© Chris Young/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press
In yesterday’s article I showed excerpts from two cycles of paintings of the journey of life, by Nicolas Poussin and Thomas Cole, and started the epic series of 34 images by Louis Janmot that constitute his Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul). The last painting of his depicted the child growing up in an idyllic country landscape in Spring.
The child’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of thirty) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window.
The couple have grown now, and find themselves walking along a path by the university. In the niches alongside the path are its professors, each offering false learning that might replace their faith. That learning is represented by the combination of papers and a lighted candle. In the niche closest to the viewer is the figure of death itself, its niche decorated with skeletons. The land is rocky and barren, with a wizened tree, where an owl is perched.
Still dressed in their gowns from their First Communion at church, the two sit together by a pond, with high mountain peaks in the distance. The boy is stroking a dove, a symbol of peace, while the girl strokes a panther, indicating tamed passions. They both hold a lily, for purity, which separates and unifies them.
In a revisit of Jacob’s Ladder, the pair fall asleep in the woods, and dream of a perpetual cycle of nine angels ascending and descending a staircase leading towards God in heaven. The angels each carry a symbol of the arts, such as a musical instrument.
The couple now face life’s challenges, symbolised by the ascent of a mountain, a task they accomplish together. So they achieve the ideals of life, both earthly and spiritual. This also indicates their exploration of space, and the world in which they live.
Later, when they have reached adulthood, she bids him farewell when she is called to ascend to heaven.
Now a man, returned to earth alone, his spirit back in heaven, he kneels before a wooden cross decorated with a garland of flowers that she left him. (It’s said this refers back to flowers she wore at their First Communion, but no such flowers appear in the paintings.) He pines for her memory, as breaks in the cloud cast bright sunlight down on patches of the earth.
Janmot’s story concludes in his series of charcoal drawings, where the man falls in love, but is abandoned. He then experiences doubt and falls into evil ways in an orgy. He suffers, and ages as a result of his sins, but his plight is taken by his mother to Jesus and the Virgin Mary in heaven for their intercession.
The intercession was successful, and a team led by an angel arrives to address the man’s plight. The woman’s corpse is despatched into the waves, perhaps in a form of burial at sea. The angel’s team consists of two other women, who sit and read from books held open by putti. At their feet are symbolic animals: a lion (strength), fox (cunning), and sheep (the sacrifice of Jesus Christ). Above them are three more putti, bearing symbolic objects including a large fish-hook, whose meaning is obscure.
The man is welcomed back at a heavenly Eucharist – the title is from the early words of the service, in Latin. Angels swing censors, there are rows of pious kings and clergy, and in the distance, descending a flight of steps, is the figure of Christ himself, bearing a lamb on his shoulders. The group at the right foreground contains the man’s soul, who looks directly at the viewer. With this, Janmot’s epic is concluded.
Just over a decade after Janmot completed that series of 34 images, Walter Crane condensed his account of the journey of life into a single painting.
Crane’s allegorical narrative of life as a bridge appears unique to him. It shows a newborn baby arriving in the hand of a winged angel in a white punt/gondola, left of centre. The baby is handed over to a mother or nurse, fed at the breast at the bottom left corner, walking up the steps, and learning at the top. Children play, then grow into young adults, and marry as they reach the top of the bridge. Throughout this runs the thread of life.
The mature adult in the middle of the bridge (by its keystone) then ages steadily, bearing the whole globe during the descent. He then gains a long white beard and walking stick during the descent into old age, finally dying, his body being placed in the black punt/gondola, where it is attended by the angel of death. Grieving relatives stand on the shore and make their farewells, one cutting the thread securing the boat to the shore with a pair of traditional scissors.
Crane explained the theme of his Bridge of Life (1884) as “fortune and fame pursued and ever eluding the grasp; til the crown perhaps is gained, but the burden of the intolerable work has to be borne.” It was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, then toured venues in the East End of London during a period of social and labour unrest.
My final series is the second of two Friezes of Life assembled by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. He seems to have started thinking about this during the 1880s, but it wasn’t until the early 1890s that it crystallised in his personal notebooks. He talked about building them into a ‘symphony’ in early 1893, and by the end of that year exhibited his first self-contained series of images in Berlin, under the title A Human Life.
During 1893 and 1894, Munch painted most of the works that were to form his first Frieze of Life, exhibited in March 1895, in Ugo Barroccio’s gallery in Berlin. His own explanation is that “the paintings are moods, impressions of the life of the soul, and together they represent one aspect of the battle, between man and woman, that is called love” (Heller, in Wood, 1992).
Munch later assembled his second and mature version, titled Frieze: Cycle of Moments from Life, and exhibited it in Berlin in 1902. It then consisted of twenty-two paintings, arranged in four sections. Here I show a small selection of some of the better-known paintings from that.
The Boston version of Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893), included in the 1895 version of the Frieze, was here titled Evening Star. It shows Munch’s lover ‘Mrs Heiberg’ at the edge of the Borre Woods, to the north of Åsgårdstrand. This features a brilliant golden-yellow pillar of reflected moonlight on the fjord, forming a distinctive ‘i‘ that appears in other paintings. This work initiates a sequence in which Munch gives his personal account of the process of falling in love.
Evening on Karl Johan shows the crowd from his painting Anxiety in an autobiographical scene. During Munch’s affair with ‘Mrs Heiberg’, he had arranged to meet her on Karl Johans Gate, the long, straight main street in the centre of Oslo. As he waited for her, his anxiety grew, exacerbated by crowds of people walking towards him.
Munch’s later depiction of this greatly foreshortens the perspective of this section of the street from the Royal Palace towards the Storting (parliament building), a distance of around 300 metres. This packs the pedestrians together and, coupled with their nightmarish faces, enhances its troubling feeling of anxiety.
