Monday 9th December - The Gods and Their Makers

 Ahhh, bliss, a day at home. Technically, I will be working from home today, but honestly a day of sofa, blanket and peace sounds like heaven. I have the dog under the blanket with me and so I will crack on with today's cats...

Jennifer found her new blue-tooth headphones were very warming...

Today's artist is one who is not as famous as everyone thought they would be.  Mr Walker had an episode of the Film programme with Barry Norman recorded on a video tape which we watched years later and were frankly puzzled by the contents. It was called 'Film '89' and in it, Norman confidently predicted the biggest and most famous actor of the 1990s was going to be Tom Berenger.  There was also Tom Cruise, who might do okay, but it was definitely Berenger who would be the superstar.  Now, the splendid Mr Berenger has done fine and will no doubt be remembered as the great actor he is but I don't believe our Barry got that prediction exactly right, not because Mr Cruise is a better actor but because fame doesn't work to any sort of predictable pattern of talent.  Sometimes it can come down to accessibility.  Trust me, I am going somewhere with this, as it brings me to the case of Edwin Longsden Long...

The Gods and Their Makers (1878) Edwin Longsden Long

Edwin Long was an absolute Victorian art superstar. When we talk about how women are written out of the history of art, Eddie Long reminds me that actually some men are too because modern eyes don't get it or it doesn't fit in our narrative or maybe we already have an artist in our art story who does what they do so we don't need another.  If Mr Walker did not work at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, possibly I would have remained ignorant of Edwin Longsden Long too, but Merton Russell-Cotes was so convinced that Long was the artist of the nineteenth century, he invested hard in some frankly enormous canvases. So, what went wrong?

Sacred to Pasht (1888)

It's a puzzler and if I was to make a prediction, I think Eddie will have his time again.  Starting with the reasons why I think he fell from fashion we have to go back to 1891. He had the misfortune to die during an pandemic, therefore when loads of famous people are dropping dead, we don't have the moment for them in which we wallow in what was great about them.  Arguably the same thing happened with Tim Brooke-Taylor during the 2020 pandemic and Farah Fawcett, who died on the same day as Michael Jackson in 2009 and therefore was a side-note, which is rude for someone who was so iconic.  It seems a little thing, but Long's death in 1891 was just one of many on that day, so he gets a mention but then we move on to the next tragic death in the same article.

The Illustrated London News ran a piece on him a week or so after his death which is very helpful to see how he was regarded by his peers.  Even Ruskin had good things to say about him, but the feeling was that he could be a little formulaic, or rather, he found what he was good at and stuck to that.  He was an Orientalist and favoured Egypt and so many of his works leaned into this.  He was respected for being 'accurate' - in the eyes of the Victorians that is - and it was sometimes joked that his work would be better displayed in the Anthropological Society than the art gallery. This and his Bible studies are what he was best known for, although he was also a fine portraitist - on Art UK there are an extensive collection of old white blokes looking thoughtful, which I grant you isn't gripping.  There is also the problem of the sheer scale of his works, for example this one...

Anno Domini (1883)

This picture is 4 metres long.  That is ridiculously huge, and in reproduction you don't get the full force of the piece which is amazing.  To be honest though, which other museum would like to borrow this?  How on earth are you going to move it? If a retrospective of Long's work was ever in the offing who has the room to house more than a few and how on earth would you get them there? On that front, Long was not playing the long game.  Recognition comes with exhibitions now and he doesn't travel well. On to the good points...

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1866)

Undoubtedly, many of the subjects in Long's paintings are not what we are feeling these days - there are Babylonian marriage markets, a lot of Bible and fairly nudey classical girls - but when Long needed to show a person of colour, he seems to have used models of colour which is appropriate and unusual.  In his Jephthah cycle, he used Princess Helen Rundheer Singh Ahluwalia. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the woman bending over is Fanny Eaton and I'd love to know who the chap on the right is. I wonder how many of his fellow artists were going out the way to find models of different ethnicities? We celebrate the ones who do, so Long should count among their number. His paintings are also very good - he's an accomplished painter who was celebrated when he became an Associate of the Royal Academy and when his pictures were displayed, it was reported in the newspapers as an event, like seeing a film today.  As Anno Domini is 16 feet long and 8 feet wide, it might take you a couple of hours to see it all...

So, back to his cats, and as he liked a bit of Egypt, I suppose it is unsurprising he created some cat paintings. In The Gods and Their Makers, again a whopper at over 2 meters long, we can see a group of women creating the figures of their Gods and seemingly having a smashing time. Is it an accurate portrayal of life in Ancient Egypt? Of course not, but it was removed enough from the Victorian romanticised imaginings to make Long's contemporaries believe it was a factual depiction, which seems odd looking at it now. It seems about as accurate as Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, but it is an evolution in intention, if not execution, if you know what I mean. The lasses in the workshop are creating figures for the temples - I love the girl holding the cat model for the sculptor.  There are kittens playing and lots of laughter, which is rather lovely. There is a bit of a tension in the title - Gods are being created, which is an unusual way of looking at it.  This can be taken as a remark on organised religion on the whole, or religions in the past.  Ha, look at their foolish religion based on lots of gods and cats and stuff! Thank goodness our organised religion is sensible with giant arks, people turning into salt and stuff. Moving on...

Chairman Meow, King of all he sleeps on...

I think most cats would agree with the sentiment of Sacred to Pasht and the fact that they should be worshipped. The Chairman no doubt feels that things have slipped a bit in the last few thousand years and he now has to wait for me to stop typing, get up and feed him rather than just being there waiting in case he fancied some food. Outrageous.

I'm not sure how we are going to create a retrospective of Long's work as where on earth would you house it and how would you get the art there? I don't think Eddie was thinking it through, but maybe he was just happy painting his huge canvases that adorn townhalls and galleries without a thought for the future. I know that one of his paintings is travelling to an exhibition in the future where I hope he will be appreciated and people will look beyond his subject matter to the talent and methodology.

I'll see you tomorrow.