Still life: strange lives

In which I reflect on two paintings in The Wilson, Cheltenham’s art gallery and museum, closed like all such places in the time of Coronavirus. My account of ‘Window, Still Life’ was written during the first week of the lockdown, when we were all still wondering what lay ahead; it appeared as a short contribution to the Summer Newsletter of the Friends of The Wilson, and I reprint it here in a slightly altered form. I wrote down my thoughts on ‘Patience’ in week six of this strange half-life with its compensations as well as its griefs.

The Wilson is shut,* but a painting in the Friends’ Gallery by the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell stays in my mind. It’s called ‘Window, Still Life’ (fig. i) and just now we are all living rather still lives, most of us with plenty of time for gazing out of windows. I doubt, though, if any of us have a view quite as strange, yet strangely resonant, as the scene V. BELL (the italic capitals of her signature just legible in the corner) has painted here.

At first everything seems straightforward. Close to a wide-open window stands a small table on which are positioned two bottles and an earthenware bowl. Behind the table something is propped against the wall – perhaps a canvas on a stretcher. Is this the artist’s studio, the objects on the table placed on what could be a superannuated palette? 

The room appears to be high up: through the window the painter looks out and down on the roofs of much lower buildings. But here the difficulties begin, for the roof lines suggest the houses are crowding together at impossible angles – pressing up indeed against the wall of the studio. No less oddly, a great gabled chimney stack seems to have become dislodged and now hovers between two roofs, one thatched and one tiled. What creates this disturbance is the cascade of trees, huge green boulders blocking out the sky, tumbling down a hillside and colliding with the houses that stand in their way.

So the two halves of the painting confront each other, the studio’s still life opposing the strange confusion outside. Actually, ‘observing’ would be more accurate than ‘opposing’: the two bottles – one a bouteille de vin with orange-striped label and dainty neck, the other a grey broad-shouldered demijohn – stand like a couple, looking out. Isolated behind the window they wait, watching as the chaos comes ever closer: the orange ridge tiles of the nearest roof are even now edging above the windowsill. 

How unexpectedly this image, painted in 1915 just as the long-term horror of the First World War was becoming apparent, speaks also to these our times!

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A picture on a wall is defined – you could say, confined – by its frame. Yet  PJ Crook

frequently challenges this idea: sometimes her paintings seem to escape the boundaries of their frame; at others the frame itself becomes absorbed into the painting.  

PJ Crook’s pictures are famously full of people but this one, ‘Patience’ (1983; fig.ii), appears to encapsulate both the idea of self-isolation and the resources needed to retreat from the

world outside. A woman sits at a card table. It’s a sunny day and the door into her garden is open, but she seems content enough inside. And when she tires of the cards her piano lid is up and her music open, ready for her to play. Nor is she exactly alone: besides her cat, there are pictures on the wall – her parents, maybe, on the right, or herself as a young woman with a husband; on the left, perhaps herself when young, with a sister. Everything appears to be neatly in place, just as she wants it: the bowl of apples on top of the piano, the two vases of flowers and the clock with its swinging pendulum, her cheerful rug with its pattern of four rectangles, one inside the other.

This rug appears at first sight not to be lying flat on the carpet; but looking more carefully, we can see that actually it has been painted over the outer, bevelled frame of the picture. Now we realise that the whole room, the whole picture, embraces the frame as though it were part of the canvas. And not just that: there are frames within frames. Across the top corner of the door into the garden, there is a thin black line, the mitred joint of a double frame. This double frame further encloses the woman playing patience while conversely suggesting that her isolation is more apparent than real: the innermost frame is as it were transparent, so we see the cat’s tail through it, not over it.

The relationship between outdoors and indoors matters too. Through the open door can be seen a vista of grass, hedge, trees, clouds and sky. The same vista is presented through the window and twice again, in the picture behind the woman’s head and reflected in the mirror above the piano. In this way she is continually surrounded by the landscape outside her window, even as she is cut off from it. By choosing it for a picture on her wall, she has opted for a virtual reality – just as the people in the other two pictures are her virtual (not her real) companions. 

