Musing On Muses

Now that the museums are opening again, I’ve been teaching young writers at Tate Britain, and it’s good, if somewhat strange, to be back. In the gallery we’ve been counting wildflowers, and thinking about, amongst other things, how many shades of green there are in John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia, and how we might name them – lettuce, cucumber, grass? Terra vert, malachite, verdigris? Veridian, botanical? In fact, Millais’ mostly used mixed greens of chrome yellow and Prussian blue, possibly even from a tube of green paint, because of the increasing sophistication of materials available, and handy for an artist on the hoof. Most of his painting was done en plein air, but took place over several months between 1851 and 1852, so a great variety of flowers of different seasons can also be found in the final painting.

In contrast to this richness of experience gathered over several months for the artist, his model, the nineteen-year old Elizabeth Siddal, posed for him for a few days in a bathtub at his Gower Street studio in London, clothed in a ‘dirty’ old dress he had found for four pounds: To-day, he writes with a sense of triumph, I have purchased a really splendid lady’s ancient dress- all flowered over in silver embroidery-and I am going to paint it for ‘Ophelia’... Millais was excited and absorbed by his project, so much so that Elizabeth famously caught a severe chill because he forgot to relight the oil lamps, which were supposed to be heating the water in the bath. He had to pay her father vast sums for the medical bills, but a myth had been created. As Jan Marsh has said, The bath water grew colder and colder and – so the tale goes – Lizzie contracted pneumonia, aptly foreshadowing her own untimely death as well as that of Shakespeare’s heroine. (Literary Review, June 1998.)

But how to view this calamity? A necessary, even archetypal, sacrifice for art - on the part of the muse - or just careless, egotistical, neglect by the artist? The painting itself was successfully sold to the art dealer Mr Henry Farrer for the princely sum of 300 guineas, and the focus was all on Millais’ great achievement. In addition, his son recounted that the flowers were so realistic that a professor teaching botany, who was unable to take a class of students into the country, took them to see the flowers in the painting Ophelia, as they were as instructive as nature itself. But the attention he paid to his model seems to have been less than exemplary.

The relationship of artists and their muses is explored without compromise by Christina Rossetti in her poem ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, where Elizabeth Siddal appears once more:

In an Artist's Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases,

One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

We found her hidden just behind those screens,

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,

A saint, an angel — every canvas means

The same one meaning, neither more or less.

He feeds upon her face by day and night,

And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:

Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Elizabeth had been discovered working in a hat shop by the artist Walter Deverell, who introduced her to Millais, but it was Dante Gabriel Rossetti whom she later married in 1860, when, after ten years as her lover, he finally agreed to set a date for it. She was everyone’s muse. Deverell painted her as Viola in ‘Twelfth Night’, and Holman Hunt painted her at least twice, but Rossetti drew and painted her over a thousand times. It’s not hard to read that for all Elizabeth’s beauty – and that extraordinarily distinctive red hair, the signature of so many of Rossetti’s paintings - Christina viewed her brother Dante’s obsession as a fulfilment of his dream, while the muse, the ‘nameless’ girl, still stares out, and ‘every canvas means/The same one meaning, neither more or less.’

It sounds uncannily like a repeat of the Millais experience, although it disregards the fact that Elizabeth Siddal was also an artist in her own right. There is also a good deal more to the story of the Rossetti’s marriage, with its winding Gothic narrative that includes death by laudanum and the untimely exhumation of Elizabeth’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery, by her husband, in search of a book. But from an artistic point of view, the picture painted by Christina Rossetti in her poem is hardly a singular example. The theme of the passive muse is well-tracked, not just in the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites, who in many ways congratulated themselves on their more liberal attitudes to women, but through the long history of female portraiture in its many guises and gazes, and the one-sided experience it so often seems to embody.

