Tess's paintings - the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum

I am looking at Thomas Hardy: The World of His Novels (2013, Frances Lincoln Limited) by J. B. Bullen, an English Professor at Royal Holloway University of London.  Looking at much more than reading, since the book features many images, mostly Bullen’s own photos showing the correspondences between Hardy’s fantasy world and what for the sake of argument I will call the real world.  For example, here is the real Cross-in-Hand pillar, “desolate and silent,” “the site of a miracle, or murder, or both” (Ch. 44), from a public photo, not Bullen’s.  An essential book for planning your walking tour of Wessex.  Don’t lose your boots.

Much of Tess of the d’Urbervilles chapter is spent on a different kind of image, as Bullen works through references to a number of J. M. W. Turner paintings; some are speculation, some are sure things.  It is all tied into the sun theme.  I knew it.  I noticed the sun motif too late.

Tess is full of paintings.  In a comment, Trednyas Days points to a good example:

Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence.  (Ch. 13)

Those are some calm pheasants.  Hardy could be inventing the entire scene, but its explicitly allegorical nature makes me suspect he has a painting in mind.  Perhaps something he saw in Belgium.

I noticed the narrator twice referring to Belgian painters, a surprising theme.  In Chapter 16, he describes the Valley of the Dairies as “speckled as thickly with them [cows] as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers,” and in Chapter 39, in one of the oddest lines in the novel, the disillusionment of Angel Clare is described in terms of painting:

Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers.

“Ghastly” is an interesting word to trace through Tess, but I’ll stick with the paintings.  Antoine Wiertz, judging by his most famous painting, was the greatest painter of the 19th century, but do not be too hasty – he was more typically terrible.  I have pulled a detail from the mammoth The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus which may be the kind of thing on Hardy’s mind.  The harmless Jan van Beers (“a minor Belgian painter,” the Norton editor deadpans in a footnote) is more of a puzzle.  Maybe this is a leer?

Angel Clare’s understanding of Italian art is pretty narrow, I’ll say that.

What puzzles me most about the explicit use (Turner is never named) of the Flemish and Belgian painters is what readers of Tess made of them.  Were Van Alsloot and Van Beers commonly understood references?  Did readers think “Oh, like Wiertz, what a shocking view of life”?  I know that today’s readers, the ones who love Tess, have looked up these artists and can answer my questions about them.  But how about the late Victorian readers?  I need another book.

Poor Belgium! - Brontë, Baudelaire bash Belgium

I don't spend much of my imaginative or literary life in Belgium. But lately I've been spending time with two vicious Belgium-bashers. Oddest thing.

Charles Baudelaire lived in Belgium from April 1864 to July 1866, hating every minute of it, apparently. He had gone to deliver a series of paying lectures, and stayed for complicated reasons involving debt, illness, publishing, his mother, and contrariness. From a letter to the painter Manet, 27 May, 1864, just after arrival in Belgium:

"The Belgians are fools, liars, and thieves... Here deceit is the rule and brings no dishonor... Don't ever believe what people say about the good nature of the Belgians. Ruse, defiance, false affability, crudeness, treachery - now all of that you can believe."

Some more abuse: "the stupidest race on earth (at least I presume there's none stupider)" (13 Oct 1864). "You know there's no Belgian cuisine and that these people don't know how to cook eggs or grill meat... The sight of a Belgian woman gives me a vague desire to faint." (3 Feb 1865)

Almost as soon as he arrives, Baudelaire begins working on a book attacking Belgium, Pauvre Belgique!, or A Ridiculous Capital, or Belgium en déshabillé. It will be "a means of trying out my claws" in which "I'll patiently explain all the reasons for my disgust with mankind." Never finished. Such a shame.

The other Belgium-hater is Charlotte Brontë, or at least her narrator Lucy Snowe. The Villette (Little Town) in Villette turns out to be Brussels, capital of Labassecoure (Poultry-yard). The inhabitants, including her students, regardless of social standing, are mostly fat peasants. It's not just Rubens and his fat women. See the parenthetical dig at her students in Chapter 9, for example, about "their (usually large) ears." Plus they spy, they're narrow in spirit, and, worst of all, they're Catholic.

Perhaps this is not really Belgium. Perhaps in the world of Villette, there is no Belgium, or it has a very similar neighbor named Poultry-yard. But I've become convinced that the mean names are not just Charlotte Brontë's joke. They're also Lucy's - it's merciless Lucy who identifies the Duke of Turkey (the Duc de Dindonneau) and calls professors who torment her Drywood and Deadrock. She's just like that.

Here, by the way is the Brussels Brontë Group Blog, where there are no hard feelings. That's the spirit.

This is what they call a transition - I'm going to spend the next two days with Baudelaire. Which is a shame, since I'm enjoying Villette so much. Plenty more Villette here.

All Baudelaire quotations from Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude, ed. Rosemary Lloyd, University of Chicago Press, 1986.