A later section closes with The Scream, showing the isolated figure of Munch before the distant city of Oslo, its fjord with ships at anchor, and the surrounding hills. As the artist’s notes explain:
I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and leant against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across flaming clouds that hung like – blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.
By the Deathbed (1895) is Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist wasn’t quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details he no longer saw.
Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is the mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.
References
Janmot’s Le Poème de l’âme: Wikipedia (in French).
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 1
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 2
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 3
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 4
Munch’s Frieze of Life
The Munch Museum, Oslo.
Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.
Series paintings of times of the day and the seasons have been popular, but those trying to depict the whole of life are unusual and challenging. This weekend I look at some of the better attempts to tell the story of the journey of life. Because some of these series consist of more than five paintings, I here show selections of those longer accounts.
One of the earliest painted accounts of life is Nicolas Poussin’s series The Seven Sacraments. His first version of this was started in about 1636 as a commission for his patron and mentor Cassiano dal Pozzi, and was completed four years later.
The first in the series shows The Baptism of Christ, as an unusual example of a baptismal scene. The white dove of the Holy Spirit above the figure of Christ is one link across some of the others in the series.
The white dove reappears in Poussin’s genteel account of Marriage.
The series is completed by Extreme Unction, showing the sacrament being administered to a cadaveric man as his family are gathered around his deathbed.
Although several of William Hogarth’s series were biographical, such as his first two of A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731) and its compliment A Rake’s Progress (1732-5), none attempted to depict the whole journey of life from birth to death.
The next is probably Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life, painted in 1839-42. Like Poussin before him, Cole wasn’t satisfied with painting this cycle of four phases. When he was in Rome in 1842, fearing that he wouldn’t see his series again, nor be allowed to exhibit it, he painted a second version, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and shown here. He had already painted a precursor cycle, The Course of Empire, in 1833-36, telling the story of an idealised civilisation, inspired by Byron’s poem Pilgrimage (1812-8).
Cole’s first series The Voyage of Life was commissioned to show a Christian allegory of the stages of life. He divided this into childhood, youth, manhood, and old age.
Childhood establishes the scene: the lush coastal undercliff, rich in flowers and the vibrant green of vegetation. A boat has emerged from a large cave in the cliff, symbolising the mother’s birth canal and the process of birth. A young baby is standing in the boat, with an angel at its tiller. A carved angelic figure forming the prow holds out an hourglass as the symbol for time.
In Youth, the young man has taken the helm of the boat, leaving the angel on the bank. The morning light is bright, and the weather fair. The young man is navigating the boat along the river, through lush waterside meadows and avenues, towards a distant vision of a celestial temple. The coastal cliffs are now in the background on the right, and in the centre distance is a rocky mountain spire.
By Manhood, the hero has noticeably matured, and his boat is on a fast-flowing river just approaching dangerous rapids passing through a rocky chasm. It is now dusk, and the angel is watching over from a break in the dark and forboding clouds. The man no longer holds the tiller, indeed the rudder is missing altogether, but both hands are clasped in prayer, as he looks anxiously up towards the heavens. In the foreground on the right are twisted trees, splintered by storms, with autumnal leaves.
Old Age shows the man in the boat far older, bald and with a grey beard. His boat is now in placid waters at the coast again, making no way. The boat itself is battered, its figurehead missing. He sits in the boat talking with the angel, who beckons him up through a parting in the black clouds, to a distant angel, far up in the heavens, rising through beams of sunshine towards brightness at the top left.
The painter who came closest to creating an epic in his works must be Louis Janmot, whose series Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul) consists of no less than 34 images, of which the first eighteen are painted in oils, and the remaining sixteen are in charcoal. Miraculously, the complete series is still together in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France. Although the captions don’t report it, each of the oil paintings is 130-145 cm in height, and 140-145 cm in width, although I have also seen them stated as being much larger, approximately 394 x 500 cm.
Like Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Janmot was also an accomplished poet, and his series is accompanied by an epic poem of nearly three thousand lines. He had a deep Catholic faith, and both the poem and the paintings are framed within his beliefs.
The series opens in heaven, with the mystical formation of a human soul, shown in symbolic form as a baby. This takes place under the watch of the Holy Trinity, although the three figures surrounding the newborn soul include a woman who represents love. Around this tight group are seemingly endless ranks of angels.
The newborn soul is brought down to earth by its guardian angel. This view, midway between heaven and earth, shows the succession of newborn souls being taken down to earth in the centre, and the judgement of the dead taking place at the side. The souls of the virtuous are seen being accompanied back up to heaven by their guardian angels, at the left. On the right are those destined for hell.
Below, on the right, is the figure of Prometheus bound, being attacked by an eagle. Prometheus is a strange figure from classical mythology to appear in this series, but a strong symbol of eternal suffering.
This is set by the Lake of Moras, where the mother sits with the newborn soul on her lap. Its guardian angel is kneeling in prayer for the mother and the soul of her new child. This painting combines the images of the annunciation to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus, in a unique way.
As the child grows up, Janmot represents it as a duality of boy, shown here in pink, and girl, in white symbolising purity and innocence. The pair are shown at play, picking flowers, in an idyllic country landscape during the spring.
This mystical duality continues through most of the rest of the oil paintings. At times, the pair appear to be brother and sister, or even lovers, but as we will see in tomorrow’s sequel, in the end they represent the earthly body (boy) and the spirit (girl). They are usually colour-coded, the boy wearing pink, and the girl white.
Poussin’s Sacraments
Cole’s Voyage of Life
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 1
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 2
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 3
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 4
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