
Hloba Nataliia Volodymyrivna, ‘Faksymil'ni vydannia tvoriv T.H. Shevchenka u kolektsii MHDU.’Ukrains'ka pysemnist' ta mova v manuskryptakh i drukarstvi: materialy 1-i 1 2-i nauk.-prakt. konf. do Dnia ukrains'koi pysemnosti ta movy. (Kyiv, 2012).
Hloba N.V. ‘Fototypichni, faksymil'ni ta repryntni vydannia tvoriv T. Shevchenka.’Ukrains'ka literatura v zahal'noosvitnii shkoli, 2011, vol. 2, pp. 41-43.
22 July 2016
Delacroix, Shakespeare and the London Stage in 1825
29 June 1855. Othello. Pleasure sublime and total; the tragic force, the succession of scenes and the gradual build-up of interest fill me with an admiration which will bear fruit in my mind. I saw once again that same Wallack whom I saw in London exactly thirty years ago (and maybe to the day, for I was there in June) in the role of Faust. Seeing that play which, however altered, was extremely well arranged, gave me the idea of doing my lithographs. Terry who played the devil was perfect. (Eugène Delacroix, Journal, I, 917-918)
Eugène Delacroix never forgot his experience of the London stage in the summer of 1825. Seeing James William Wallack in a performance of Othello in Paris in 1855 transported him back 30 years to the many evenings which he had spent at the theatre during his three-month stay. As he indicates in this journal entry, an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust by George Soane and Daniel Terry entitled The Devil and Dr Faustus that he saw at Drury Lane, with Terry playing Mephistopheles and Wallack as Faust, inspired his famous series of 18 lithographs, published as illustrations to Albert Stapfer’s translation of Faust in 1828. The British Library has a fine copy of this important work, considered one of the jewels in the history of the illustrated book.
Eugène Delacroix, ‘Méphistophélès’, lithograph, from Faust. Tragédie de M. de Gœthe (Paris, 1828) 1875.b.9
But Delacroix’s stay in London was especially filled with Shakespeare. His interest in Shakespeare had begun long before, perhaps in connection with his friend Charles-Raymond Soulier, who as the son of émigrés had been raised in London and later gave Delacroix English lessons. In 1819 Delacroix had attempted a translation of Richard III which at the time he considered one of Shakespeare’s best plays for showing ‘the tallent of the author in the living painting and investigation of secret motions of human heart’ (Lettres intimes, 84-85). Given the poor quality of his English, it is fortunate that he gave up translating and read Shakespeare largely in Letourneur’s French translation, published in 1821 (British Library 840.f.2-8). But seeing Shakespeare played live on stage sparked a fascination that would become one of the most prominent elements of Delacroix’s art and thought: dozens of paintings and prints on Shakespearean subjects, and a lifetime of reflecting on what Shakespeare represented for the history of art and aesthetics — for concepts such as realism, the sublime, unity, beauty and naturalness.
The London stage in 1825 was a heady mix of sublimity and melodrama. On the one hand, one could attend a play nearly every evening and see actors who have since entered the annals of Shakespearean performance – Edmund Kean, Wallack, Charles Mayne Young, Daniel Terry. On the other hand, productions often altered the originals, performances were rowdy and the plays were paired with vaudeville-like pastoral ballets, pantomimes and musical farces.
The British Library’s collections of playbills and theatrical journals allow us to identify what and whom Delacroix saw. Frequenting the two main theatres of the time – Drury Lane and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden – he went to openings of Richard III on 20 June, with Kean as Richard and Wallack as Henry, The Tempest on the 22nd with Young in the role of Prospero, Othello on the 25th with Kean as Othello and Wallack as Iago and The Merchant of Venice on 2 July with Kean as Shylock and Wallack as Bassanio.
Playbills for the performances that Delacroix saw of Othello (above; Playbills 21, p. 204) and The Merchant of Venice (below; Playbills 100, p. 210)
Although he missed Hamlet with Young in the title role on 27 June, the resemblance of Delacroix’s Macbeth, in his 1825 lithograph, to illustrations of Kean in this role suggests that he saw Kean play Macbeth on the 30th.
