The association between two plants, holly and ivy, with the feast of Christmas appears peculiarly British, and best expressed in the traditional carol The Holly and the Ivy. Apparently, holly has been a symbolic reference to Jesus Christ since the Middle Ages, now explained by its red berries representing the drops of blood of the crucifixion, and the crown of thorns worn by Jesus. Ivy then forms a symbolic reference to Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary.

This is seen in cameo in two paintings by British artists of the nineteenth century.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a couple of works on and about Christmas, of which A Christmas Carol from 1867 is probably the more interesting. His model is Ellen Smith, described as a ‘laundry girl’, who is dressed in items from the artist’s collection. There are several allusions to Christmas, particularly the Virgin and Child just above the model’s face, and a sprig of holly with its red berries at the end of her musical instrument.

Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s undated Christmas Time – Here’s The Gobbler! includes a larger spray of holly on the wall at the top right.

Otherwise, holly is only exceptionally identifiable in paintings, and the only reference I have found is in a single work by James Tissot, where it appears together with ivy, but not in reference to Christmas.

Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London following the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she is perhaps a governess. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if its floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

Ivy has longer and more extensive traditions throughout European painting, although it too is only exceptionally identifiable.

In mythology, a thyrsus or thyrsos is a form of staff or even spear decorated with plant matter. In its strictest form, it should be a wand made from the giant fennel plant, decorated with ivy leaves and tipped with a pine cone or artichoke. It’s almost invariably an attribute of the god Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), and his devotees, maenads or bacchantes. It’s thus associated with prosperity, fertility and their over-indulgence in the form of hedonism. In the extreme, it can be tipped with a metal point and used as a club.

Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (1597-1602) is a marvellous fresco on a ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Dionysus is sat in his chariot with his thyrsus, here a long staff wound with ivy leaves but without any tip. Although a feature of many other paintings, this is one of very few decorated with ivy.

Ivy also makes an appearance in a not dissimilar painting with open narrative, this time by Philip Hermogenes Calderon in 1856.

Calderon’s Broken Vows is an early ‘problem picture’. A beautiful young woman, displaying her wedding ring, stands with her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, which was her aspiration.

A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and affording glimpses of the couple behind, but only tantalisingly small sections of their faces.

Calderon here deliberately introduces considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions that aren’t supported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon invites us to speculate.

Like laurel, ivy can also be worked into a crown.

Francisco Pradilla’s watercolour of A Flute Player Crowned with Ivy is a delightful example from 1880. But it took Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to envisage ivy being used instead of a length of rope.

In Puvis’ Fantasy from 1866, one of the two people in this idyllic wooded landscape is using a length of ivy to school a winged white horse, either Pegasus or a hippogriff.

Although seldom clearly identifiable in landscape paintings of trees, one of Paul Nash’s last conventional landscapes is an exception.

Oxenbridge Pond from 1927-28 shows a pond at Oxenbridge Farmhouse, Iden, not far from the artist’s home. Patterns of brushstrokes are assembled into the textures of foliage, ivy covering a tree-trunk, even the lichens and moss on the trunk closest to the viewer, at the right edge.

Reference

Wikipedia on the carol The Holly and the Ivy.

Two centuries ago today, 14 December, the major French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon. In this second and concluding article celebrating his career and art, I continue from the years following the Franco-Prussian War, when his work achieved broad appeal despite the bitter divisions in French society. Their unreal and classical motifs painted in a plain style using pale colours must have been refreshingly different from social realism, the Academy, and the increasingly sketchy landscapes of the Impressionists. Puvis responded by painting increasingly symbolic themes in the same style.

Death and the Maiden from 1872 is most probably based on Schubert’s song of the same title, expressing the inevitability of death, almost in terms of vanitas, which had last been popular during the Dutch Golden Age. This linked with the recent war, when so many young French and Prussian people had died, and with contemporary scourges such as tuberculosis, which killed many young adults. The maidens are seen dancing together, and picking wild flowers, as the personification of death is apparently asleep on the grass at the lower left, his black cloak wrapped around him and his hand resting on the shaft of his scythe.