Laurence Ferlengetti in his poem ‘Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt’ turns his gaze to the embracing couple in The Kiss, but it is the woman whose experience is privileged in his account. The portrait, so mythologised in popular imagination as a perfect expression of intimacy, is systematically dismantled as Ferlengetti steps inside the painting to reveal a woman pinned by the man who embraces her, her ‘fingers/strangely crimped/tightly together’ while her hand is ‘a languid claw/ clutching his hand/ which would turn her mouth/ to his’. Soon we are both inside and outside the painting, as, like an artist, the poet paints her - there are her ‘tangerine lips’, her ‘long dress made of multicolored blossoms/ quilted on gold’. There is ‘her Titian hair/ with blue stars in it’. Then, in the devastating final lines of the poem, we find, suddenly, her internalised agency:

And he holds her still/ so passionately/ holds her head to his/ so gently so insistently/ to make her turn/ her lips to his/ her eyes are closed/ like folded petals/ She will not open/ He/ is not the One

Other poets move against the tragic passivity of the muse in other ways, refusing to romanticise or silence. These are poems which speak for the women they portray, giving a direct voice, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Standing Female Nude’, which responds to George Braque’s Bather (1925). The painter is now the object of the muse. In fact, he has even become an object of humorous derision, as his model tells us ‘His name// is Georges. He tells me he’s a genius.’ His self-admiration, and self-imagined virility, is deflated by the speaker with wry humour as she elevates her own kind of artistry - ‘Little man,/ you’ve not the money for the arts I sell.’ In a deliberate reversal, the agency, and energy, are all hers – ‘These artists/ take themselves too seriously. At night I fill myself/ with wine and dance around the bars.’

Ekphrasis, literally speaking out, has a long tradition, as poets speak out for the people, animals and even objects in paintings, a process that may also involve some self-interrogation, a turning of the gaze on oneself. Vicki Feaver examines her own complicity in her response to Roger Hilton’s nude ‘wearing not a stitch’ in ‘Oi yoi yoi’, saying, ‘As a woman I ought to object’. In this triangulation of painter, muse and witness, she finds herself swept up in the exuberance and energy of the painting, and excuses its frank portrayal of nudity with the disclaimer ‘But she looks happy enough’. Finally, she will justify this further, with a frank admission that real life is more tangled than the ideological positions we might want to assume, for

which of us doesn’t occasionally Want one of the Old Gods to come down And chase us over the sands.

As in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, humour is used to diffuse the complexity of the situation, and discover some element of choice in the midst of an old dependence. As for those Old Gods –are we really to think of an encounter with Zeus disguised as a swan, or a bull, in this light-hearted, frivolous way? And surely the economic need of Braque’s model criticises a society where women must sell their nudity.

There are many ways of speaking, and thinking, about ekphrasis – it was taught as one of many rhetorical tools in ancient Greece, and is generally understood to derive its primary meaning from the Greek ἐκ ek and φράσις phrásis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, and the verb ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, 'to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name'. This combination of naming, and giving a voice to, seems to be at the heart of the process - how far it can go beyond its object, or how far it can, rather than being merely descriptive, not only enter into the spirit of the art itself, but also articulate some kind of self-interrogation in the process, personal or collective. Particularly in an age as visual as ours, where the reproduction of images is so exact, and immediate, language has a unique role to play in diverting this process of multiplication, and slowing it down.

I’ve also heard ekphrasis described as ‘speaking back’, which is surely at the heart of any reclamation of the silent, nameless muse. In the case of Millais’ painting, the question is complicated in an ekphrastic sense when we think about the model as muse, as well as the particular subject she was embodying, steeped as both were in cold water. For whom might we speak out, or back? Ophelia, in her distraction, or Elizabeth Siddal, in her discomfort? Or both? And what of those truly ‘nameless’ portraits, whose enigmatic title Portrait of an Unknown Woman, or Man, or Girl, can be found on the walls of so many galleries and old houses? These too might occasion curious literary responses. An exhibition of fourteen portraits curated by the National Gallery in 2011-12 Imagined Lives: Portraits of Unknown People commissioned eight writers, including John Banville and Tracy Chevalier, to picture the lives of their sitters in short fictional pieces. Here is Rosy, by Tracy Chevalier

In other news…

My poem Encounter was published in Finished Creatures 4 (Stranger) in September.