Above: Eugène Delacroix, Macbeth, lithograph, 1825. © The Trustees of the British Museum (Creative Commons license); Below: C. Williams, Kean as Macbeth, engraving from The Theatrical Inquisitor, 2 January 1815 PP. 5210
Like Byron and Keats, Delacroix was very impressed by the passionate, expressive and sensational Kean, especially in the role of Shylock, which he called ‘admirable’. Contemporary prints show that a drawing of Delacroix’s bearing the date of the performance of The Merchant of Venice (2 July) indeed represents Kean in this role, despite a false annotation, with the elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica suggested in the background.
Eugène Delacroix, Kean as Shylock, graphite on paper, 2 July 1825. (Musée du Louvre)
Kean was then at the height of his fame, popularity and indeed notoriety. In January he had gone through a very public trial for adultery which had seen him pilloried in the Times for immorality and had inspired riotous reactions – by both opponents and supporters – in the theatres. The irony of his playing the seemingly aggrieved husband Othello provoked especially raucous responses: the Morning Post (29 January 1825) reported ‘Kean forever’ banners in the gallery, groans and hisses in the pit, so much shouting that Wallack (as Iago) could not be heard and so much interruption that many speeches had to be dropped; the manager came onstage to calm the uproar, and Kean himself offered to withdraw (to cries of ‘No!, No!’).
By the time of Delacroix’s visit the scandal had abated somewhat, but Kean continued to have a highly emotional relationship with his audience: the Richard III that Delacroix attended was the Kean’s first appearance after a long absence and the papers report the rapturous applause and cries of appreciation that, in the curtain calls, kept him from being heard. Of his Othello on the 25th the Theatrical Observer gushed, ‘There is a grandeur of conception, a boldness of execution, and an overpowering reality of tenderness which we are quite unable to withstand’ (27 June). Kean’s acting itself had an electrifying, terror-inspiring quality such as Delacroix had never previously seen.
Henry Meyer after Walter Henry Watts, Kean in the character of Shylock, mezzotint, 1814. © The Trustees of the British Museum (Creative Commons license)
The London plays seem to have led Delacroix immediately to some first attempts at Shakespearean subjects: in addition to the Shylock drawing and the Macbeth lithograph, he painted a Desdemona and Emilia based on Othello.
In the following years, he painted over 30 works on episodes from Shakespeare, notably from Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Macbeth. He also produced an important series of lithographs from Hamlet (1843) of which the British Library has a full set of the second edition (Paris, 1864; 1872.c.28).
Michèle Hannoosh, University of Michigan
References:
Eugène Delacroix, Lettres intimes, ed. Alfred Dupont (Paris, 1995). YA.1995.a.23416
Eugène Delacroix, Journal, ed. Michèle Hannoosh (Paris, 2009). YF 2009.a.27250
20 July 2016
‘The best of these was Derzhavin…’: Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816)
In 1924, introducing the first Oxford Book of Russian Verse (Oxford, 1924; 011586.f.70), the British travel writer, wit and man of letters Maurice Baring noted that the first author represented in it was Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin. Like Baring, Derzhavin had had a distinguished military career (he had won renown while serving in Catherine the Great’s army during the Pugachev rebellion), but was also a man of wide cultural interests, well-read and fluent in French. It was this which caused Baring to describe him as ‘a master of the French classical manner, in whose work the elements of real poetical beauty entitle him to be called the first Russian poet’. True, poets had begun to emerge in Russia as French literary influences spread during the reign of the enlightened Empress, but none equalled his gifts, leading Baring to remark that ‘the best of these was Derzhavin’. In selecting and editing the poems for the first anthology to make Russian verse available in the original to a wider public, Baring considered that Derzhavin represented the true beginning of the country’s poetic tradition.
Title-page with portrait from G.R. Derzhavin Sochineniia (St Petersburg, 1851) 10795.ee.25.
Although Derzhavin’s family claimed descent from Morza Bagrim, a member of the Golden Horde who settled in Moscow in the 15th century, accepted baptism and became a vassal of Grand Prince Vasilii II, his own circumstances were comparatively humble. He was born in Kazan on 14 July 1743 to a father who was little more than a modest country landowner, and who died before Gavrila grew up. Educated at the Kazan gymnasium, he served as a private in the army but rose through the ranks to achieve a still more distinguished career in the civil service, appointed as Governor of Olonets and of Tambov, personal secretary to Catherine the Great, and finally Minister of Justice (1802) in the government of Alexander I.
