poliphilo

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They say (Suetonius says) that the Emperor Tiberius had his own Epstein island. It was called Capri.

There are those who have thought, "No that can't be true. No-one could be as depraved as Suetonius makes out". Among them was the doctor/writer Axel Munthe- who had a home on Capri and wrote a sort of autobiography called The Story of San Michele- which happens to be a favourite book of mine. He presents Tiberius as a philosopher king, too good for the dirty world of politics, who took to his island to think deep thoughts. When I was a kid there was a TV show called The Caesars, later eclipsed by I Claudius, which took the same line. Tiberius was played by Andre Morrell- now best known for his roles in Hammer horrors- and I still fondly remember the aura of kindliness and wisdom he gave off.

But now- after Epstein- what reason can we have for doubting Suetonius? People with unfettered power- emperors and suchlike canaille- will and do behave atrociously. And it serves nobody to be in denial.

Another example from history: In the 15th century there was a French nobleman called Gilles de Rais, who rode with Joan of Arc then retired to his castles in Brittany and- well- never mind. He got caught and made an example of, perhaps because he wasn't quite rich and powerful enough to deter the law. Or perhaps because he was an outlier- and not part of an organisation or brotherhood that knew how to protect its own.

It's become a cliche to say we live in dark times. No we don't. This is the end of the dark times. Light is being beamed into the secret places. And we need to pay attention and say "Enough!"

Picture Diary 118

1. Les Girls

2. She sees you

3. Rosa Mundi

4. Maria Aegyptiaca

5. Choose a muse

6. Behold a pale horse....

I don't think I want to write too much about the Epstein files. The revelations just get darker and darker. We need to acknowledge them and face up to them, because unacknowledged demons just keep hanging around, but I'm not going to do it here in a blog where I aim to keep things cheerful.

But I do just want to say that I'm less interested now in revelations about the sitting president (whose goose is cooked) and increasingly in what we're learning about the ruling class to which he sort of belongs. Uncle Jeffy knew everybody. A journo who has done the deep dive says his friends fall into three categories- or circles. There's the outer circle of people who had dealings with him and may have known who he was but didn't get deeply involved, there's the middle circle consisting of people who availed themselves of his hospitality (a euphemism) and then the inner circle who it may be inaccurate to call Satanists but who were certainly committing abominations. None of these people- from the lightly tainted to the deeply disgusting- seem to have known or cared that Uncle Jeffy was recording everything. Stupid or complacent- or are those two things the same? What all these people have in common is money. Lots and lots of it.

In property news the media this morning have been posting pix of Uncle Jeffy's New Mexico ranch. Ranch? No, more like an effing palace. Then we learn that his Paris flat (which has a red room, I wonder why) has just sold for $2 million under the original asking price; if I were the new owner I'd be going round smudging everything with sage. Finally it seems that somebody is offering guided tours of Little St. James Island. What fun!

A few more Copley portraits, then we're done.

There aren't so many famous faces in Copley's gallery- not like there are in Reynolds's or Lawrence's. They were the fashionable image makers. Copley scored some celebs in his early days in America- but once he moved to London he was no longer the big fish in the small pond. He picked up one or two royal commissions but his sitters were mostly of the middling sort.

Painting portraits provided a living but the artists would mostly have preferred to be doing something else. Copley, like Reynolds, wanted to do history paintings, Gainsborough wanted to do landscapes- but portraits, portraits, portraits was what the punters wanted. If a lot of 18th century portraits are kinda boring it's because the painters themselves were bored.

Anyway, at his best, Copley is damn good.

This first picture is from his American period. You can pick them out by their dark backgrounds. Once he moved to England he lightened up.

John_Singleton_Copley_-_Portrait_of_Gulian_Verplanck_(cropped).jpeg

John_Singleton_Copley_-_Portrait_of_Gulian_Verplanck_(cropped).jpeg

I think this is American too. I mean, that's such an American face. As he moved into the larger world he became more adventurous in the way he posed his subjects. Also his grasp of anatomy improved.

