Art Chowder September | October, Issue 17 | Page 39

I
n his Ophelia, a theme taken from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Millais’ painstaking observation of the plant life
along the riverbank recalls the botanical accuracy of the
central panel of the Ghent Altarpiece, where 32 species of
trees and herbaceous plants have been identified. 5
William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)
The Awakening Conscience
1853
oil on canvas
30 x 22”
Tate Gallery, London
William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience
applies an Eyckian attention to domestic minutiae and
pictorial symbolism. Aside from its compelling realism,
fascination with the Arnolfini Portrait (also called The
Arnolfini Wedding) arises from the mysterious choice of
elements in the couple’s chamber: the little dog, a single
lit candle in the chandelier, oranges on the window sill,
two pairs of shoes in the foreground and background.
Hunt’s symbolism is more transparent. No wedding ring
and the cat under the table, among other allusions, reveal
the woman’s precarious relationship with the man at the
piano. She is his “bird.” Her countenance was originally
so darkened at the revelation of her bleak future with
this transient paramour that the picture’s owner couldn’t
bear it, so Hunt changed her expression to a liberating
awakening to a better future than the destiny of a “fallen
woman.”
But there is a deeper, more complex affinity between
these energetic aspiring artists of the mid-nineteenth
century and the ancient Flemish master, one that,
paradoxically, also attests to the distance between them.
Van Eyck, a towering figure in the development of
European painting and a man of distinction in his own
time, was also an unsurpassed paragon of medieval
craftsmanship. The traditional workshop-apprentice
system was the order of things within which all the
masterworks of medieval art and technology came about:
Gothic cathedrals, stained glass, works by gold and
silversmiths, and illuminated manuscripts. Long before
the artists’ materials industry came along with highly
portable, ready-made squeeze tubes, apprentices were
required by necessity to make paint from available raw
materials. The Old Masters had relatively few pigments,
either derived from the earth or simple chemical
processes, and they were by no means easy to work with,
as anyone who has tried making oil paints with linseed oil
and dry pigments can attest. They dry at different rates,
refuse to stay in suspension, and have poor “shelf life.”
They may chemically react with one another. Some are
highly toxic (orpiment, also called King’s yellow, is an
arsenic compound), or fugitive in the light. In short, Old
World artists needed to balance and compensate for a
range of factors to paint in oils at all.
By the 19th century the master’s workshop had been replaced
by the academy; artists were no longer trained in the intimate
knowledge of their materials, and any direct links to the tradition
of craftsmanship were lost. Artists were left to speculate over how
the Old Masters achieved their results and began to experiment.
Whereas Van Eyck’s centuries-old paintings remain models of
preservation, paintings by former President of the Royal Academy
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) have made him a byword on
premature deterioration.
Collapsible metal tubes for artists’ paints appeared in 1842.
During the 19th century advances in industrial chemistry led to
a whole new range of brilliant colors. Whereas Van Eyck used
some dozen pigments in the Ghent Altarpiece, the Pre-Raphaelites
had at least 28 different pigments, and these are the only ones
verified by scientific analysis and the account books of one
supplier, (Roberson & Co.), among many.
September |October 2018
39