The house with no kitchen or fireplace

 

The facade of Paycocke's House: built 1509, but all the oriel windows, and much of the highly detailed carving, date from early in the 20th century

Paycocke’s House in Coggeshall, Essex, is one of the best-known Tudor houses in England. It was owned by a wool merchant, Thomas Paycocke, who made his fortune from selling undyed wool. So I was fascinated to see this demonstration of a wealthy Tudor merchant’s lifestyle. But on arrival, my response was a number of questions. 

Like many old houses, this one had been altered. I’ve nothing against adapting old houses to suit current needs, but the biggest alterations took place around 1900, when Noel Buxton made a lot of changes, including adding fireplaces to the main rooms, and moving the main staircase, and more or less rebuilding the front of the house, adding oriel windows, for example. All of these changes were made to give the appearance of putting the house back to its original state. To the present-day visitor, it’s difficult to imagine the house in its original layout, and at a first glance, the front looks all of a piece. But, of course, the reality is, as with so many English parish churches, that what you are looking at is as much a Victorian restorer’s idea of what medieval (or Tudor) looked like, rather than the original. None of those oriel windows existed in 19th-century photographs. Inside, there are beautifully carved bressummer beams, usually found over a fireplace – but none of them is in the original position. All the fireplaces are new.

Those fireplaces intrigued me. Thomas Paycocke used this house as his main showroom, where he met clients, many of them from continental Europe. Indeed, in the main room, visitors can see the table is set for a meal. Yet we learn that Paycocke’s house had neither a kitchen, nor any fireplaces! Records of tenants in the early 20th century report how cold the house was, and it must have been similar for Paycocke in his day. How did he not have a fire, or any kitchen? How can you live in a house with neither? According to the National Trust website, Thomas didn’t live there, but had another house in the town. Nonetheless, he let his son, John, live there. There was originally a third storey, but it’s difficult to imagine fires at that level and not on the ground floor.

Medieval halls had a central fire with a hole in the roof, but I don’t imagine any newly built Tudor dwelling trying to replicate that heating system. So what did Thomas Paycocke do for heat, and what did he do to provide food for his clients? He certainly had the money – he left the equivalent of over £500,000 in bequests in his will.

Sadly, Paycocke’s House raises more questions than answers, and it doesn’t seem to offer a very good example of what everyday Tudor living was really like. Although the later inhabitants are certainly of interest, the reason we visit the house – to get a glimpse of how people actually lived – is not, sadly, something the current house can provide.

He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, by Robert A. Johnson (1974)

 

Parsifal and Kundry, from the 1889 Bayreuth production of Wagner's Parsifal

With a title like that, perhaps it was asking for trouble for me to try reading this bookHe was. But I was struck by the idea of using a medieval epic to present views of masculinity. The author, Robert Johsnon, “a Jungian analyst in private practice in San Diego”, proposes to use the Grail myth, interpreted via Jungian psychology, to explain how men behave. Specifically, he uses the Chretien de Troyes version of Parsifal. I couldn’t resist reading about Parsifal, so I sat down to read this short book (just 84 pages, just 25,000 words). I should have realised it was an unlikely achievement. In that short space, Mr Johnson proposed to use Jungian psychology to explain the male psyche via the Grail story, and to do it in a contemporary Christian context (the book originated as a series of lectures at an episcopal church in San Diego in 1969).

I can’t deny, I am fascinated by the medieval tales such as Parsifal. They tell such a simple yet unintelligible story, so that they cry out for an explanation, and

There is no denying, the prose has a kind of comfort about it. As readers, we enjoy being carried along with the author’s argument, when it appears so sensible. One trick is that the author occasionally interjects a common-sense aside, for example, on page 24 he wonders where Parsifal got his sword from “I am very curious. I would very much like to know where Parsifal’s first sword came from.” That seems a very straightforward question, just what we would ask.

