Another Trollope

One holiday project that has slowed to a crawl is the rereading of Anthony Trollope's six Palliser novels. Just before Christmas I described myself sailing along through the books, but it took until today to finish the third novel in the series. The Eustace Diamonds centers on the theft of a diamond necklace worth TEN THOUSAND POUNDS (in 1860s money). In spite of the fact that it is an imaginary necklace, I hoped to find some graphic representation of it, but the few I found were (like the one with the little dots of white paint immediately below) pretty uninspiring.


Lizzie Eustace is a dashing young widow whose ownership of the necklace is disputed by her dead husband's family, so when the necklace disappears Trollope lets himself in for something close to a mystery-plot, though his handling of it is mostly comic. Craftily, he never describes the necklace in any detail, leaving the reader to imagine an unparalleled magnificence, along with a sense that it is heavy, burdensome and even ugly. I did find one rather fuzzy photo here of a necklace of "raw diamonds" in the British Museum that Trollope might actually have seen, and I like to think he did.

Histrionic Trees

This morning it was very foggy and San Francisco looked just like a Highland Moor in a 1940s Hollywood movie. The histrionic trees above are in the front yard of the Harvey Milk Recreation Center at Duboce Park. I passed by on my way to a routine appointment at the California Pacific Medical Center at Duboce and Castro where I sat around for the usual half hour in the examining room before the doctor showed up. These delays never vex me because they are ideal for getting on with the novel in hand, whatever it may be. Today it was the sixth and last of Trollope's Parliamentary Novels, The Duke's Children. Now that his irreverent and humorous wife is dead, Plantagenet Palliser seems to be turning into a thorough domestic tyrant and snob, but I do not think that Trollope intends to let him get away with any such behavior in the long run. Below is a photo I found (later on, at home, with the sun coming out) on the web site of the National Portrait Gallery in London – a portrait I had never seen before – taken of our author by none other than Julia Margaret Cameron. It has a pleasing, otherworldly look – almost like a spirit emanation. As Mrs. Cameron said of her own work, "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty."

Painted Views of English Rooms

Augustus Charles Pugin
Library at Cassiobury
before 1816
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

William Henry Hunt
Green Drawing Room of the Earl of Essex at Cassiobury
1823
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous English artist
Large Salon with Organ
1830
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

William Alfred Delamotte
Drawing Room at Middleton Park, Oxfordshire
1839
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

William Alfred Delamotte
Drawing Room looking toward Conservatory, Middleton Park, Oxfordshire
1840
watercolor gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous English artist
Drawing Room
ca. 1842
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

 "Mr. Harding had ever mixed something of fear with his warm affection for his elder son-in-law, and now in these closing hours of his life he could not avoid a certain amount of shrinking from that loud voice – a certain inaptitude to be quite at his ease in that commanding presence.  The dean, his second son-in-law, had been a modern friend in comparison with the archdeacon: but the dean was more gentle with him: and then the dean's wife had ever been the dearest to him of human beings.  It may be a doubt whether one of the dean's children was not now almost more dear, and whether in these days he did not have more free communication with that little girl than with any other human being.  Her name was Susan, but he had always called her Posy, having himself invented for her that soubriquet.  . . .  Posy was now five years old, and could talk well, and had her own ideas of things.  Posy's eyes, – hers, and no other besides her own, – were allowed to see the inhabitant of the big black case [a cello]; and now that the deanery was so nearly deserted, Posy's fingers had touched the strings, and had produced an infantine moan.  'Grandpa, let me do it again.'  Twang!  It was not, however, in truth, a twang, but a sound as of a prolonged dull, almost deadly, hum-m-m-m-m!  On this occasion the moan was not entirely infantine, – Posy's fingers have been something too strong, – and the case was closed and locked, and grandpa shook his head.   
     'But Mrs. Baxter won't be angry,' said Posy.  Mrs. Baxter was the housekeeper in the deanery, and had Mr. Harding under her especial charge.
     'No, my darling; Mrs. Baxter will not be angry, but we mustn't disturb the house.'
     'No,' said Posy, with much of important awe in her tone; 'we mustn't disturb the house; must we, grandpapa?'  And so she gave in her adhesion to the closing of the case.  But Posy could play cat's-cradle, and as cat's-cradle did not disturb the house at all, there was a good deal of cat's-cradle played in these days.  Posy's fingers were soft and pretty, so small and deft, that the dear old man delighted in taking the strings from them, and in having them taken from his own by those tender little digits."
     
 – Anthony Trollope, from The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)

Charles James Richardson
Entrance Hall, East Sutton Place, Kent
1844
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Charles James Richardson
Library in Gothic Style
ca. 1860
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Joseph Nash the Elder
Elizabethan Room at Lyme Hall, Cheshire
1872
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Henry Robert Robertson
Hall Place, Leigh near Tonbridge, Kent
1878
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

M F Pearce
Library, Brabourne Vicarage
ca. 1890
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

"A daughter of the archdeacon had made a splendid matrimonial alliance, – so splendid that its history was at the time known to all the aristocracy of the county, and had not been altogether forgotten by any of those who keep themselves well instructed in the detail of the peerage.  Griselda Grantly had married Lord Dumbello, the eldest son of the Marquis of Hartletop, – than whom no English nobleman was more puissant, if broad acres, many castles, high title, and stars and ribbons are any signs of puissance, – and she was now, herself, Marchioness of Hartletop, with a little Lord Dumbello of her own.  The daughter's visits to the parsonage of her father were of necessity rare, such necessity having come from her own altered sphere of life.  A Marchioness of Hartletop has special duties which will hardly permit her to devote herself frequently to the humdrum society of a clerical father and mother.  That it would be so, father and mother understood when they sent the fortunate girl forth to a higher world.  But, now and again, since her august marriage, she had laid her coroneted head upon one of the old rectory pillows for a night or so, and on such occasions all the Plumsteadians had been loud in praise of her condescension."

