Luminous teacher


Great Works: 50 paintings explored Tom Lubbock


FRANCES LINCOLN, 216PP, £18.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £17.10 Tel 01420 592974


from a brain tumour in January this year, reserved his most thoughtful writing for a weekly column, Great Works, in which he discussed a favourite painting. As a member of the Liberal Lubbock dynasty – which included “the more Jamesian than Henry James” man of letters Percy Lubbock – and a product of Eton and Cambridge, where he read philosophy and English, he was born and bred to be the belletrist of this memorial volume. This is criticism from a palmier age, and the better for it. The 50 essays selected, all illustrated, for this neat book deal exclusively with Western painting, beginning with Giotto’s Inconstancy, Anger, Despair of 1303-6, from the fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, and ending with Concrete Cabin (West Side) 1993, by Peter Doig (b. 1959). Most of the names may be famous, but hackneyed pictures are largely and understandably avoided. The bias favours


T


om Lubbock, The Independent’s chief art critic from 1997 until his death at 53


the modern era, with 17 nineteenth-century paintings and 13 from the twentieth century. There are seven sacred works; three abstractions; and one named portrait, Ingres’ Madame Moitessier. Seven pictures are from British public collections, one per collection (Tate and National Gallery included), and three are privately owned. The Lubbock method is to advance from


the general to the particular or, more accurately, from other relevant particularities to those of the picture itself. Thus a discussion of Mickey Mouse’s ears introduces Klimt’s strange vision of Water Nymphs, similarly “dark flat shapes with no definite three-dimensional existence”. The humorous parallel is typical. In a reflection on the National Gallery’s Apollo and Daphne by Antonio Pollaiuolo, characteristically a surprising, yet small and therefore easily overlooked painting, he addresses the general topic of pictorial humour (Lubbock was also a caricaturist and collagist) with the opening question: “Seen any good jokes lately?” His conclusion is that “very few of our famous pictures are famous for being funny”. Nonetheless he reckons Pollaiuolo’s laurel-branch-sprouting Daphne deserves a place “in that great collection-in-waiting – the joke book of Western art”. For The Tablet, one turns to sacred


subjects. He chooses Tintoretto’s Paradise as “the great exception” to Samuel Beckett’s


Inspirational reading & listening for Christmas from The National Gallery London and St Martin-in-the-Fields


The Art of Worship Paintings, Prayers, and Readings for Meditation Nicholas Holtam, with a foreword by Richard Chartres


In this beautifully illustrated book, Nicholas Holtam, who was Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields for 16 years and is now Bishop of Salisbury, presents his favourite paintings from the National Gallery, alongside religious commentary, Bible quotations, prayers and poetry.


Hardback, includes 47 colour illus. R.R.P.£12.99 OFFER PRICE: £10.00 - promo code ARWBK


Divorce most foul The Art of Worship: Music and Prayers for Meditation


Performed by The Choir of St Martin-in-the-Fields A companion CD to Nicholas Holtam’s The Art of Worship, this recording features arrangements of many of the prayers included in the book, which are sung by the resident Choir of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. It includes music by some of the best loved English choral composers, as well as some newly commissioned works recorded for the first time.


CD, includes 17 tracks (see www.yalebooks.co.uk for more details) R.R.P.£9.95 inc.VAT OFFER PRICE: £8.00 inc.VAT - promo code ARWCD


YaleBooks 22 | THE TABLET | 12 November 2011


Available from bookshops – including the National Gallery Shop, London To order at discount visit the Yale website www.yalebooks.co.uk and enter the promo code ARWBK or ARWCD at checkout


The Sealed Letter Emma Donoghue


PICADOR, 416PP, £16.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £15.30 Tel 01420 592974


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efore her Man Booker-shortlisted novel Room, inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, Emma Donoghue was probably best-known for Slammerkin, a sinister historical novel based on an eighteenth-century murder. Again drawing from history for inspiration, with The Sealed Letter she has taken a notorious mid-Victorian divorce case with a legal mystery at its heart. Admiral Codrington and his much


droll speculation in Molloy: “Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run?” Tintoretto’s paradise, “endless flux” rather than “permanent fixity”, is a “daring solution” to this “problem of heavenly boredom”. Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Flesh addresses St Paul’s promise: “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” Lubbock sees that Signorelli locates this “physical miracle” not in the bodies but in the peculiar nature of the ground they rise from and stand on, which is simultaneously and miraculously liquid and solid. Undoubtedly his oddest reaction was to Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna with Saints in San Zaccaria, Venice. He literally hallucinated, the figures became “real”, the altarpiece changing into an “unfolding scene”. The experience was never repeated on subsequent visits. Nor did it qualify as a revelation, according to William James’ quoted definition, but it left Lubbock with a “special fondness” for the “Santa Claus”-like figure of St Jerome. There is only one serious criticism and that is the selection’s omission of Wyndham Lewis, of whom Lubbock was such a doughty champion, he was made a trustee of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. He listed Lewis’ One of the Stations of the Dead in the top 10 of his greatest paintings in Britain. Of lesser note is his townie inability to see that Delacroix’s “rabbit” is a hare and his “rifle” a shotgun; and, with everyone else, he wrongly identifies Van Gogh’s whirring quail as a skylark. Finely wrought pieces like these should


be savoured, designed as they originally were to be read at intervals. His friend Laura Cumming, historian and Observer critic, provides a suitably fervent introduction. Tom Lubbock did his profession proud. His plain-spoken, wide-ranging and affectionate response to pictures makes him an ideal companion for student, tourist, connoisseur and artist alike, as his long-running column already demonstrated. The shade of Percy Lubbock must be smiling indeed. John McEwen


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