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.

In yesterday’s article, I showed examples of paintings using classical deities and resolved conflicts in ancient history to depict the concept of peace. Today I move on to more recent and modern history.

Benjamin West was commissioned by William Penn’s son Thomas to paint The Treaty of Penn with the Indians or William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771-72), the one ‘modern history’ painting he showed alongside four more traditional narrative works at the Royal Academy in 1772.

This shows the Quaker founder of the state of Pennsylvania purchasing land for his colony from the Lenape people, with a treaty of peace between the colonists and the ‘Indians’, an event that took place ninety years earlier in 1682. This proved as popular and successful as West’s famous painting of The Death of General Wolfe, being reproduced in prints and on all manner of other surfaces, even bedspreads! Like that earlier work, it was also savaged for its historical inaccuracies, to say nothing of its misrepresentation of the reality of westward expansion in North America.

In 1867, 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.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes painted a pair of allegories, Peace (above), and War (below), using colours stronger than usual to enable reading of their greater detail. Both are set in classical times in an idyllic landscape. Peace is a group dolce far niente that might 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.

By the start of 1871, Prussia had inflicted a crushing defeat on France, whose Second Empire was forced to agree an armistice.

Édouard Detaille’s depiction of The Armistice of 28th January 1871 (1873) shows the moment that the symbolic white flag was raised, over a bleak plain.

By a strange coincidence, that same year the Russian war artist Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin painted his powerful Apotheosis of War (1871), showing ravens or crows perching on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town. This was his reaction to the series of battles fought by the Russian Empire against those living in lands that it wanted to acquire.

My final paintings are products of what was then known as the Great War, but proved to be only the first of the two World Wars of the twentieth century.

Paul Nash’s pen and ink drawing of Sunrise: Inverness Copse, showing the aftermath of heavy fighting during the Battle of Langemarck, became his finished oil painting of We are Making a New World (1918). Although richer in colour, the slime green furrowed mud dominates the lower half of the canvas. Its intensely ironic title and use of the early morning sun makes the artist’s response to the war very clear, and it has remained one of the strongest images of that war.

Nash’s Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what is now a part of eastern London. This area was destroyed during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.

William Nicholson’s The Cenotaph the Morning of the Peace Procession is an interesting historical record of 1919, as well as a detailed oil sketch. The cenotaph shown here isn’t the current memorial in central London, but a temporary structure erected for a ‘peace celebration’, also known as a ‘victory parade’, that took place in London on 19 July 1919, following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles to formally end that war.

This was designed very quickly by Sir Edwin Lutyens, approved on 7 July, and hastily constructed in wood and plaster. It was unofficially unveiled on the day before the celebration, and soon attracted the laying of wreaths by the public. Following great public demand, a permanent version was constructed to a slightly modified design the following year, and that remains the focus for all similar events in London. Just twenty years later the world was dragged into yet another war.