The Jackdaw

Tag: Constable

  • Griselda and Moondance

    Griselda and Moondance

    It won’t have escaped the eagle eyes of either of The Jackdaw’s readers that our favourite bit of raven-tressed gallery fluff, Griselda van Bonkhorst, resurfaced pretending to hold up Constable’s The Lock. She was last found swooning over a Rembrandt and before that upstaging a Stubbs with her impeccable embonpoint. What with her fashionably unironed T-shirt and sexy rubber gloves she was looking quite the oil painting you’d expect. Knowing his daughter’s childhood dream of running her own little farm shop in the Cotswolds, her father’s plan to buy her into an auctioneers in order to see GvB married off to a quality suit has not yet paid dividends: she still awaits Mr Right.

    She is assisted here by fellow ornament Moondance van Dongen, a distant relative of the atrocious Dutch Modernist. Employed for her looks and Low Country subtleties and savoir faire, Moondance actually has to work for a living, her daddy having lost all his money speculating in Spanish property – currently she is heir to three miles of weed-cracked concrete the wrong side of Almeria.

    Griselda is not too chuffed about this competition for the eligibles of the Square Mile and is hatching secret plans to cause Moondance a nasty accident with a priceless ceramic. Meanwhile, dear old Grizzy looks dreamily up the Stour valley and sees her Range Rover splashing mud over the strawsuckers as she races to open her emporium where, don’t ya know, today’s special bargain is muddy carrots at ten guineas a pound. You can’t hold back a nice bit of skirt.

    COME ON LADS WHAT’S IT WORTH?

    Having so far failed to attract their beaux, Griselda and Moondance agreed with the publicity stills man that for the Renoir they would be shot close up to expose their aristocratic profiles in contrast to that of the undressed plebeian model. They might then make the society pages of Country Life or The Lady or any of the other publications in which fillies of the van Bonkhorst and van Dongen pedigree can offer themselves for gentleman suitors of comfortable means.

    Griselda looks disapprovingly at the pie-eating Impressionist hussy and can only wonder if the artist set up his mistress with a little shop in Normandy selling calvados and cider produced locally (in Bulgaria). Moondance, meanwhile, peers quizzically at individual brushstrokes having just been informed by mischievous porter Bentley (himself in search of a rich old suit) that Renoir was famous for having said that he painted with his dick. Poor old Moondance, never the brightest penny in the till, will eventually get the meaning but at the moment she is stuck imagining the blisters on poor old Pierre’s peashooter.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw, Jul-Aug 2012

  • Selling England by the pound

    Selling England by the pound

    Today John Constable’s The Lock, painted in 1824, sold at Christie’s for £22.4 million. In the current art market of silly prices some lucky person got the bargain of their lives. Let us hope the picture will be placed in a museum, where people might enjoy it, instead of disappearing into a Swiss warehouse as the investment bauble of some gold-tap billionaire vulgarian. It is the same price as that commanded by ordinary works by the top price sellers in British painting, Turner and Bacon, both of whom have sold work for significantly higher amounts than this. It is the same price a collector might pay for an off-the-peg Monet one wouldn’t inflict even on an enemy. The Lock, being one of the six major works deliberately painted by the artist between 1819 and 1825 for the Royal Academy exhibition in order to cement his reputation, presented the last opportunity for a collector to own one of the major works by the artist of the quintessential English landscape. All the other major pictures are already off the market in museums.

    Why so low a price? Of the top 50 most expensive paintings ever sold either privately or at auction only five are Old Masters, and of the remaining 45 ten are by Picasso, seven by Van Gogh and four by Warhol. The new billionaires, who are not old fashioned men of discernment and discrimination but those who buy conspicuously in order to impress friends, are uninterested in works not instantly recognisable for their “wall power”. Even the most knuckle-dragging mate of a Russian oligarch can recognize Warhol or Picasso but they wouldn’t know a Constable from a concertina and couldn’t recognise anything before 1850, all brown paintings looking alike to them.

    Who bought it? Assuming that The Lock is too sophisticated a picture for nouveau squillionaires, the only two museums in the market at this kind of price are the Getty in California, which two years ago paid £29 million for a Turner view of Rome, and the museum being built from scratch by the Qatari royal family, who are hotly rumoured to have bought the record-breaking The Scream by Munch a couple of months ago. No British gallery could afford a square centimetre of such a work, not that our museums actually need any more examples from Constable’s brush. For example, on the day of The Lock’s sale the Tate, which owns 261 works by the Suffolk miller’s boy, had 13 works on display. It always likes to keep plenty in reserve. There were more works by Constable on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum than at the Tate – the V&A owns 802 items relating to the artist including the full-size oil sketch for the Hay Wain. The National Gallery has nine works by Constable, all of them on display every day of the week free of charge.

    “Painting,” wrote Constable, “is but another word for feeling.”

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw, 3 July 2012

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18702667