Yet this book sold in such astonishing numbers – over 100,000 copies sold, states the cover. How do you sell so many copies? Well, don’t let the reader have any doubt. The Bible, medieval chivalric epics, the nature of the psyche, have multiple interpretations, but despite the multiplicity of subjects tackled in this short book, the author remains sublimely confident that his interpretation is right. His text mixes therapy, Jung, the Christian Bible, and medieval epics, and, do you know, they all have the same message! It’s remarkable. In fact, in reading the book, I was gobsmacked. Have attitudes changed so much in the last 50 years? But let’s go through the book and identify just where my jaw dropped.

Here are some examples of the author’s tone of certainty:

•  “All men are Fisher Kings” (p10)
•  “Read a typical modern novel and you will find that it revolves around the subject of the lostness and the loneliness of the alienated man … We are all wounded and it shows” (p12)
•  “It is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him. A man must consent to this.” [p15]

One imagines Mr Johnson the practising psychiatrist is always right: “In my consulting room a man will sometimes bark at me when I prescribe something strange or difficult for him. ‘What do you think I am? A fool? And I say, ‘Well, it would help.’ For it is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him.” [p15]

And, surprise, Jung is also always right. According to Johnson, every boy goes through a “Fisher King” moment, when he blunders into something that is too big for him. Except, in Jung’s case, his Fisher King moment was not his fault at all – his teacher didn’t believe that Jung could have written the assignment he submitted in class. “There’s one paper here that is by far the best, but it is obviously a forgery.” That’s not a Fisher King moment, that is a piece of hagiography.  This anecdote could have come from the Bible: Jung as Christ.

Everywhere, there is the astounding confidence of the author. He tells us he uses the Chretien version of Parsifal, not the version by Wolfram von Eschenbach, because it “is simpler, more direct, and nearer to the unconscious”. What enables him to make such a judgement?

Another curious technique of the author is to assign unusual meanings to common words. He makes a distinction between “emotion”, “feeling”, and “mood” (which he uses as a synonym for depression). For the author, “enthusiasm”, means “filled with God”. This reassignment of natural language demands a kind of compliance from the reader: if I say it means X, it does so.

But the Parsifal story, you say! It cries out for interpretation. The Fisher King (Amfortas in Wagner’s opera) has been wounded, but his wounds will never heal. He seems to have been wounded sexually – somewhere in the thigh.  His wound will only be healed by the intervention of a fool.

Nonetheless, Johnson’s interpretation of the story is highly questionable. For example, Parsifal covets the Red Knight’s armour and horse, and so he kills the Red Knight. Is this wrong? Certainly not, according to Johnson. “The Red Knight represents that strong, virile, masculine stuff a boy needs so desperately … That is the fierce competitiveness of adolescence and masculinity in general. Almost every boy has to win from somebody else.” [p25]. This is enough to send half or more of the male population into a nosedive because they were not victorious in their last fight.

Even stranger, Johnson mingles the Christian fixation on chastity, with the knightly ideal: “the only proper pursuit for a  knight [is] he must never seduce or be seduced by a woman.” [p28] I seem to remember that the chivalric epics accepted and acknowledge sexual passion – but not in this interpretation. In Johnson’s book, “it is terribly important to make this distinction between the outer, flesh-and-blood woman and a man’s inner feminine quality, and to keep inner laws differentiated from outer laws” [p31]. Whatever that means.

The book is a farrago of “masculine” and “feminine” behaviour. The author repeatedly talks about the need for men to discover their feminine side. To be honest, I’m more interested in identifying my overtly male side and noticing in 2026 how many males seem incapable of relating to other males except by a handful of acceptable male encounters (football, the gym, the  pub).

In the introduction, no fewer than four women are credited with turning the author’s talk into a text for publication. Clearly, the author himself, who presumably wrote some notes for his lecture, couldn’t do the work. He was hard at work writing the sequel to this book, called (inevitably) "She". Or perhaps he was just too busy acknowledging his masculine side to do the feminine work of typing and transcribing.  

