Whistler and Illuminated Manuscripts

What connection, you might say, is there between the artist Whistler and illuminated manuscripts? Not much, I hear you answer. But there is almost as little connection between Whistler and Nature, and that is the title of a whole book – to be honest, a deeply disappointing book. Described as “published to accompany the exhibition” Whistler and Nature, it fails to explain how only a minority of the works in the exhibition are about nature, and yet makes clear how Whistler grew up in an environment of engineering and construction. His early landscapes include figures in the background erecting telephone cables, so clearly, he wasn’t striving for the traditional picturesque. Mention of the picturesque leads to a lengthy discussion of Capability Brown and William Kent that does not seem very relevant to Whistler. A claim is made that Whistler used the techniques of Gainsborough, which doesn’t seem very relevant either. More maddeningly, the book includes two of Whistler’s exquisite portraits, which are not discussed in any detail in the book. Why struggle to find links between Whistler and Nature, if he paints portraits as good as these? The book seems an object lesson in earnestly searching for themes in Whistler that are not the most fruitful ones for exploring what Whistler actually painted: urban landscapes, including industry and fog - when he wasn’t painting portraits. Some of those portraits, including At the Piano, 1858, are remarkable studies of adolescents.

The curator of the exhibition, and author of the bulk of the book, Patricia De Montfort claims in a rather over-elaborate way that Constable is depicting human industry in works like Dedham Lock (1820), and so, presumably, Whistler was following in a tradition of depicting industry in the picturesque landscape; I see the depiction of industry as accidental, not central to the theme of Constable’s painting, which in my opinion looks less like a study of human activity than a sense of nostalgia for a golden age; there is little industry in East Anglia.  Slightly more relevant is perhaps a Turner watercolour of Leeds, 1816, which certainly does appear to be a depiction of an industrial city, complete with smoke from chimneys. But surely the justification for Whistler’s Wapping is that the painter had grown up in a family of engineers, had studied at West Point, and liked the feel of activity and business from depicting working ships.

The real interest in Whistler is perhaps the series of Nocturnes (few if any of which appear in the exhibition), including the Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Bognor (1874). These paintings simplify their ostensible view dramatically, and reduce it to a dusk or night-time scene, including a few artificial lights enabling the view to be discerned. Of course, as modern viewers, we find it incredible that any art can be created in Bognor, or, for that matter, we don’t immediately think of urban Westminster as a site for art. That finding of beauty in the fog and the haze of a modern city, and reducing an image to broad, almost abstract masses of colour, is where Whistler becomes interesting – the painter of modern life, to use Baudelaire’s phrase. It is as if he was depicting a landscape in the manner of Howard Hodgkin or Ivon Hitchens, a hundred years before either of them.

As for figures in Whistler’s landscapes, Ms de Montfort quotes Whistler himself on the role of one of these figures:

My picture of a Harmony in Grey and Gold is an illustration of my meaning a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because black was wanted at that spot.

Unfortunately, the author fails to take this hint and spends two pages describing the “intellectual tradition of the figure in the landscape”. As Beckett would say, no meaning where none intended.

The final chapter of the book, by Clare Willsdon, makes a claim for Whistler as a painter of gardens. If art criticism could be described like the children’s game where you search for the subject and are either hot or cold, depending on how close you are, then this writing is very cold indeed. Certainly Whistler created some engravings set in gardens; his wife was a keen gardener, and the resulting images are unobjectionable, perfectly competent, but not very memorable. It’s not the Whistler I remember.

What to make of Whistler

The Red Dress, 1894

There are two Whistler exhibitions running concurrently at the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge museum. One is a travelling show that appears to have been mounted by the Hunterian Collection of the University of Glasgow, without any curatorial involvement from Cambridge, while, in true Fitzwilliam style, the other is from the Fitzwilliam’s own collection of prints - a completely independent exhibition. Intriguingly, you can sometimes see the same print in both exhibitions, but with different captions. The Fitzwilliam’s own captions look to me to be more informed about how the print was made, and often about the context.