Structurally, this painting suggests containment, a room framed not once but three times. Yet the picture itself refuses to be confined by these frames: it spills onto, through and over them. Emblematically, therefore, the artist offers us an image not so much of self-confinement as of self-contentment. It’s taken less than two months for terms such as self-isolation and social distancing to embed themselves in our thinking and in the way we live now. This is why I find PJ Crook’s ‘Patience’ both challenging and reassuring: we would not have chosen to live like this but, accepting why we have to, we are learning how to make the best of it.

© Adrian Barlow

Fig. i: You can see a larger image of Vanessa Bell’s ‘Window: Still Life’ on the ArtUK website here.

Fig. ii: You can see a larger image of PJ Crook’s ‘Patience’ on the ArtUK website here.

*Though the Wilson is indeed shut, you can now access its latest show, SISTERHOOD, created by the  artist Danielle Salloum. This exhibition opened in the Summerfield gallery, on the 3rd floor, just before the art gallery and museum (like all others in the country) had to close. Now it has been re-presented as a provocative and often moving virtual show, comparing portraits and lives of twenty women from Trinidad and Tobago with twenty women from Cheltenham and Gloucestershire.  I strongly recommend SISTERHOOD, and you can visit it, free, here.

Edward Wilson: pipe smoking and Polar exploration

To The Wilson, Cheltenham’s Art Gallery and Museum, to celebrate the acquisition of a fairly ordinary-looking smoker’s pipe.  And rightly so, for this pipe belonged to one of the town’s most distinguished sons: the Polar explorer, doctor, artist and naturalist, Edward Adrian Wilson (1872-1912). More than this, research into the pipe’s history has shed light not just on the complex character of Wilson himself but also on the importance of pipe smoking to those who chose to boldly go where no man had gone before in the early years of the twentieth century.

Made of polished rose briar, the pipe is of the ‘Billiard’ style. A silver band protecting the joint where shank meets stem is idiosyncratically engraved with Wilson’s monogram EW (See illustration below). The letters GBD, stamped both on the wooden shank and on the silver band, identify the pipe’s maker as the Paris-based firm Ganneval, Bondier and Donninger. The band, however, is stamped with London hallmarks, dating it to 1900. The initials AO, also stamped onto the silver band, identify A. Oppenheimer & Co. as the London distributor of the pipe.

It’s more than thirty five years since last I smoked a pipe myself. Like me, Wilson had taken it up at university: an 1893 Cambridge photo shows him smiling, boatered and bow-tied, with pipe in mouth. Certainly he smoked one for most of the 1890s and not even TB, severe enough to force him to go to Davos for treatment, put him off for long. He hated the forced inactivity of the regime his Swiss doctors imposed, and was jubilant when eventually allowed to take up his pipe again. ‘SMOKED ALL DAY!’ he recorded in his diary.

Many pipemen, I suppose, have a love-hate relationship with their pipes, and this was certainly true of Wilson. He was a man of extraordinary gifts and interesting contradictions. He used to give up smoking for Lent and would go up into the woods above Cheltenham, to throw his pipe away in a gesture of finality. But when Lent was over, back he’d go to retrieve the pipe and start smoking once again. Not so surprising, perhaps: pipe smokers hate to be separated from their pipes and will go to great lengths to be reunited with them. Robert Graves, in Goodbye to All That, has a story about the Everest mountaineer George Mallory, who

once did an inexplicable climb on Snowdon.  He had left his pipe on a ledge, half-way down one of Lliwedd precipices, and scrambled back by a short cut to retrieve it, then up again by the same route. No one saw what route he took, but when they came to examine it the next day for the official record, they found an overhang nearly all the way. By a rule of the Climbers’ Club climbs are never named in honour of their inventors, but only describe natural features. An exception was made here. The climb was recorded as follows: “Mallory’s Pipe. A variation on Route 2; see adjoining map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in failing light, by Mr G.H.L. Mallory.”