A visit to Bath

 

A view from the Holburne Museum: a nicer view outside than in?

Everyone looks forward to a visit to Bath! We all know that for a few years, notably when Jane Austen was writing, Bath was the English centre of pleasure and entertainment. Yet, somehow, that moment of grandeur last for less than a century. John Wood, the architect, created his plan for the development of Bath in 1725, and apparently, already by the 1790s building had slowed; Bath was being replaced by Brighton and Cheltenham as a destination for the rich.

But a visit at the weekend showed that Bath today is again a highly popular place for pleasure. I lost count of the number of weddings and hen parties being celebrated in the streets. We walked in Sydney Gardens, which, apparently, are the only remaining pleasure gardens in Bath, and there were plenty of people around, but the looked more like residents than visitors; the visitors were in the centre, seeing the attractions.

My visit was of course limited. I mostly saw museums (the American Museum, the Holburne Museum, and the Victoria Art Gallery), and had dinner at the former Empire Hotel, now rebranded as The Architect. But there was no doubt that the centre was very lively. Cambridge, where I live, is a city full of tourists, but few of them visit the city for entertainment in the evening. In contrast, Bath seems to come alive as the sun goes down.

What was also noticeable was the absence of traffic in the largely pedestrianized centre. But perhaps Bath was not entirely cosmopolitan: at 10 o’clock in the evening, our formal restaurant was almost empty.

Is Bath a centre of taste?

If there was taste on display, it was from many years ago, and with very different attitudes. The Victoria Art Gallery, despite its fascinating collection, looked as though it hadn’t had any funding for the last 50 years. Paintings were stacked three-high in the one big room. There were some children’s activities laid out, but I didn’t see any children doing them. The ‘shop’ was dedicated to selling tickets to a paid exhibition on the ground floor (the permanent collection is free access, although this isn’t made very clear).

 

The American Museum

The premise of the American Museum, founded by (American) Dallas Pratt and (Briton) John Judkyn, was, to coincide with their vision of American history, based around the Founding Fathers and white settlers. Pratt and Judkyn were antique collectors and dealers, so they had every reason to enjoy celebrating American-made furniture and objects.

But, of course, that comfortable, long-established vision of US history, taught to generations of schoolchildren, has been completely side-stepped by the belated recognition of colonialism and slavery, the admission that Native Americans, and African Americans, were almost entirely written out of the history presented in the Museum. This raises a fundamental problem: history books are rewritten with each generation, but the Museum’s collections are almost entirely what how the white settlers lived and what they collected. Now, the collections don’t tell the story the curators would like to tell, and worse, what is on display is offensive simply by what it leaves out. Overall, this is a disaster for the museum organizers: a tone of almost self-congratulation has switched to a place for apology. Unsurprisingly, the permanent collection is full of apologetic captions (which are easier to change than the objects themselves) mentioning, for example the Native Americans who once occupied the lands shown in the Puritan and Shaker rooms, for example. Temporary exhibitions, of course, are much easier to change, and the exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts is a stunning contrast to the permanent collection. These quilts were made in Alabama by descendants of slaves. Not only that, the quilts are quite simply stunning.

 

The Holburne Museum

The permanent collection at the Holburne Museum has never been very exciting. Perhaps it’s my taste, but large-scale portraits, even by Gainsborough, to enable the rich visitors to Bath to congratulate themselves are not very exciting – even when dressed up as a Bacchante:

 

Perhaps part of the problem is that the spectacular house that houses the collection was not designed as an art gallery, and, despite all the changes made to accommodate visitors, the space still works very poorly. The ballroom was converted to a gallery by Reginald Blomfield, but the main room has too many windows to make it suitable for pictures. You can’t see the pictures, and the view out of the window is too good; I chose the view. Unfortunately, the 2011 extension, by Eric Parry Architects, an ostentatious building, simply adds more small rooms that aren’t connected to each other. Now there are two separate staircases and two separate sets of small rooms on the second floor.