Completed for and exhibited at the Salon of 1879, Young Women at the Seaside must be one of the palest and plainest paintings of any visit to the beach. Only one of the three young women faces the viewer, and she looks as if she’s about to die of ennui. Even the sea looks cold and distant.

Two years later, in 1881, Puvis exhibited The Poor Fisherman (1881), which proved to be one of his most successful works. Significantly more colourful, he provides more detail, although keeping well away from anything that might be mistaken for social realism or the increasingly popular Naturalism. A thin if not quite emaciated fisherman stands, Christ-like, in his boat waiting for his catch to fill his net. Behind him on the marshy land is his wife picking flowers, and their infant, another possible reference to Jesus Christ.

Puvis painted at least four versions of this work, it was reproduced as a lithograph, and numerous contemporaries copied and admired it, declaring its importance in the development of painting at the time. It’s thus one of the formative works leading to the Symbolist movement, whose manifesto was published five years later.

In 1882, Puvis painted the much paler Pleasant Land, which returns to the south coast of France and a small group of young women and their children who are engaged in dolce far niente just above the beach.

For the Salon of 1883, Puvis intensified the unreality with his nocturne The Dream. In a similarly placid and contemplative Mediterranean coastal setting, a traveller (vagrant), their meagre possessions tied up in a cloth, is asleep under a crescent moon. Three angelic but wingless figures from a dream are shown in mid-air, two scattering stars and one bearing a laurel wreath.

Puvis had painted a succession of murals in France from the 1860s onwards. During the 1880s, these turned increasingly to the recurrent motif of classical figures in a sacred grove.

This panoramic easel painting of The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses, made in the period 1884-89, is a good example of this series. Puvis alludes to the Muses, but doesn’t identify them with their customary attributes. Instead, two women (wingless again) are flying, one apparently playing the lyre. The figures below are engaged in contemplation, discussion, and the central group are listening to a recital of poetry or song. Most of them wear golden laurel wreaths in their hair, and all are dressed in classical robes.

Charity (1887) is a personification of one of the seven Christian virtues, again set in timeless classical terms. She is the mother of twins, one of whom she holds by her breast. She is clasping the back of the neck of a dark wolf, lying beside her, adding a more unusual touch. This had become a popular motif, and only nine years previously had been painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in contrasting Academic style.

Of his surviving murals, I think The Sacred Wood is perhaps the most impressive. Completed in 1889, it graces Le Grand Amphithéâtre of La Sorbonne in Paris, and is his ultimate expression of this theme. It includes many classical and artistic references: near the centre, bent over the surface of a pond, is Narcissus, and towards the right, dressed in red, what looks like Dante.

In 1890, Puvis was co-founder and first president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which became the dominant Salon in Paris.

Puvis continued his low-chroma paintings of coastal scenes with The Shepherd’s Song in 1891. Oddly, the shepherd referred to in the title is the smallest of its figures, perched part-way up an ill-defined rocky slope at the left, above two black goats, as three women are fetching water in the foreground.

During the early 1890s, Puvis developed the theme of the sacred grove and relocated it to a hillside above the city of Rouen, in his Inter artes et naturam (meaning Between Art and Nature), from about 1890-95. His viewpoint is Bonsecours, to the south-east of the city, looking north-west over its bridges and distinctive skyline. Clothing worn suggests a curious conflation of periods, from the classical at the left edge, to the contemporary at the mid-right.

The last of these paintings is The Poet from 1896, which returns to the Mediterranean coast, where a poet, who has just dropped his lyre behind him, is swooning, as a winged angel comforts and supports him. At the upper right is a white dove representing the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this was his prescience of death.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes died in Paris, where he had worked most of his life, on 24 October 1898, at the age of 73. Only three months before, he had finally married his partner of more than forty years, a Romanian princess who died just a month after their wedding.

Two centuries ago tomorrow the major French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon. In this and tomorrow’s concluding article I briefly celebrate his career and work.

Puvis had never intended to be an artist, but serious illness cut short his studies, and after his convalescence he travelled to Italy. He there became inspired to paint, studying briefly under Eugène Delacroix before he closed his studio. He was then a pupil under Henri Scheffer and Thomas Couture, but proved something of a loner and didn’t follow contemporary Academic tradition. Although his first paintings were accepted for the Salon in 1850, recognition didn’t come until much later.