Mrs_Isaac_Smith_Elizabeth_Storer_by_John_Singleton_Copley_1769.jpeg

Mrs_Isaac_Smith_Elizabeth_Storer_by_John_Singleton_Copley_1769.jpeg

Here's a nice young man. Full length for a change.

John_Singleton_Copley_-_George_Boone_Roupell_-_1983.23_-_Detroit_Institute_of_Arts.jpeg

What a lively group portrait.! That'll be the longed for son and heir who's reaching up to his daddy- the bluff, red-faced English squire. The wife looks bored, like she wishes she were anywhere else. Aren't the kids done well!

Copley doesn't flatter, but he has a way of making his people look intelligent. I think you could have an interesting conversation with this sensible-looking lady. Again what an assured colourist he is: golden brown, red, pink- delicious! He's not a flashy painter but he knows what he's doing.

Mrs._John_Scollay_(Mercy_Greenleaf)_by_John_Singleton_Copley.jpeg

Mrs._John_Scollay_(Mercy_Greenleaf)_by_John_Singleton_Copley.jpeg

Finally one of Copley's ritzier clients. Admiral Lord Howe. You'll find him in the history books. What a great character study! Howe has seen it all and it has made him sad.....

John_Singleton_Copley_(1738-1815)_-_Admiral_Richard_Howe_(1726–1799),_1st_Earl_Howe_-_BHC2790_-_National_Maritime_Museum.jpeg

John_Singleton_Copley_(1738-1815)_-_Admiral_Richard_Howe_(1726–1799),_1st_Earl_Howe_-_BHC2790_-_National_Maritime_Museum.jpeg

I couldn't resist doing this.

West and Copley both painted pictures of the Death of the Earl of Chatham.

The Earl of Chatham- aka Pitt the elder- was the dominant British politician of his age. He suffered a seizure while speaking in the House of Lords- against the American rebels as it happens- and had to be taken home. His actual death occured- in bed- 34 days later but let's not quibble.

So let's compare the two versions.

Here's West

Benjamin_West_-_The_Death_of_Chatham_-_Google_Art_Project.jpeg

Benjamin_West_-_The_Death_of_Chatham_-_Google_Art_Project.jpeg

And here's Copley

The_Death_of_the_Earl_of_Chatham_by_John_Singleton_Copley.jpeg

Now personally I find the West rather flat and boring and the Copley- with its strong, dramatic lighting and masterly grouping of figures- a tour de force but I'll shut up now and let you make up your own minds.....

The other notable American painter to pursue a career in 18th century London was John Singleton Copley. He was less successful than West but the more interesting artist. Face painting was his thing and he had entered a crowded market. This was the great age of British portraiture and he was up against the marvelllously inventive Joshua Reynolds, the virtuostic Thomas Gainsborough and- towards the end of his life- the dashing Thomas Lawrence- plus a host of others. Hiis own work is greatly variable; he can be clumsy and he can be brilliant. You put your money down and you might receive a picture that evoked your wonderful intelligence, wit and beauty or one that made you look like taxidermy. The pity is that his real talent was for large scale, crowded figure compositions or "histories" and he got to paint so few. Histories were West's speciality but Copley was so much better at them-

But first a couple of portraits

The sitter here is Copley's step-niece- and maybe her being a family member freed him up to produce something untypically swishy and sexy. Bejasus, what a hat!

And now one of his best male portraits.

John_Singleton_Copley_-_Gilbert_DeBlois_-_1990.300_-_Museum_of_Fine_Arts.jpeg

John_Singleton_Copley_-_Gilbert_DeBlois_-_1990.300_-_Museum_of_Fine_Arts.jpeg

This is daring stuff, the artist is gazing up at his sitter and the face is in shadow. I call this taking risks. What results is an image of of a forceful, vibrant personality. And the colours, blue sky, plum-coloured coat, orange drape are just gorgeous.

And now to the "histories".