Sadly, the permanent collection isn’t much to write home about, even after the addition of the Schroder collection of Renaissance objects. Holburne and Schroder both collected in many different art forms, with the result risking being an incoherent muddle. The museum administrators acknowledge this when they created a display of lots of the Holburne collection in one “room”. 

There is no attempt to tell you what each of the pieces is; it’s just an impression of lots of stuff. If it were my grandmother’s house, that I had to deal with after she had died, I’d get rid of everything and start again. Worse, it turns out that Holburne was heavily involved in slavery.

You pay £16.50 to enter the museum, with no concessions for pensioners. For that, you are treated to the collections of two very rich families. You also get a glitzy website and lots of marketing (invitations to become a member on most screens). In the basement, a £2.5m development has the Schroder family collection of Renaissance objects – the vast majority of which are shiny. The main idea behind this collection is, apart from a handful of exquisite portraits, to display the Schroder family’s wealth. Admittedly, the Renaissance loved rare stones and expensive objects, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow the Renaissance slavishly and simply admire this family’s wealth.

There was an interesting exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century prints, which in highlighted the  lack of excitement from the permanent collection.

 

Is Bath worth a visit?

Galleries and museums are stuck what the collection they have. Probably a better experience of how it felt to be in Bath during its heyday could be obtained by visiting different locations, such as the Royal Crescent, and Roman baths, and the Assembly Rooms. Nonetheless, I think more could be done with each of the three venues I visited.  

Miss Marjoribanks, by Mrs Oliphant (1865-66)

 

Margaret Oliphant: a photograph from 1860 (public domain

My first impression was how accomplished a writer Mrs Oliphant is. Highly complex sentences, very precisely described scenes; but further reading suggests there might not be much behind the artful syntax.

What people will say about the book today is that it is by a woman writer and features a largely female cast. Lucilla has the ability to twist all the males she meets around her little finger; she is certainly the most dominant character. At the same time, you could reduce the plot to one sentence: which man will Lucilla choose to marry? After all her efforts to become the centre of the social universe of the small town of Carlingford, it appears she will dutifully take her place as a second-rank citizen. There are vague references to good work that she will do after her wedding, but it is acknowledged that the married state is the only truly desirable outcome.

The lack of characterisation for the two main male characters is astonishing. We know nothing about Mr Cavendish or Mr Arbuthnot, the two prospective suitors, nor of Tom, her cousin. Very strangely, he is dismissed at the start of the book as hopelessly uncoordinated and incompetent, yet at the end he is, remarkably, the most suitable choice of husband – an immense about-turn that is never satisfactorily explained.

One of the major characters is an archdeacon, but his speech and manner suggest anything but a clerical background. Perhaps he is an imposter – he does not appear to wear a dog collar, but a shirt and tie. When confronted for details of his dealings with Mrs Mortimer, he shows anything but Christian charity. Yet a few pages later, he is dutifully lined up to marry her. As for Mr Cavendish, it is never quite clear what the nature of his “crime” was.

When I read the word “pre-Raphaelite”, I was impressed, but it would appear that Oliphant uses the word to mean any painter. There is similarly loose language with the terms “Broad Church” and “Low Church”. It’s clear they are used to distinguish social levels, which is fine, but the term Broad Church is used very frequently, without, I think, always being clear about what is implied.

Oliphant drags out the plot – many pages go by without any precision about what actually happened in the past. At the same time, some events happen so fast they are difficult to believe. The book is organised in two parts, separated by some ten years. The first (Iarger) part comprises Lucilla establishing her reputation, which seems to take place within a couple of years, making her no older than 19. During that time, she has been able to set up a school for the poor, with a school mistress, and a well-established garden, as well as being the major society hostess of the town.

There is a lot of repetition, not simply like Dickens as a kind of leitmotiv, but repeating details of story and attitude. It wouldn’t be difficult to cut 50+ pages and make the novel more powerful.