– Anthony Trollope, from The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)

M F Pearce
Informal Sitting Room, Brabourne Vicarage
1893
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

 

Maria Cheval Tooke
Drawing Room, Cosham House
1892
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Edward Lampson Henry
Library
ca. 1915
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Relevance

My project (described earlier here) of reading Trollope's six "parliamentary novels" (as a sort of life boat to get me across the troubled sea of the Holidays) is moving along. Having finished Can You Forgive Her? I moved on to Phineas Finn, where the character of Madame Max Goesler is introduced about halfway through the book.

She is seated at a dinner party next to Phineas Finn, a young Member of Parliament. Madame Max chooses to tell him about her own political views, warmly advocating "... manhood sufferage, womanhood sufferage, unlimited right of striking, tenant right, education of everybody, annual Parliaments, and the abolition of at least the bench of bishops."

"That is a strong programme," said Phineas.

"It is strong, Mr. Finn, but that's what I should like. I think, however, that I should be tempted to feel a dastard security in the conviction that I might advocate my views without any danger of seeing them carried out ..."

George Clausen (1852-1944) - Rural Scenes

George Clausen
In the Barn
1902
oil on canvas
Leeds Art Gallery, Yorkshire

George Clausen
A Frosty March Morning
1904
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

George Clausen
Winter Work
1883-84
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

George Clausen
At the Back of the Barn
1902
oil on canvas
Leeds Art Gallery, Yorkshire

George Clausen
Mowers
1891
oil on canvas
Usher Gallery, Lincoln

George Clausen
Interior of an Old Barn
1908
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

George Clausen
Building the Rick
1907
oil on canvas
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, West Midlands

George Clausen
Green Fields
ca. 1902
oil on canvas
Leeds Art Gallery, Yorkshire

"At the age of fourteen George Clausen was apprenticed to the drawing offices of Messrs. Trollope, a London firm of decorators. While working there he attended evening classes at the National Art Training School, South Kensington. In his twenties, developing as a painter, he took inspiration from the work of Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage. By 1880 he had settled in the Essex countryside. Clausen's work was chiefly concerned with "the life of the country labourer, his actions and the land he worked on, a literal truth raised to a higher power by his sense of design and his lyrical feeling for the beauty of light."

– adapted from biographical notes at the National Portrait Gallery, London

George Clausen
The Straw Plaiter
1883
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

George Clausen
Portrait of a Village Woman
1904
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

George Clausen
Children and Roses
1899
oil on canvas
Norfolk Museums

George Clausen
Contemplation
1878
oil on canvas
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

George Clausen
Portrait of painter A.G. Webster
1881
oil on canvas
Usher Gallery, Lincoln

George Clausen
Study for a Self Portrait
ca. 1882
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

George Clausen
The Chinese Pot
ca. 1910
oil on board
University of Hull Art Collection, Yorkshire

Two-dimensional Images of 19th-century Persons

Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll
Lady in a landscape, holding a mourning fan
1865
watercolor
British Museum

Augustin Édouart
Frank Johnson and Helen Johnson
ca. 1842-44
cut-paper silhouette
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"There are those who have told me that I have made all my clergymen bad, and none good. I must venture to hint to such judges that they have taught their eyes to love a coloring higher than nature justifies. We are, most of us, apt to love Raphael's madonnas better than Rembrandt's matrons. But, though we do so, we know that Rembrandt's matrons existed; but we have a strong belief that no such woman as Raphael painted ever did exist. In that he painted, as he may be surmised to have done, for pious purposes – at least for Church purposes – Raphael was justified; but had he painted so for family portraiture he would have been false. Had I written an epic about clergymen, I would have taken St. Paul for my model, but describing, as I have endeavored to do, such clergymen as I see around me, I could not venture to be transcendental."  

– Anthony Trollope, from The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866-67)

Anonymous painter
Portrait of the artist, Philip Hermogenes Calderon
1860
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

David Wilkie Wynfield
Portrait of the artist, Philip Hermogenes Calderon
1863
albumen print
National Portrait Gallery, London

George Henry Harlow
Portrait of a young woman
early 19th century
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

James Tissot
Woman in an outdoor costume
19th century
watercolor
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Anonymous printmkaer
William Hazlitt
ca. 1850
woodcut
British Museum

Constantin Guys
On the pavement
19th century
wash drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 

Édouard Manet
La Toilette
1861
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Warwick Brookes
Figure study
1849
drawing
British Museum

Robert Frederick Blum
Edith Copeland
1889
wash drawing
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Louisa Anne Beresford
Mary Cochran at the piano
1887
drawing
National Portrait Gallery, London

Fernand Khnopff
The Offering
1891
pastel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

W. and D. Downey
Portrait of Edward, Duke of Windsor, age 1
1895
albumen print
National Portrait Gallery, London

MUNI Sunset

Taking pictures out the window of the 22 Fillmore on the short ride home from the gym. These are velocity views of 16th Street, heading west. Potrero Hill gradually becomes the Mission. The sky glows for a few minutes before the big fade-out. Watching the viewfinder and clicking the shutter, I'm also thinking about Trollope's novel The Prime Minister, presently speeding to its conclusion even though I would like it not to end.