Watson and the Shark is the painting Copley took to London as his calling card. It illustrates an actual incident. Watson is the guy who's skinny-dipping. He survived with the loss of half a leg. There'd been nothing quite like it in the history of art and Copley never did anything quite like it again. Only a provincial could have pulled off something so outre and original. It's a heroic image, but it convinces in its heroism. You believe it. Every pose and gesture makes sense. It's dramatic not melodramatic- and it looks forward some fifty years to the romanticism of Gericault and Delacroix.

Also that shark is bloody scary.

privateimagesb38ce6b38ce693-ba56-4953-9c2c-d8139fe4b059__0.jpeg

privateimagesb38ce6b38ce693-ba56-4953-9c2c-d8139fe4b059__0.jpeg

The second is a battle picture. The Death of Major Peirson. Battle pictures are terribly difficult to pull off. Battles are chaotic- but the artist has somehow to produce a composition with lots of people doing lots of different things which holds together, makes sense, is artistically satisfying but doesn't look like a theatrical tableau. And this is how you do it! Can I think of any battle picture that's better than this? No, frankly, I can't.

As with Watson and the Shark we're looking at something that really happened, though Copley has telescoped the action- which is permissible. The French sent a small force to capture the island of Jersey. They surprised the British governor in his bed and he surrendered. But Major Peirson, the youthful commander of the English garrison, fell upon the French, chased them through the streets of St Helier and overwhelmed them. Peirson was shot dead at the very beginning of the action, but his servant Pompey, the man in the fabulous hat, took immediate revenge by shooting the shooter. In Copley's picture It's all happening at once. The faces of the officers surrounding the gloriously martyred Peirson are proper portraits and I understand that some of the buildings in the background are still standing and recognisable from his portrayal of them.

Anyway, here it is.....

The Lewes Meeting House has a copy of this print. It'll be worth a few bob. They have it leaning against a wall, out of sight, out of mind. I love old prints and if I weren't a fine upstanding citizen I'd have waited until no-one was looking and added it to my collection.

mw65663_800x657.jpg.webp

It's called Mr West and his family. The original was painted by Mr West and commemorates a visit of his elderly male relatives to see his new-born second son. The two old gents are Quakers wearing Quaker gear- which is presumably why the Lewes Meeting House aquired it.

Mr West is Benjamin West, the American painter. Born in Pennsylvania, he studied in Italy, as one did, then moved to England where he prospered, becoming court painter to George III and the second president of the Royal Academy, in succession to Joshua Reynolds. He seems to have been an agreeable man. When the American colonies rebelled against the mother country he kept a discreet silence and wouldn't be drawn.

He is best known for big, splashy paintings of historical events. He did Bible stories, Roman history, medieval history and modern times. and was prolific in producing them. Sadly they are not very much to modern taste, being theatrical, melodramatic and often wildly inaccurate. If you set aside your prejudices it is possible to admire them for their energy and imagination. The best known of them, and one of the most carefully considered is his Death of Wolfe. Wolfe was the general who captured Quebec from the French- thus securing Canada for the British Empire. I do rather like it. As West's histories go it is really quite restrained. Wolfe was famous and singular among officers for carrying a rifle- just like a common soldier- and there it is discarded at his feet. West has done his research.

Scrolling through the reproductions of West's work on wikipedia I found a number of rather charming little paintings of everyday subjects which look as if they were done quickly, freely and possibly even for fun. In the first we have some gentlemen in a punt out fishing with what looks rather like a sea battle going on in the far distance. In the second we see some sturdy British peasants reaping corn and canoodling in the vicinity of Windsor Castle while some glittery gentlefolk look on.

Benjamin_West_-_Gentlemen_Fishing_-_Google_Art_Project.jpeg

Benjamin_West_-_Gentlemen_Fishing_-_Google_Art_Project.jpeg

Harvesting_at_Windsor_by_Benjamin_West,_PRA.jpeg

Underneath the water
Six feet deep
There lies Hitler
Fast asleep.

Child's skipping rhyme as recorded by Charles Causeley.

I dreamed I was in the Chancellery at the end of World War II. The papers the Nazis had left behind would need to be sorted through. Then Hitler emerged from wherever it was he'd been hiding and sat down with us.