There is some resemblance to E F Benson: small town society and its controversies, determinedly removed from politics and current affairs, and of little interest to anyone outside the town. Unlike Benson, Oliphant has less humour, so the going it slow, at times, but the rise and rise of Lucilla, the doctor’s daughter, as she creates her salon, is enjoyable to follow.

Keeping out of politics by saying “he is the right man for Carlingford” makes it easier for the writer but convenient for the novelist – no need to take sides. If you believe Mrs Oliphant, the choice of MP was made without reference to any party politics.

 All in all, an interesting a readable novel, but not much of an assessment of the society around her, and a woeful plot.

Beyond the Arabian Nights: an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens

 

A copy of Delacroix, Femmes d'Alger, 1867, by Henri Fantin-Latour

I should have got the message from the title of the exhibition, the impression I got was that it would have major works from the Louvre’s world-class collection of Islamic art.

For the first time ever, a remarkable group of pieces from the Department of Islamic Arts at the Louvre Museum will be displayed at the Louvre-Lens. Among them are two exceptional masterpieces: the Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon. This unprecedented loan is complemented by artworks from French and Belgian collections.

I like the way the Louvre is thanked for its “unprecedented loan” to the Louvre-Lens, in other words, to itself. However, Islamic art was outnumbered in this show by French works. The exhibition focused on European (mainly French) responses to Islam, or imaginations of Islam. This kind of exhibition (which we can call Orientalism, although the term has been extensively criticized for its ambiguity) is now quite a commonplace for art exhibitions. Said’s book, Orientalism, dates from 1978, and there were exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1984, The Metropolitan in 2004, and many others. I was astonished to discover the Metropolitan was lining up a new Orientalism exhibition from June 2026.

Isn’t it somewhat colonial to continue to focus on Western artists and their response to Islamic art, rather than look at the Islamic works themselves? What I saw was a number of exhibits that by current standards would never be shown in public, for their sexism and racism. The Louvre has a major collection of Islamic art (in fact, there is a catalogue of the Louvre Islamic collection available to view in this exhibition, although it is not on sale in the Louvre-Lens bookshop), comprising over 14,000 objects, displayed in Paris with a dedicated Islamic gallery only opened in 2012. It wouldn’t be difficult to have an exhibition of some of these pieces in Lens, and to have an exhibition of Islamic art per se. Instead, this show gives the impression not just of tolerating old attitudes, but even encouraging, condoning, or even paradoxically celebrating them. Why are we being shown stereotypical attitudes that are today widely condemned, via artworks of little quaility? For example, you can be pretty sure that any commercial film adaptation of The Arabian Nights dating from the 1960s or earlier would have primitive attitudes, and the clips seem to confirm it. Was it really necessary to include them? Are these among the 300 “masterpieces” on show at this exhibition? This show looks, for the most part as if the curators looked in the dusty archives to see what wasn’t being shown, but was easy to use. Even when you think a major work has been included – there are works by Matisse and by Delacroix – you then discover that the version on show of Delacroix’s Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is a copy, rather than the original. Other works, such as a bronze Napoleon riding a horse, seem to have little relevance to the show’s theme.

Instead, we had displays of what the museum already holds – lots of Orientalist works from the last 150 years, much of it displayed out of context. For example, there were the remains of a Paris collector’s apartment, with Islamic objects – but the like so much else in the exibition, these objects were included because a French collector had purchased them. Imagine a show in Saudi Arabia of French art that only included pieces bought by Arab collectors; it would not be a very comprehensive display.

The exhibition closed with some contemporary works, which were supposed to illustrate some kind of progress in orientalist attitudes, but I’m afraid to say in some cases they perpetuated the stereotypes. There was a video of a woman writing on her bare belly, explaining that she was in so doing removing the objectification of women in so much European art. Since her head was never visible, I didn’t feel I a position to see the video in a non-objective way.