Title page from an early edition of Derzhavin’s works (St Petersburg, 1808) 1509/3064
When dismissed from this post the following year (he opposed the new Tsar’s liberal views), he was able to retire to his estate at Zvanka near Novgorod and devote himself to literature. He also had an establishment on the banks of the Fontanka in St. Petersburg where he hosted meetings of the Lovers of the Russian Word (Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova), a conservative literary society which met from 1811 and (ironically in view of major influences on Derzhavin’s work) attempted to cleanse the Russian language of Gallicisms and promote folk traditions and Old Church Slavonic as a more acceptable foundation for national culture.
Title page of Derzhavin’s play Irod i Mariamna (St. Petersburg, 1809) 1609/4532
The reasons for the society’s opposition to French influences were entirely comprehensible in view of the turbulent political climate of the times; indeed, one of Derzhavin’s most celebrated odes was a ‘lyric-epic hymn’ on the driving of the French from Russia in 1812 (St. Petersburg, 1813; 1601/452. (2.)). However, the influence of the classical drama of Racine and Corneille persisted in his five-act tragedy Irod i Mariamna (‘Herod and Mariamne’) , although the Anacreontic verses which he had penned earlier, are part of a tradition found in other areas of European literature, notably in German, at that time.
Title-page of Derzhavin’s anacreontic poems, Anakreonticheskiia piesni (St Petersburg, 1804) 1160.k.11
Derzhavin’s work was soon translated; in 1793 August von Kotzebue published a German translation of his poems in Leipzig (11525.ee.28), and the British Library also holds a Latin version of his hymn to the Deity: De Deo. Carmen Rossiacum illustris Derzavini Latinis elegis explicuit Stanislaus Czerski (Vilnius, 1819; 11426.ccc.17. (6.)). It also possesses a translation of the same ode ‘translated from the Russian of Derzhazin [sic]’. It appears in an album compiled by Sir John Bowring, a scholar and diplomat with an interest in Slavonic languages and literature, and is described as ‘Printed for Mr. W. Stokes, teacher of memory. For the use of his pupils’.
Derzhavin, Ode to the Deity, translated by Sir John Bowring (London, [1861]) 1872.a.1(77)
Derzhavin’s own memory, though honoured in his native country, has not fared so well outside it. After his death on 20 July 1816, the literary society which he had done so much to foster was dissolved, although it was resuscitated in the 1850s, and for modern readers Opinion, the anti-Semitic tract which he wrote when commissioned by Tsar Paul to investigate famines in Belorussia, makes unpalatable reading with its proposals to deny autonomy to Jewish communities in the Russian empire and enforce their resettlement in colonies on the Black Sea. As an innovator, though, his use of broken rhythms would prove to be a powerful influence on subsequent writers of Russian verse, and he did much to promote awareness of the potential of the Russian language as a rich literary medium and ensure its place in the world of European literature, despite his prophetic view that although French was a language of harmony, Russian was one of conflict.
Susan Halstead Content Specialist (Humanities & Social Sciences), Research Engagement
14 July 2016
Born on a Fourteenth of July: Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau
On 14 July 1816, the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, a son was born to Anne-Louise Madeleine de Gercy, the wife of Count Louis de Gobineau, an officer of the Royal Guard who had followed Louis XVIII into exile during the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return the previous year. When young Arthur was 11, his mother decamped with her three children and a lover to Germany and then to Switzerland, which gave the boy the advantage of 18 months at the Collège de Bienne. His prospects were compromised by the family’s Legitimist sympathies and the lack of mathematical knowledge which barred him from a military career, but his Germanic education was to lay the foundations for a life’s work based on orientalism and organicism.
Portrait of Gobineau from his The Golden Flower (New York and London, 1924) 10633.d.36.