So many of the great men and women of the past never died in the way history records but faked their deaths and were seen afterwards by "reliable" witnesses. Jim Morrison is alive and working as an electrician in L.A. Tsar Alexander II went off and became a Holy Man. Joan of Arc married a nobleman. As for Jesus- well, need I go on? In the case of Hitler there are still Argentinian country people who remember the elderly German chap who lived with his younger wife on a farm in the hills and used to receive visits from seemingly important folk in big sleek automobiles. There are photos. The moustache has gone. His health wasn't good and he died in the 1960s.

Perhaps the truthiest truth is that there are multiple timelines, billions of them- and there's a certain amount of leakage between them (viz the Mandela effect). In one timeline Hitler committed suicide, In another he was arrested by the Russians, in a third he has rescued. Perhaps there's even one in which he suffered the fate imagined for him in Tarentino's Inglorious Basterds. Why live out only one version of one's life? Let's rather extract every last drop of juice from the human experience.

The latest "great man" to be both alive and dead is Jeffery Epstein. He wasn't suicided, he was spirited away and is currently living out his life in a luxury villa in Tel Aviv. A great number of people believe this to be the case. Winesses have emerged.....

Picture Diary 117

1. The orator

2. Ludwig jumps for joy

3. Jupiter

4. Eco, eco Aradia!

5. Well swum, swan

6. Weary-eyed

The Epstein material is bewildering. Who can possibly take it all in?

Powerful people from around the world were emailing Uncle Jeffy and asking them to "fix it" for them.

(That, by the way, is a reference to a creepy old BBC show for kids hosted by Jimmy Savile- the British Epstein)

Elon emails Uncle Jeffy to scrounge an invite to one of his really wild parties.

Someone in the Indian government emails Uncle Jeffy to ask him to set up meetings for P.M. Modi with high-ups in the US administration.

Some dude in David Cameron's office asks Uncle Jeffy if please, please, please can he arrange for him and his mate to meet Woody Allen.

It's bonkers.

Who set Uncle Jeffy up? Where did his money come from? Who did he answer to?

The Quakers in Lewes have a meeting for worship and shared lunch on the first Wednesday of the month. We thought we'd be neighbourly and join them.

Their Meeting House dates from 1784. It has been adapted and enlarged but the heart of it is much as it used to be. There's a burial ground out front which is now a secluded garden where people come to eat their lunchtime sandwiches. The headstones are typical- small, uniform, hoop shaped stones with nothing on them but names and dates. The oldest I could decipher carries the date 1797 but some may be older. The burial ground predates the building by nearly 100 years.

I looked up from the screen and the sky was violet. It only stayed that way for a few moments- and the it was blue. Or should I say "grey-blue". Ach, the colours of these northern skies are so transitory, so fugitive, so subtle. Also they bleed into one another. At this instant the sky immediately over the hills is a sort of dusty pink which gradually modulates into duck-egg blue the higher your eyes climb. Can I say exactly where pink ends and blue begins? Absolutely not.

And since I wrote the last paragraph, just moments ago, the pink has modulated into a kind of yellowish-grey- a shade for which I don't have a single word. Maybe "magnolia" would come close.....

Clearly the current president is all over the Epstein files. But it's not just him. It's the whole gang.

All over the files like flies.

Politicians, elder statesmen, tech lords, CEOs, entertainers, power brokers, royalty.....

Not just a few bad apples but the whole fucking barrel......

They reckon themeselves untouchable, but are they?

Every day- in the dawn- flocks of starlings fly through our air space, heading inland. Then in the evening they follow the same flight path back towards the sea. My guess is they spend the night roosting on- or rather under- the pier; all those struts and girders like a man-made forest.

We were talking about the sea at the lunch party on Saturday and I dug a quote from Swinburne from the memory banks. Yesterday I looked it up and found I'd misquoted.

Swinburne wrote:

"I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea"

And I had rememered it as

"I will go back to the great grey mother,
Mother of gods and men, the sea."