There were indeed two major Islamic works, Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon, but the first is well-known because of its use for baptising French kings. I would have like to come away from the exhibition knowing more about Islamic art, not more about what 19th-century French artists and collectors thought about it. To quote from the exhibition blurb: 

Orientalisms are historical and imaginary accounts. Like any account, they can be transmitted, rewritten, expanded, questioned and criticised. Like any account, they contain both light and dark elements. Like any account, the rest of their history remains to be written, which is expressed by the views of contemporary artists whose artworks are present throughout the exhibition.

Personally, I would stop calling it “orientalisms”, and I would focus on “Islamic art”. It doesn’t seem so radical.

What Robin Lane Fox thinks about The Bible: The Unauthorized Version

 

I wrote about this book while I was immersed in it, and now I have completed it, I can give perhaps are more rounded impression.

Books and websites about the truth or otherwise of the Bible are so prolific, that you would think some ground rules would have been established. Nonetheless, I have only praise for Lane Fox for writing the book, as I initially welcomed the idea of reading what a readable but authoritative historical scholar thought about the Bible. I was brought up in a Christian environment (largely from my school, but also from the wider world) where the Bible was taken, well, as gospel. So the realisation that Biblical scholars have been reassigning and critiquing Bible texts for more than a hundred years was a remarkable discovery. Although this book is largely a distillation of others’ research, it is welcome for all that, since it provides a very clear vision of two opposed worlds: the biblical scholars, who assume authors such as “D” or “P” to explain discrepancies in vocabulary, subject-matter, and chronology, contrasted with the world of believers. The Web is full of writers who will artfully explain to you why the Bible is right, even though the scholars have just proved it wrong. One of the things missing from Lane Fox’s book is just this contrast. There could be a hundred books like this one, without it making any difference to the world beyond the academy. Should this not be considered? In the domain of science, no doubt many people still believe the sun rotates about the Earth,  but it doesn’t make a huge difference, as their knowledge is a kind of cul-de-sac. In contrast, belief in religious systems causes deaths on a vast scale, and (to give just one example) is coupled with the dominant political ideology in the United States and fills me with dread (such as recent calls by right-wing Christians for women to lose the vote and to remain in the home). Academic knowledge, in this domain, is strangely impotent, and you would think that Lane Fox would consider the impact of his writing. Voltaire, in contrast, gleefully grabbed the headlines with his anti-clericalism and dissemination of inconsistencies in the Bible (in his Philosophical Dictionary and elsewhere). The world has need of a  Voltaire today.

Is Lane Fox a believer?

One reviewer summed it up nicely as “Fox doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in the Bible”. Make what sense of this you can. You would think it a rhetorical question when the author announces as early as the Preface “I write as an atheist”. Yet his fondness for some of the books, such as the Gospel of John, is very visible (he keeps referring to its author as “the beloved disciple”

To summarize the book, it is a broad overview of Biblical textual scholarship, covering the Jewish Bible, the Christian New Testament, and some of the other early Christian writings. This would make it just a secondary review of literature, and to a large extent, it is, but Lane Fox attempts to provide his own angle in two ways. First, he writes as a historian, and claims to assess the Bible as history. I’ll discuss that one below. Second, and much weaker, he has his own views on the many Biblical scholars he refers to – but as a reader, I’m so overwhelmed with the details he is reporting that his own views are of minor interest.

His claim to evaluate the Bible as history is at odds with his practice. He seems quite relaxed about the telling of miracles in both Jewish Bible and the New Testament. Voltaire, in contrast, has a clear point of view, and enjoys himself immensely revealing the inconsistencies of Christians, who maintain that every miracle carried out by Christ and the Apostles in the New Testament is infallibly true, yet reports of more recent miracles in the present day are treated with great doubt. Well, Mr Lane Fox, where do you stand? Do you believe some of the miracles but not others? As a historian of the ancient world, Lane Fox has the example of Herodotus to compare. I’m no Herodotus scholar, but apparently Herodotus also had this kind of on-off view of miracles: he believed in the Delphic Oracle, but not in some other miraculous events he reported. Nonetheless, Herodotus was prepared to believe in the intervention of the Gods. Whatever the case, I would expect Lane Fox to compare the treatment of miracles in non-Biblical sources with Bible accounts. You could explain them, perhaps, as part of the ancient world view, just as views of women, justice and revenge were fundamentally different at that time. But that isn’t made sufficiently clear; I don’t think the author ever clearly states his view on the major Christian miracles (the resurrection, the Virgin birth, and so on). 