Puvis painted two completely different versions of The beheading of John the Baptist. This is the earlier, from 1856, alternatively known as The Daughter of Herodias Gives the Signal for the Ordeal of Saint John the Baptist, which in itself raises questions. Salome dominates the painting, her right hand holding the empty platter high above her head as she is about to drop it to signal John’s execution. John the Baptist is still alive at this stage, seen in the murky distance at the left. Another figure, perhaps Herodias, is hiding in Salome’s robe, behind her.

His later painting, from about 1869 and in the National Gallery in London with a smaller version in Birmingham, is more in accord with the biblical account of this story.

The Wine Press, from about 1865, is more typical of his mature paintings, showing a classical figurative motif executed simply using low chroma throughout. In this case, a bearded young man wearing a wreath as a loincloth stands awkwardly on a wooden step-ladder, tipping freshly harvested grapes into the large wooden press. Three young women, dressed loosely in classical robes, are delivering him the grapes from the vineyard, as a pair of longhorned cattle look on.

During the 1860s, Puvis reacted to the popular trend towards realism by painting increasingly unreal works, such as Fantasy from 1866. Two naked people of indeterminate gender are in an idyllic wooded landscape near the foot of sheer cliffs. One sits plucking flowers to form a wreath, the other uses a length of ivy to school a winged white horse which could be Pegasus or a hippogriff. Puvis’ application of paint is so thin that the wings of the horse are semi-transparent, and his colours are muted in the extreme. In almost every respect, this was the antithesis of social realism, pre-Impressionist landscapes and Academic painting of the time.

Puvis increasingly turned to allegory and personifications, as in this painting of Vigilance, completed in 1866 and accepted for the Salon of that year. Traditional attributes associated with this personification are the oil lamp she holds aloft, a book and a rod, which are omitted.

The following year Puvis painted a pair of allegories, Peace (above) and War (below), using stronger colours to make it easier to read their greater detail. Both are set in classical times in an idyllic landscape. Peace is a group dolce far niente which would later have passed for Aestheticism: men, women and children engaged in nothing more strenuous than milking a goat.

In War, three horsemen are blowing a fanfare on their war trumpets, haystacks in the surrounding fields are alight and pouring black smoke into the sky, and the people are suffering, even though signs of destruction are slight and none is wounded. The timing of these paintings wasn’t coincidence: France was in the process of sliding inexorably towards its war with Prussia, and the Second Empire of Napoleon III was about to self-destruct.

Shortly before the Franco-Prussian War, he painted this unusual and relatively colourful maritime scene of Marseilles, Gateway to the Orient (c 1868). Set aboard a fanciful sailing ship, it shows the mixed ethnicity of those who crewed and travelled in the vessels trading through the port of Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast. The city itself is in the distance, making its title the more odd. I suspect this was a study for one of the murals he made for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles in the 1860s.

Puvis was deeply affected by the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune that followed in 1871.

The role of balloons during the siege of Paris was inspiration for The Balloon of 1870, which became popular as a lithograph made by Émile Vernier. The following year, Puvis painted a pendant The Pigeon (below), showing another means of communication used during the siege.

Here a woman seen almost in silhouette waves at one of the balloons bearing news, as it flies near Mount Valérien. In her right hand she holds a musket, symbolic of the arming of the people of Paris at the time. The same woman appears in mourning in The Pigeon, collecting a carrier pigeon that had fought its way through the predatory hawks flown by the Prussians.

The two paintings meant a great deal to Puvis, who reluctantly gave them to the government a few years later, to be prizes in a lottery organised to provide aid to the survivors of the great fire of Chicago in 1871. They didn’t return to Paris until 1987, and are now both in the Musée d’Orsay.

Puvis’ Hope from 1872 develops this post-war theme further, and was exhibited at the Salon that year, the first to follow the war. A young woman sits amid a landscape that has been destroyed by fighting. The bleached rubble of a farmhouse is seen in the right distance, and there are two improvised graveyards with clusters of crosses. She holds a sprig of oak as a symbol of the recovery of the nation.

His three paintings provoked reflection rather than taking sides, and became popular across the range of public opinion. They proved a turning point in his career, as I’ll show tomorrow.