In October 1835, having failed the entrance examination for Saint-Cyr, Gobineau landed with 50 francs in his pocket on the Paris doorstep of his wealthy and eccentric uncle Thibault-Joseph, who was obsessed with the restoration of the legitimate kings of France. After three weeks of complete neglect, his nephew threatened to commit suicide on the spot, at which the elderly adventurer deigned to pay him some attention. However, he provided little practical help, and Gobineau had to rely on letters of introduction to Sainte-Beuve and other literati while he rented a garret and attempted to launch his literary career. By 1846 he had succeeded enough to marry, but it was not until 1849 that he secured a post as first secretary of the French Legation in Berne through the good offices of his mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, now minister of foreign affairs.
Although Gobineau’s 30-year diplomatic career took him all over the world, with postings to Greece, Switzerland, Germany, Newfoundland, Sweden and Brazil, he was temperamentally unsuited to the profession. It did, however, allow him to travel twice to Persia, where he camped among Bedouins and enjoyed the splendours of life as the head of the French Legation in Teheran in 1855-58. A second appointment as plenipotentiary (1862-63) enabled him to develop his knowledge of Persian and Arabic, peruse rare manuscripts, and compose his Traité des écritures cuneiforms (Paris, 1864; 7702.f.13) as well as Les Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (Paris, 1865; 2217.d.3). Aghast at the prospect of being posted to the United States, which he abhorred because of its cruel treatment of Native Americans and black people, and its uniform mass culture based on the uncritical worship of technology and democracy, he was relieved to be appointed to Athens instead in 1865. After bitter disillusionment at the conduct of Germany in 1870-71, he was delighted to become plenipotentiary in Stockholm in 1872, feeling a profound affinity with the lands from which he believed his Norman forebears had originated.
Title-page of Histoire d’Ottar Jarl, pirate norvégien (Paris, 1879; 10761.e.27), in which Gobineau describes a (fanciful) Viking-Norman descent for his family.
Not surprisingly, his nomadic existence took its toll on family life, and by 1876 resulted in a complete break with his wife and two daughters. His declining years, in which his health suffered as a result of recurrent fevers contracted in Brazil, were mitigated by his relationship with Mathilde de La Tour, an Italian diplomat’s wife, and literary and intellectual friendships such as that with Richard Wagner, whom he first met in Rome in 1876 and who invited him to stay at Bayreuth.
Had Gobineau confined himself to writing fiction, travel memoirs and works of scholarship, he would probably be remembered nowadays as little more than a minor literary figure. However, a book which he published in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’), secured him a far more notorious reputation.
Title-page of the first volume of Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Paris, 1853). 10006.dd.14 (and available online)
Although the Essai caused Gobineau’s contemporaries to prevent his election to the Académie française, this was not on the grounds of racism but of scientifically unconvincing theories and anti-Christian determinism. Ironically, in view of the author’s detestation of the United States, it was first published in English in Philadelphia in 1856 (10006.d.30). A German translation (12901.cc.9) appeared in the same year, and Wagner was sufficiently interested in Gobineau’s ideas to collaborate with him on an article which appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter (P.P.1943.b.) for May-June 1881.
Gobineau’s division of the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to demonstrate that ‘history springs only from contact with the white races’ and distinguishing the ‘Aryan’ race as the pinnacle of human development and the basis of all European aristocracies, certainly exerted a sinister influence on the pernicious racial ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet a close reading suggests that the Nazi thinkers who espoused his theories had not read them in depth: Gobineau had a high regard for the cultural and intellectual achievements of Judaism, and nothing but condemnation for discrimination and inhumanity proceeding from racism. Indeed, Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a far more direct precursor of National Socialist theories, was dismissive of Gobineau as a paranoid unrealistic dreamer, whose writings were irrelevant to Chamberlain’s own vision of the future. Moreover, the unwieldy treatise was little read in Germany until the 1890s, when Gobineau, who had died in Turin in 1882, was unable to defend his ‘divination’ of the distant future against those who seized upon and distorted his ideas. He emphasized the dangers of expansionism which could only lead to its own destruction, and in this, at least, he was a true prophet of the disasters to come.
It is a final irony that a man with a lifelong distrust of bourgeois monarchy, indiscriminate democracy and the forces of revolution should have been born on the day still celebrated as that on which the French Revolution and the cause of national democracy in France burst upon the world.