What Lane Fox reveals

Nonetheless, the book has some startling revelations. Among the discoveries reported by Lane Fox (he wasn’t the first to find them, but they are nowhere nearly as evident as they should be) are:

1. The Christian Bible does not move from retribution to forgiveness (as we are taught at school). The Book of Revelation ends with “the slaughter of most of humanity”. “There is no comforting progression, from a barbarous God of war to a later and milder God of love”
2. The Nativity is a fabrication. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, and the wise men were added later.
3. Many of the links between the OT and the NT were added by later editors.
4. The Bible is not the word of God (one of the most often repeated claims). Its textual history is messy and highly contested. Many books of the Bible appear to be by multiple authors, written at different times and shoe-horned together. Even the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament are reported in the four gospels with discrepancies between them. Specifically, quotes attributed to Christ are written in four different styles, depending on the author – and the style is continued in the author’s text, so, in essence, you are presented with four different Christs. 

A poor piece of publishing

It’s partly the author’s fault, and partly the publisher’s:

• Poor index: there are over 400 pages of closely-argued text, but the inadequate index covers mainly proper names. A digital version with every word indexed would be a great help.
• As an academic, the author hides behind the use of “we” and quotations that are not cited in the text. This gives the impression of a committee of authority that knows the truth, which we, the readers, are privileged to share (but not to alter).
• Lane Fox’s peculiar system for citations is weird. Quotations are cited, but not in a clear way. He chooses, for reasons best known to himself, not to assign an author to most of his quotes in the main text, and only to refer to these authors in an elliptical way. At several places I have wasted time trying to work out who he is quoting.
• He assumes far too much knowledge on the part of the reader. He expects a grasp of Middle Eastern ancient history, early Jewish history, early Christian history, and good knowledge of the Bible text, including the Apocrypha. He provides no chronology, no list of Bible books, and maddening chapter titles that do not describe what is contained in them.
• Perhaps the book would be better organized as a thematic companion to the books of the Bible
• The author thinks he is witty, and includes many cryptic allusions, which you might (or might not) recognize. Either way, it doesn’t help the intelligibility of the text.
• His concepts of “historian” and primary sources aren’t very helpful. I’ve written about the former in an earlier post. He confidently distinguishes books that are more valuable because they have “primary information”, such as the books of Kings, but to be honest, I think this misses the point. If presented as a work of faith, we judge it differently to a work of history. We remember the Book of Job, which doesn’t have the slightest historical truth, rather than the Book of Kings, however accurate it may be. 

The Unauthorized Version is just one of many books by scholars attempting to clarify their view on the veracity, and historical position of the Christian (and Jewish) Bible. Below the surface, it seems to me that the author is struggling with some kind of belief that he cannot somehow reconcile with his academic career. Four hundred pages later, he is no more comfortable, it would seem, than when he started. The Bible is full of errors, he seems to say, and yet, four hundred pages later ... 

Jan Steen's Old Testament paintings

 

Jan Steen, The Wrath of Ahasuerus, c1668-70, Barber Institute (detail)

Does an era have a defining characteristic, a way of thinking and feeling that is so typical of its time that it becomes difficult to escape? Perhaps The Netherlands in the 17th century, the so-called Dutch Golden Age, is an example. We are so familiar with genre painting from this period that we expect it everywhere we look, so familiar, in fact, that an intense artist like Rembrandt is a surprise, partly because he is such a contrast with his peers.

