Another note concerned three paintings from the Manchester City Art Gallery: William Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd (1851); John Souch's Sir Thomas Aston at the Death Bed of His Wife (1635) and George Stubbs's Cheetah With Stag and Two Indians (1765). Each is interesting in various ways.
What Holman Hunt was trying to say is still unclear. Something about thwarted passion and neglect of duty - sheep in the corn - but what is the Death's Head Moth all about? No one knows. The outstanding thing though is the technique, principally the way in which he underpainted in white and then applied colours while the underpainting was still wet. This makes the picture light up and there is amazing clarity in the hair of the shepherd with, seemingly, each strand clear, separate and distinct.
The Souch, I suppose, says something of death, grief and the investing of hopes in the person of his son, although I don't quite remember the significance of the cross staff which he and the boy are holding. But it is a picture that bears standing in front of for five or 10 minutes at a time, and one is almost drawn in to a time when the crises that would lead to the Civil War were building. Lady Aston, painted in life in the bottom right corner even as she expires in the bed, was a great beauty, with the artist giving her masses of curly hair - appropriate for a Cavalier family. Tate Britain has some better stuff on 17th century beauty, my favourite being The Cholmondeley Ladies, a weird painting for sure. Hope, by the way, didn't do Fine Young Master Aston much good: his father was on the losing side at the Battle of Nantwich in 1642 and died four years later of a blow to the head after a period as a prisoner of the Parliamentarians.
The Stubbs is just great fun - a kind of What Happened Next? One supposes that the cheetah will catch and kill the stagg when it is introduced to the enclosure but - burger fights back at bbq - it was actually flipped over the fence by the antlers. An instance where one wishes that someone would hurry up and invent motor-driven photography and Grandstand-type action replays.
Last note. Whatever became of Roz, a colleague in the 1980s who was fleeing a broken love affair? She was a shameless and addicted smoker and I cannot think of her now without seeing a little cloud of blue smoke, from Silk Cut or Bensons, around her head. She actually shook if she was deprived of a fag - withdrawal - and was forever fussing over her lighter etc. Eventually she did withdraw, announcing out of the blue (cloud) that she was leaving without giving proper notice. We - the stupid men in the department - bought her a crystal vase, God knows why, but never got the chance to present it: she sensed on her last day that something was happening and just bolted, screaming. A lucky escape for all concerned. Including the lover.