Susan Halstead Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
12 July 2016
Balkan Day II in Drawings by Ian Long
The south-eastern countries of the Balkans were in focus of Balkan Day II: A Rich Heritage of Stories, a public event held at the British Library on 24 June 2016.
The Balkans is home to a great number of fascinating stories and traditions, many of which remain untold in English. This event brought together some of the leading contemporary academics, writers and translators who talked about writing and creating in this fertile cultural space.
The event featured a range of authors, translators, publishers and others speaking on various topics. Artist Ian Long captured the speakers in the course of the day, and some of his portraits are reproduced below. You can also hear some of the talks from the event here.
In the first two keynote speeches, Kapka Kassabova's website (below) spoke on the theme Borderland: Notes from a Journey to Europes Last Frontier, where Bulgaria and Turkey Meet, and Robert Elsie described The Chaotic Course of Albanian Literature.
In a session chaired by poet and editor Fiona Sampson, Ioana Parvulescu and Alek Popov spoke on the theme of Authors as Cultural Ambassadors: How does the history and mythology of the homeland influence the stories we tell today?
Ioana Parvulescu
A panel of translators - John Hodgson, Christopher Buxton, Stephen Watts and Mevlut Ceylan, with Christina Pribichevich Zoric in the chair - reflected on the question ‘Should translators of ‘small languages’ aim to be invisible or consider themselves a second author?’ in a session entitled Bringing the Balkans Westward.
John Hodgson
Christopher Buxton
Christina Pribichevich Zoric
The event ended with a screening of the film Balkan Spirit, followed by a discussion with its director Hermann Vaske.
Ian Long
Ian Long is a writer and graphic artist. He is keen to take drawing out into the world and see what it can do, in the widest possible variety of situations.
08 July 2016
Grey Power
When Zayn Malik dyed his hair grey, I’m reliably informed, sales of grey hair dye rocketed.
Of course, it was all the rage in the 18th century to have grey hair or wigs, as we see in this portrait of Marie Antoinette:
Portrait of Marie Antoniette by François-Hubert Drouais (1781). Image from Wikimedia Commons
In order to cool down this fashion fervour, let us turn to Rabbi Santob de Carrión (more properly Shem Tov), active in Castile in the reigns of Alfonso XI and Pedro the Cruel. His most famous work in Spanish (he also wrote in Hebrew) is the Proverbios morales, which typically takes an idiosyncratic view of the world.
One curiosity of the transmission history of Santob’s work is that it is preserved in Latin script and in Hebrew script. Image from Santob de Carrión, Proverbios Morales. Edited with an introduction by Ig. González Llubera. (Cambridge, 1947). 11453.d.11.
Santob’s contribution to the grey debate runs:
Las mis cañas teñilas,
Non por las aborresçer,
Nin por desdesyrlas,
Nin mancebo paresçer,
Mas con miedo sobejo
De omnes, que buscarian
En my seso de viejo,
E non lo fallarian
[I dyed my hair black
Not to hide my age,
But to stop men thinking
My hair made me a sage.]
Barry Taylor, Curator Romance studies
Reference:
Barry Taylor, ‘Sem Tob de Carrión, Proverbios morales’, in Diccionario filológico de la literatura medieval española: textos y transmisión, ed. Carlos Alvar and José Manuel Lucía Megías, Nueva Biblioteca de Erudición y Crítica, 21 (Madrid, 2002), pp. 941-44. YA.2003.b.1351
06 July 2016
From Darwinian epic to Christian martyrology: the mystical art of Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
For an artist to attract the attention of a contemporary novelist may not always be an advantage. When, for example, Paul Cézanne opened his friend Emile Zola’s new novel L’Oeuvre and found himself portrayed as the unsuccessful painter Claude Lantier, he politely returned the package to its author and never spoke to him again.