The spirit of the age came to mind when looking at a Jan Steen painting. In 2018, The Barber Institute had a fascinating exhibition focusing on just one work: Jan Steen’s The Wrath of Ahasuerus (c1668-70). Such a focus is a lovely rarity, and I don’t know why other institutions don’t follow the idea (I seem to remember the Caen Beaux Arts did something similar). I didn’t get to see the exhibition, but I noticed the catalogue in a second-hand collection, and read all of its 84 pages.

The painting relates to the story of Ahasuerus, in the Book of Esther, an Old Testament king of the Persians. Ahasuerus is informed of this plot by his wife Esther. She had been adopted and brought up by a Jewish court official, Mordecai. When Mordecai refused to pay reverence to Hamam, in retaliation, Hamam decided to kill all the Jews in the kingdom.

The painting shows the banquet at which Esther reveals she is Jewish, and the plot to kill all the Jews. Dramatically, Ahasuerus switches the intended execution victim from Mordecai to Hamam.

Why is this painting of interest? For two reasons. First, it represents an atypical subject for Steen. Secondly, it is an example of the moral tales from history so common in Western art; the picture that tells an improving story. 

Steen the painter

I am familiar with Steen for his detailed and lavish costumes and settings, typically of witty and irreverent moments in domestic Dutch life, often with messages concealed in the objects. His paintings usually stand out in galleries of Dutch art by the colourful details such as the rich tablecloths. This painting is unusual, in that it has all these details, as well as a sweet little dog, but it is a historical tale. Which is it, a genre piece or a history painting? Or, as with Veronese, could it be both? You can’t help feeling it works either as one or the other, but in this case, with an impending mass killing only narrowly averted, you feel the dog does not quite give the right message.

As the catalogue states, Steen’s figures are not classical, and Ahasuerus has a stage-villain look about him. So too does the cowering  Hamam. There is a lovely baroque sense of dramatic movement, although the figures tend to exist in isolation of each other, rather than (as with Guercino) being integrated by their movement. Nonetheless, the painting gives a powerful sense that this is a dramatic moment, a moment of change.

 

The context of the painting

Who was it painted for? The catalogue can only guess that it was painted for a Jewish collector, and presumably the purchaser chose this  subject. Indeed, it seems (from the catalogue) there were Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam during the 17thh century, who collected historical paintings, even paintings with Catholic subjects,  to my surprise. The enduring interest in the story of Esther is primarily because it was the origin of the festival of Purim.

How historical is this painting?  

What about the relation of the subject to history? “Scholars agree” to identify Ahasuerus with Xerxes I, king of Persia, described in Herodotus as “fickle and hot-tempered”. So is the purpose of this Biblical story the same as the episode in Herodotus, to provide a little moral story for our edification? Whatever the case, neither the story of Xerxes by Herodotus nor the Biblical episode has any basis in historical fact.   According to Robin Lane Fox’s criteria, neither is a primary source, nor based on a primary source.

So we should judge the story as a fairy tale. Was it inspiring to have such a tale in our living room? Did we feel improved by  seeing how close the Jewish community came to total destruction, saved at the last moment by a ruler with little judgement?   

What do the art historians think?

The final essay in the catalogue “The Critical Fortune of Steen’s OT Paintings” describes how the critics universally dismissed his historical works as lacking decorum. The author’s response is that the sales prices for these works has always remained high: “His biblical painting have realised high prices …while sometimes a discredited part of his oeuvre, Steen’s OT scenes deserve their place in the limelight”. That’s not much of a defence.

What do I think?

Genre painting was, and still is, in my opinion, rated lower than other kinds of painting. This is unfair, because its best practitioners, of whom Steen is an example, could paint well. The paradox of Steen is that he paints scenes of disarray and excess with great care and attention to detail; he is a painter who always wants to include something happening in every corner. However, when commissioned to create a historical work, he cannot drop this style; in this sense, he is a prisoner of the spirit of the age. Just look at that dog, jumping up. If I owned this work, I’d remember the dog, not the moral.