One of the pieces in the new Biannually is an article by Philip Pullman urging us to reclaim the empathy and kindness which has been lost in the modern world. Portrait of a Woman c. 1884-89 by Minnie Jane Hardman shows the kind of woman we would all like to be – she looks strong and thoughtful and compassionate, certainly not the kind of person who would pass by on the other side of the road.
‘Rest Centre and Communal Feeding’ is by an unknown artist, it’s in the archive of the WRVS, now RVS, which Persephone has always supported (because of the World War Two books in our list).
This is the original jacket for the American edition of The Oppermanns: the text describing the book is now up on our website here.
A new Biannually is being sent out this week. It may arrive within a day or two. Or it may take a week or two. But it’s on the way! And by Thursday, the official new publication date for the Spring/Summer books, we will have caught up on the backlog of orders that came in during April and the first two weeks of May. So, fear not, if you placed an order it won’t be long now. Meanwhile, this wonderful woman is on the cover of new Biannually. She is Mrs Ellen Sharples painted by her daughter Rolinda Sharples in c. 1830, who helped establish the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol by donating her own art collection.
The BBC documentary is called Becoming Matisse and ‘tells the tumultuous story of his early life. Matisse (b. 1869) picked up a paintbrush at the late age of 21, and the next 15 years saw him turn his back on the bourgeois aspirations of his parents and teachers’ (here). ‘L’Atelier Rouge (The Red Studio) dates from 1911 when Matisse had undeniably ‘become’ Matisse. It ‘features a small retrospective of his recent painting, sculpture, and ceramics, displayed in his studio. The artworks appear in colour and in detail, while the room’s architecture and furnishings are indicated only by negative gaps in the red surface. The composition’s central axis is a grandfather clock without hands – it is as if, in the oasis of the artist’s studio, time were suspended’ (here).
The Dessert: Harmony in Red was painted in 1908. ‘In his Paris studio with its windows looking out over a monastery garden, Matisse created one of his most important works of the period 1908-1913. The artist himself called this a “decorative panel” and it was intended for the dining room in the Moscow mansion of the Russian collector Sergey Shchukin [and is now in the Hermitage]. Matisse turned to a motif common in his painting: a room decorated with vases, fruits and flowers. Yet, as he wrote in 1908, “the basis of my thinking has not changed, but the very thinking has evolved and my means of expression have followed on.”‘ (here).
The Dance (1909) is an ode to life and has become an emblem of modern art. ‘It was commissioned with its matching painting Music by the influential Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. Characterised by its simplicity and energy, this ecstatic bacchanalia left a lasting mark on 20th-century art. Dance was painted at the height of the Fauvism aesthetic and embodies the emancipation from Western art’s traditional conventions of representation. It can be seen at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.’ ( In 1909 Virginia Woolf was 27. She kept a notebook that year and it would be an interesting lockdown task to compare the observations in this notebook with what was happening to painting in France.)
First shown at the Salon des Indépendents in 1906, Le Bonheur de Vivre seemed incomprehensible. It was greeted, recalled Matisse’s first dealer Berthe Weill, with “an uproar of jeers, angry babble and screaming laughter. . . . ” Yet in this painting Matisse had achieved a new kind of serenity, a harmony of unexpected elements, that he would draw on throughout his career’ (quoted here). ‘It is a large-scale painting (nearly 6 feet in height, 8 feet in width), depicting an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly coloured forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. Matisse used a landscape he had painted in Collioure to provide the setting for the idyll, but it is also influenced by ideas drawn from Watteau, Poussin, Japanese woodcuts, Persian miniatures, and 19th century Orientalist images of harems. The scene is made up of independent motifs arranged to form a complete composition’ (quoted here).
Unbelievably, we are now in the eighth week of lockdown. More about life at Persephone on the Letter tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Post is going to France – a tiny effort to make up for not being part of Europe Day on Saturday – the sadness! the humiliation! – and taking inspiration from an interesting (if rather odd) documentary on BBC2 called ‘Becoming Matisse’ (available for another two weeks in the UK but probably also available in other countries as it was clearly made for a wide audience). ‘Henri Matisse is one of the most beloved painters of the 20th century [who] wanted his art to transcend the darkness and violence of the modern age. This alone has often seen him written off as a populist crowd-pleaser, not really a serious artist. Yet what we now tend to forget is that at the beginning of his career, he was a rebel and a revolutionary – one of the first artists to tear up the rules of western art to bring it into the modern world … considered so shocking that he was ridiculed by everyone – by the critics and the public, even by many of his fellow artists.’ Woman with a Hat was painted in 1905, more details here. (The Forsterians amongst us might notice that 1905 was the year of Where Angels Fear to Tread. Just consider the opening sentence: ‘They were all at Charing Cross to see Lilia off’…’ This is an incredibly modern sentence. No novel before Angels would have begun like this.)
And finally (because tomorrow is a Bank Holiday in the UK, even though one of us will be in the shop sending out orders and the rest of us will be having the same kind of day as we’ve been having for the last six weeks): a painting (previously on the Persephone Letter) touched up by the brilliant artist Michael Alford. It’s Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo by Richard Samuel and it shows a group of women writers 250 years ago – in 1778 to be precise. They are Elizabeth Carter, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Griffith, Elizabeth Ann Linley and Charlotte Lennox. Now in masks.