Nicholas Penny

‘Impressionism became very quickly the house style of the haute-bourgeoisie,’ T.J. Clark observes at the close of The Painting of Modern Life. Few seem to have resisted the invitations of Madame Verdurin or to have hesitated to adopt the pseudo-Rococo frame with whitened gilding. Renoir, in particular, who had begun his career decorating porcelain, ended it providing upper-class wall-ornaments. Clark perhaps has him chiefly in mind when he sternly (but cryptically) declares that there are ‘ways’ in which the ‘dissolution’ of Impressionism ‘into the decor of Palm Springs and Park Avenue is well deserved’. The paintings upon which he prefers to concentrate his attention and which seem to win his approval are by Monet, Degas, Seurat and Manet – especially those works by Manet which puzzled or offended.’

In the middle of his new book Michael Baxandall wonders whether the ‘complex Newtonian-Lockean sense of how we see’, which he has just expertly expounded, provides any ‘purchase’ on Chardin’s painting, A Lady Taking Tea, to which ‘our primary explanatory duty is due.’ It is bracing to discover that we have this duty but I am puzzled by what exactly needs explanation.

Do you remember when children’s tonsils were removed at the slightest pretext? Extraordinary reversals in official treatment have done little to shake faith in modern medicine. Forty years ago the approved, the ‘scientific’ solution for warping and splitting painted panels was to construct elaborate ‘cradles’ of wooden crossbars behind them to hold them tightly in place. This, it is now agreed, created far more problems than it solved and, at considerable cost, ‘cradles’ are being removed. Other processes cannot be reversed. In the second half of the 18th century (when picture restoration first obtained official status with the creation of the first national museums), specialist skills for transferring the skin of paint from a panel to a canvas support were developed in France, and some of the greatest paintings in the royal collection were destroyed. Most tragic of all has been the fate of stone sculpture and architecture submitted to chemical cures far more damaging than the diseases afflicting them.

In the National Gallery you can look into a dark and very ancient stone chamber where there is a teenage girl of exquisite beauty, wearing white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion, blindfold. She is supported, tenderly, by a gentleman in a black cloak and looked on by a large man in red tights who holds an axe. In front of her, between her and us, there is a wooden block surrounded by fresh straw: behind, in the shadows, ladies-in-waiting, who have divested her of robes and jewels, sob and swoon. ‘The great business of painting,’ declared Jonathon Richardson the elder, echoing almost all earlier European writers on art from Alberti onwards, ‘is to relate a history or fable’ – to compete with the poet or dramatist, and best of all with epic and tragedy. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche reminds us that the ‘great business’ was not neglected in the 19th century, although by then there were those who argued that painting what could be seen, whether landscape or ‘modern life’, should be a higher priority. It was only in this century that theorists decided that for a painter to be concerned with narrative was improper and ‘literary’ (although writers were still permitted to be pictorial). By then the ‘great business’ had been lost to the ‘pictures’, as the cinematograph was popularly known.’