Odilon Redon in 1914, from André Mellerio, Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur (Paris, 1923) 7860.c.22
Odilon Redon was more fortunate. In a sense, he began his artistic career as a failure; despite the early promise which he showed in drawing, his father decreed that he should train as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He showed little enthusiasm for this and, having failed the entrance examination, turned to sculpture, lithography and etching until, in the summer of 1870, he joined up on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. As with Goya, the horrors which he witnessed made a lasting impact on his work, and over the next few years he produced a series of visionary charcoal drawings and lithographs in unrelieved black, which he described as his noirs. Not surprisingly, he was slow to win critical acclaim, and might have remained as obscure as his works until, in 1884, a novel appeared which brought them to a wider public.
‘Hommage à Goya’, images by Redon, from André Mellerio, Odilon Redon (Paris, 1913) Ac.4554/3
In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the decadent aristocrat Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes possesses a collection of Redon’s works, ‘covering nearly every panel in the vestibule’, framed in unpainted pearwood rimmed with gold and featuring ‘the most fantastic of visions…studies of bleak and arid landscapes…creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium’. In the midst of these horrors, suggesting the ‘terrifying or hallucinating effects’ of Edgar Allan Poe, there hangs an image of Melancholy before which he meditates for hours to dissipate his gloom as he admires the contrast between its ‘liquid green and pale gold’ and ‘the unbroken black of all these charcoal drawings and etchings’ (translation by Robert Baldick; Harmondsworth, 1959; W.P.513/86a).
The grotesque figures with their wild eyes and distorted bodies recall the ‘feverish nights and frightful nightmares’ which he had experienced during a childhood attack of typhoid fever, and would be readily identifiable to anyone who had seen Redon’s noirs. The spread of his reputation in literary circles as a result of Huysmans’s novel led to commissions and collaborations with other authors, including the Belgian Symbolist poet Iwan Gilkin. The British Library possesses a copy of the limited first edition of La Damnation de l’artiste, with a frontispiece featuring just such a skeletal creature, and also one of his Ténèbres, also published in a limited edition of 150 copies. Here, the frontispiece shows a mysterious winged being carrying a vessel in her hands; despite her beauty, the leathery bat-like nature of her wings has a devilish rather than an angelic quality.
Frontispiece from the first edition of Iwan Gilkin La Damnation de l’artiste (Brussels, 1890) 11482.1.25
Frontispiece from Iwan Gilkin, Ténèbres (Brussels, 1893) 11482.k.22.
Redon also provided seven illustrations for Edmond Picard’s monodrama Le juré and an equally sinister frontispiece for André Mellerio’s study Le Mouvement idéaliste en peinture, which contains a section on Redon himself as well as others on Gauguin, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec and lesser-known figures such as Louis Anquetin and Paul Sérusier. Mellerio was an author and art critic who became a close friend of Redon after their meeting in 1889, as well as an advocate of Symbolism, and wrote a biography of him as well as the preface to the catalogue to an exhibition of his work in 1894 at the Galeries Durand-Ruel.
Frontispiece from Edmond Picard, Le juré (Brussels, 1887) 1871.c.9.
Frontispiece from André Mellerio’ Le Mouvement idéaliste en peinture (Paris, 1896) 7585.n.3.
As he moved towards pastels and oils, abandoning noirs at the turn of the century, Redon’s interest in Hinduism and Buddhism and his absorption of Japanese influences eased his transition to abstract painting and led to growing acclaim and popularity, including the Légion d’Honneur (1903) and commissions from Baron Robert de Domecy for portraits of his wife and daughter and 17 panels for the family’s Château de Domecy-sur-Vault in Burgundy. By the time of the artist’s death in 1916 his international reputation was secure, as was proved by the New York Armory Show of 1913, where he was accorded the largest single representation.
Cover of Mellerio’s Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur
Mellerio’s final tribute to his friend was Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur, a masterly survey of his entire work which pays special tribute to his revival of the technique of lithography at a time when it had fallen into a state of stagnation, and notes the psychological complexity which he achieves through the interplay of black and white, arrangements of lines and the play of light. Suffering and sublimity, the uncanny and the luminous, all blended to create what Mellerio termed the ‘suggestive art’ of a man who, at the start of his career, described himself as a ‘peintre symphoniste’, subtly exploring the deepest layers of the subconscious. It is tempting to see, in his darkest visions of the human condition, a presentiment of the carnage which was unleashed just a few days before his death on 6 July 1916.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
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