AND ANOTHER THING
From wild boar piglets to the dray horse's battering sandal
PAUL JOHNSON
Which is the most striking representation of an animal in art? I ask this after having been ravished by what must be a strong contender for the title. It is in the Diirer exhibition at the British Museum. Two things struck me about this display. First, though it includes certain key items from other collections, such as the touching self-portrait Diirer drew when he was 13 (now in the Vienna Albertina), it is largely put together from the BM's own magnificent resources. Second, the BM's works by Dfirer, including his exquisite watercolours, are all in superb condition, having been looked after with tender care ever since they joined the institution (a reminder how fortunate it is that the Elgin Marbles have been, and are, under the protection of the BM). I was privileged to be shown round the exhibition by Neil MacGregor, the BM's director, who is delighted to have moved from the National Gallery, which, with all its treasures, is a modest-sized collection, to the BM, the largest and most varied in the world, with more than 30 million items. I emerged with, if possible, an even higher opinion of Diirer as an artist than I had entered, but still baffled by this enigmatic genius. We know a great deal about him, not least from his own hand, in writings and self-portraits. Yet the mysteries remain. How to reconcile his modesty and his egotism, his love of novelty and his deep conservatism, his strong sense of order and his passionate desire for change? The great book on Diarer remains to be written.
However, the gem of the show is not by Diirer at all but by Hans Hoffmann (1545-92), his admirer and imitator. It is of a 'Wild Boar Piglet', done in 1578 in Nuremberg, in watercolour on vellum, using a fine brush. This delightful creature, with his elegant snout and ears, and exquisite bodystripes in dark brown, yellow and white, is painted on a large scale (300-455mm), and with a clarity and precision which make every hair tell. I have seldom been so struck by a painting at first meeting and, though it is reproduced in the catalogue, I was annoyed with the BM shop for not having postcards of it so that I could share my delight with my friends. There is strong competition, of course, especially from Dilrer's 'Elk', though I have a feeling that he did it from a stuffed specimen (the bison he drew on the back in ink looks much more alive). Diirer's 'Walrus', I am pretty sure, was stuffed, and, as for the famous 'Rhinoceros', Durer never saw it at all. It was presented to the king of Portugal
who passed it on to the Pope. But the ship taking it to Italy was wrecked off Genoa and the poor frightened beast drowned. Durer took, and embellished, its image from a print. I must say, it does not look very like the rhino which gave me the fright of my life in an African game reserve in 1991. The crafty beast appeared to be grazing contentedly with its pacific arse facing me when I crept up to draw a quick sketch: in a second it jumped around to confront me with its angry horn.
Animals, more perhaps than any other subject, require drawing from life. The elephant that Louis IX of France presented to Henry III in 1254 lived in the Tower of London for four years until its death, and Matthew Paris had several chances to draw it. He was much impressed by its trunk and nails, and by the fact that it had knees. His efforts to reproduce it, especially the one in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, are pretty good, the most accurate mediaeval renderings of an elephant I know. They are not, of course, in the same class as Rembrandt's three drawings from life of elephants (the best in the BM and two others in the Albertina, one of them used as the model for the Garden of Eden elephant in Rembrandt's sensational etching of Adam and Eve, `The Fall of Man'). What makes these drawings so remarkable is the way the draughtsman, using only black chalk, conveys the texture, density and wrinkled elasticity of the skin.
Lions are peculiarly difficult to portray accurately, and baffled the painters and sculptors of the Renaissance, even very observant and accurate ones like Carpaccio. The first painter to master the lion completely was Rubens. For his great painting 'Daniel in the Lions' Den', done in 1615 and now in the Washington National Gallery, Rubens surrounded the prophet with no fewer than nine lions, all magnificent, and to appreciate the trouble he took to get them right you have to look at his life sketches in the New York Morgan Library's collection of drawings. For sheer skill they are rivalled only by studies that Rembrandt made of the Berber lions brought to Amsterdam by the Dutch East India Company. There are two fine ones in the BM, but the best of all is the beast in the Louvre, a distrustful creature about to turn very nasty indeed. By comparison, Landseer's lions in Trafalgar Square look pretty tame, though he could produce more vivid beasts in oil and watercolour. For the sheer beauty of the big cats one has to turn to Stubbs — see his 'Manchester Cheetah', done in 1763. And his stunning oil, 'The Zebra', now in the Yale Center for British Art, is certainly the most sumptuous of animal paintings.
Stubbs was fascinated by the image of a horse attacked by a lion, and tried to bring it to life over a period of more than 30 years. At least 17 of his efforts have survived. There is in the Tate a terrifying version of the theme painted in enamel on copper. None of these ferocious images works, in my view, because Stubbs did not draw or paint them from life and had never witnessed such a harrowing scene. But they deeply impressed both Delacroix and Gericault on their visits to England in the years after Waterloo. This was the only period when English artists dominated their French contemporaries — not only Stubbs but Constable and Turner and, to a lesser extent, watercolourists like Bonington, who for a time shared a studio with Delacroix. It is the subject of a new show at the Tate put together by that fine scholar David Blayney-Brown, whom I had the pleasure of hearing talk on the subject at the recent get-together of Romantic period scholars at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. Delacroix said that Bonington could make his watercolours 'glitter like jewels', and what would I give for a few lessons from this young genius, who died at 26 from TB!
The man who learned most from England was Gericault, France's greatest animal painter. He was devoted to horses all his short life, and his study of 'Croppers' (Louvre) is one of the paintings I would most like to possess. A magnificent oil of a dappled horse by Gericault. just the right size for a modern drawing-room, recently came on to the London market, and the shrewd buyer got it, I believe, for the modest sum of £250,000; lucky fellow! Gericault not only admired our horse painters and bloodstock — and the spirited tall blondes who rode them in Hyde Park, whom he called Amazones' — but also the gigantic dray horses of the London brewers and coal merchants, for which there was no exact French equivalent. He painted them superbly in watercolour, another skill he perfected here. Gericault painted lunatics better than anyone else, but his real destiny lay with animal art. I wish he had never got involved in his ridiculous 'Raft of Medusa'. He could have used the time to paint more animals. As it was, he, too, died of spinal TB, aged only 33. But then, most of the animals we love die tragically young, do they not?
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