Actually I think my version is an improvement. The sea isn't "sweet", "grey" is much better- more evocative, and I think "mother of gods and men" has the edge over the original.....

There were five of us- and two dogs- sitting round after a big lunch, and Jacky suggested me should all tell our life stories. It was like the set up for an Edwardian novel or short story collection- Conrad or Buchan- except that this wasn't happening in "The Club" but in our front room and we weren't "old Africa hands" but four gals and me- who, on these occasions, figure as an honorary gal. So, five mini-autobiographies. The dogs weren't called upon though Molly, who is a Roumanian rescue dog, would have had a tale to tell.

It took my mind off the war I'm expecting to break out any time now in the Middle-East between (initially) Iran, Israel and the USA.

And stopped me thinking about those photos of Prince Andrew (I refuse to pretend he's not a member of the Royal Family) down on all fours beside a young woman who is lying prone on the parquet floor of some horrible mansion- and the Epsteiny stuff about the Pres and Bill Gates-...

Or about the two dead in Minneapolis.....

By the way, have you heard Springsteen's protest song, Streets of Minneapolis? It's like a return to the glory days- the old lion awake and roaring.....

Hypnagogic images are the ones that come to you when you're falling asleep and hypopompic images are the ones that come when you're waking up. I just asked Google because I can never remember which is which.

I always enjoy them.

Sometimes you get snatches of dream action or conversation. Sometimes you get a mental picture that flashes up and is gone. They're very hard to catch hold of. Try too hard and you risk kicking yourself back into a fully waking state.

This morning I saw some town in the middle East as it would have been at some time in the past- just a few square white-washed buildings in a rocky valley. Then I saw it as it would be now, with the skyline beyond the valley full of high-rises. The whole vision lasted about a second- or less. It was unconnected to anything before or after.

Where on Earth- or out of the Earth- do these things come from?

I believe we've had US presidents quite as wicked as the present one- perhaps wickeder- but we've never had one who was anything like as disreputable. Others lied but never this transparently, others waged war and overthrew foreign governments but generally either secretly or with plausible pretexts, others were quite as amoral but managed to keep their financial and sexual misbehaviour under wraps. No earlier president threw his weight around like a third world dictator. No earlier president was quite as stupid.....

And no earlier president did anything like as much damage to his country's image in the world. All the others either built or sustained the American Empire. This one has destroyed it.

I dreamed the black silhouette of a man identified as my father was trying to get in through the bedroom window. After which a wild black thing with claws leaped onto the bed. Oddly enough I wasn't scared. My thoughts were more "This is all very inconvenient." I assumed the thing with claws was the cat and I'd have to get up and sort him out. And then my waking brain told me that the thing with claws was very much bigger than the cat. Also silent- and Marlowe is one of the noisiest things on four legs. "O good," I concluded, "I don't have to do anything about any of this...."

I like the story (which I believe is true though I don't insist on you believing me) about the traveller on the inner planes who met an ET and asked them if they'd ever had an incarnation on Earth- to which the ET replied "I wouldn't stoop so low."

Thiis sounds contemptuous but probably wasn't. The ET- insensitive to nuance because English is not their first language- would have done a mind meld and extracted the words they thought appropriate from the Earthling's memory banks- and all they were actually saying was they had no intention of undertaking such a difficult assignment. Earth is known through all the worlds as a particulary difficult planet- exceptionally low vibration, exceptionally low everything else apart from opportunities for learning and growth- and these are exceptionally high. The tougher the game the greater the reward- and those of us who come down here and submit to Earth conditions are acknowledged as stupidly brave....

I also like the story (almost certainly true) about the four year old who told his mother, "I'm bored with this reality; I can't fly, I don't have X-ray vision, I can't read minds....."

I thought I'd have another go at having AI conjure me up an old master. I asked for a Leonardo Virgin and Child again but it can't get the Mona Lisa out of its machine mind so I went sideways and asked for a Raphael Madonna.

It gave me this.

"But that's not the Virgin Mary," I thought,

And then a moment later..." O, I see....."

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poliphilo

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Dark Times?

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