There are plenty of photographs of pipe-smoking explorers and mountaineers seen with pipe in hand or clamped between teeth. Look at any photo of Capt. Scott smoking: you’ll probably see he has an identical-looking pipe to the one that now belongs to The Wilson. Just how much his pipe mattered to him, Scott himself explained in the South Polar Times, May 1902:

The day’s work is nearly over; but a solitary joy remains; throughout your recent adventures you have always kept your mind’s eye on the pipe, tobacco and matches that are distributed about your person [….] The solace of that pipe […] is a thing that only the true smoker can appreciate.

George Seaver, Wilson’s first biographer, claims Wilson didn’t smoke while on Discovery, and Scott himself referred to him as ‘a non-smoker’. Not smoking during the expedition (especially if he travelled with today’s pipe, probably presented to him on departure) would have been a severe test of his resolve, for other members of the team all puffed away with gusto. No wonder Discovery had to set sail with 1,300lbs. of tobacco on board: smoking mitigated the extreme cold and dulled the appetite.  Wilson did, however, return to his pipe once back in Britain. Some of his time after 1904 was spent in the Scottish Highlands researching the causes of disease in grouse. He reported that rubbing his socks with pipe tar helped keep the mosquitoes away from his ankles; no doubt wreathing himself in tobacco smoke offered further defence.

I suspect it was this presentation pipe that he smoked in Scotland. Although it comes in a well-worn and much-used leather carrying pouch, the pipe itself has has not been heavily smoked: there is only one tooth mark on the stem. There is, however, some slight pitting on the edge of the bowl. This suggests to me that Wilson was accustomed to knock out his pipe on a convenient stone or rock in order to dislodge the dottle. Seaver claims that by 1908 Wilson had lost all taste for a pipe, and never hankered after it again. Certainly this pipe wasn’t one retrieved from the Antarctic after Wilson’s death: it surfaced in an auction of contents from Hooton Pagnell Hall, where his brother Bernard (who managed this Yorkshire estate) had accumulated a personal collection of memorabilia associated with Edward. One can surmise that the pipe came to Bernard from Oriana, Edward’s widow; after his death, she distributed mementoes of her late husband to the family.

I have some fellow-feeling for a man who gives up his pipe altogether; I also have a sneaking admiration for those who carry on, often in the face of opposition from family and friends. Scott of the Antarctic never gave up – until forced to do so in those latter days, when tobacco as well as food had run out in the hut where he finally died, his arms cradling Wilson.  I know of few more touching letters than the last one Scott received from his wife, Kathleen, before his death:

'How can I guess how things will be with you when you get this… But oh dearie I am full of hope. My brave man will win – with his own right hand and with his mighty arm hath he gathered himself the victory. Now don’t forget to brush your hair – and don’t smoke so much and altogether you’re a ducky darling and hurray for you!'

Adrian Barlow

[Notes: Robert Graves’ account of Mallory’s Pipe comes from Goodbye to All That, (1929; London: Penguin Books, 1960) pp.35-36.  George Seaver writes about Wilson’s struggles to give up smoking in Edward Wilson of the Antarctic (London: John Murray, 1933) pp. 30, 49, 55, 88 and 161. Kathleen Scott’s last letter to her husband (found when his body was recovered a year after his death) was made public in 2012. You can read the full text of the letter here.

[Illustrations: (i, ii and iii) Edward Wilson’s pipe, now in The Wilson, Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery, reproduced by permission of The Cheltenham Trust and Cheltenham Borough Council; (iv) detail from the west window of Binton Parish Church, near Stratford-upon-Avon, depicting Captain Robert Falcon Scott and colleagues about to set off the for South Pole (Wilson on right of image). The window was designed by John Lisle and made by C.E. Kempe and Co., 1915

My thanks to Ann-Rachael Harwood, Curator of Human History at The Wilson, and to Gill Poulter, Heritage and Exhibitions Director, Dundee Heritage Trust, for their help with this article.

Text and photograph iv © the author.