What can we say about Whistler? One of the most cantankerous people who ever lived, is the first thing that comes to mind. Publishing a book about negative things people have said about you (The Gentle Art of Making Enemies) suggests a pretty feisty character, and pushing your brother-in-law through a plate glass window does somewhat reduce my sympathy for Mr Whistler.

There is no mention of the episode with the brother-in-law in the “Whistler and Nature” exhibition (curated by Patricia de Montfort, lecturer in history of art at Glasgow University, although there is no mention of her position in the catalogue). Here we have a rather sanitised Whistler, grouped by theme. Many of the drawings and prints are very small, and the exhibition’s strange insistence on roping the spectators back from the works means it is difficult to see them. By contrast, the Fitzwilliam’s own show does not prevent you getting close to the works, nor from photographing them. Incidentally, the “Nature” part of the Whistler and Nature show seems to be rather widely interpreted. It includes the female nude, studies of Venice and The Thames; I don’t know why the exhibition wasn’t simply called “Whistler in the Hunterian, Glasgow, with a few other works”.

Unfortunately, the catalogue follows the recent trend of not including all the works in the exhibition, nor even making it clear which of Whistler's works are included or not. Even more unfortunate, the best Whistler by far in the catalogue, the oil painting Wapping, from the Washington National Gallery of Art, is not included. 

Whistler’s nudes are a disappointment, at least based on this display. They appear to be a long series of females wearing some diaphanous clothing, with the aim of capturing the movement of the material. The result is simply rather vague and inconsequential. Some of Whistler’s oil paintings of seascapes capture much better the evanescent quality that he was evidently seeking.

Similarly, the exhibition’s attempt to link Whistler to contemporaries (Albert Moore, Japanese paintings) does not seem to be sufficiently clear. I didn’t see much of a link between the Moore painting and Whistler’s own work, nor did I recognise the Japanese elements pointed out to me in the captions. That doesn't mean they aren't there, simply that I didn't see them from the works displayed. 

The Kitchen, 1858

For me, the best works were the small oil paintings and some of the highly worked engravings, in which Whistler shows true skill in using the various print-making techniques he had learned. One print in particular, The Kitchen, 1858, achieves some wonderful broad areas of dark shading that I didn't think were possible from an engraving. Some of the lithographs look to be simply transmitting pencil shading to paper, without any intermediate printing process – truly remarkable. Apparently, the caption tells us, Whistler learned to draw not directly onto the plate but onto a sheet that was then transferred. However he did it, the results are superb - a good example is The Red Dress, 1894. 

What to do about tourists in Cambridge

Encourage them, is the simple answer.

I didn’t (initially) choose this topic. It was a presentation, believe it or not, at the Cambridge Antiquarian Society spring meeting (March 2019). What is their interest in Cambridge tourism? Pretty negative, from the sound of it. And after hearing complaints about the tourists (including local councillors asking for bus parking to be more controlled, and one comment in this presentation about a tax on coaches visiting Cambridge) I am moved to write.

Here, then are my suggestions for the positive management of tourism in Cambridge, based on the following premises:

• Tourists visiting Cambridge is a good idea. The tourists should not be shunned. After all, they could be visiting Alton Towers or Madame Tussauds. Here, they are looking for an educational experience.
• The tourists are concentrated in and around Kings College. Hence there is a need to disperse the tourists. I suggest three new areas: Parker’s Piece, the station, and the area around Kettle’s Yard. 

 Here, then, are my ten suggestions:

1. A new museum of Cambridge positioned perhaps at the railway station – the Mill building. This museum would be (a) the designated repository of archaeological finds in Cambridgeshire, (b) would cover Cambridge growth and industry rather than the University specifically. Alternatively, it could occupy the former cinema in Hobson Street (which has been empty for years). This museum should take over the computing museum, which has truly the worst location of any museum ever.
2. Converting two or three of the city centre churches to tourist-based activities: St Bene’t, or Little St Mary’s. This policy has been very successful in Norwich.
3. Double the size of the Fitzwilliam Museum, with Heritage Lottery Funding. The Fitzwilliam is capable of taking twice as many visitors as it currently has. The Ashmolean had 937,000 visitors in 2017, and is moving from Feb 2019 to seven-day opening. The Fitzwilliam had 397,000 visitors in 2017. Here is a way of relocating over half a million of Cambridge visitors!
4. A museum of Cambridge University. This could be based in the Police and Fire Station building, both relocated further out of the centre. Include rooms on China and Cambridge, Japan and Cambridge, with details of alumni and artworks, etc. The Oxford Story was in my opinion a very valuable introduction to the university for visitors. It had around 165,000 (declining to 100,000) visitors per year.
5. The Cambridge Museum (formerly the Folk Museum) takes over the church of St Giles opposite and becomes twice as large. Create a museum cluster around Kettle’s Yard, with a redesign of the whole area, to create a more pedestrian-friendly space, including street cafes, and other public spaces. Make this space one of the dispersal zones.
6. The Cambridge University Library opens a museum and café, showing some of the illuminated manuscripts from its collection. The Bodleian has 771,000 visitors annually.
7. A tourist train, battery-powered and single-deck, running through the middle of Jesus Green and Parker’s Piece, as well as the central triangle (King’s Parade, Sidney Street, St Mary’s Street). Each train holds a maximum of 50 people. The train route would start at the station and would go around the central triangle.
8. Open some university buildings to visitors, such as the Senate House.
9. Congestion charging for cars along Trumpington Street and Regent Street, set at a price that means the traffic is not gridlocked along these streets.
10. Sign posts between the station and the city centre, including signs to individual colleges (how radical!) The principle is simple: do you want to encourage tourists, or confuse and bamboozle them, as currently happens? Anyone arriving at Cambridge Station only reaches the centre of Cambridge with great difficulty. 

I'm glad I didn't meet John Doe

Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) must be one of the most unlikely Hollywood stories. I’m astonished it ever survived the initial review of the script.

To summarise, a young ambitious journalist, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) creates a fictional character, under the pseudonym John Doe, who is going to commit suicide as a protest against social injustices (these social injustices are not specified in detail anywhere in the movie). Her newspaper goes along with the idea and hires a down and out to impersonate John Doe – none other than Gary Cooper. The whole idea flourishes and becomes a political movement. At that point the agenda is hijacked by the newspaper owner, D B Norton, for the purposes of launching his own presidential bid. At the last movement, the John Doe surrogate turns away from suicide and takes over his destiny as the real John Doe, running a populist party.

Where are the holes in this story?

Firstly, the difference between Ann Mitchell and D B Norton are not so clear to me. Both of them are flagrantly prepared to exploit a down-and-out to promote their newspaper (initially), with the idea of social justice distinctly secondary. The journalist wins back her job by a coup – writing the John Doe article without consulting anyone. 

Secondly, perhaps more fundamentally, as David Thompson points out, there are distinctly fascist undertones in the idea of a single leader being able to create and built a political party, of whatever hue. It is clear by the end of the film that the “people” (as identified by this film, a small group from a rural area who in a moving cameo represent neighbourly folk everywhere). No blacks or single women, of course.

There are uncanny echoes of the contemporary political situation in the US. F D Roosevelt (who Wikipedia tells me is often rated as one of the three greatest US presidents) stood for election in 1940 on a peace platform, while having a clear intention to take the US into the War. His 1936 election campaign was unashamedly populist. Campaigning against “economic royalists”, he stated “I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my administration, that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match”. This is just the kind of vague populism that we encounter in Meet John Doe. There are never any examples of specific social injustice, and the only positive recommendations seem to be nicer to your neighbours. The above quote is taken from Jackson Lears’ review of a recent biography of FDR.

Unfortunately, Mr Lears then continues the review above by stating: “It [the speech by FDR in 1936] was the rhetorical high point of American populism – the genuine article, as opposed to the contemporary right-wing counterfeit”. Meet John Doe is I think a clear example of how easy it is to manufacture such a counterfeit. John Doe is selected quite blatantly as the most attractive man among all the tramps applying for the post. In other words, Gary Cooper is anything but John Doe: he’s anything but average. Did Capra not think for a moment that having a physical god addressed by a small group of John Doe Club members, all of them looking like losers, slightly jars? That the whole John Doe initiative is not run by D B Norton but by the chilling journalist Barbara Stanwyck who makes every speech up, and successfully manipulates an innocent and not very intelligent (but stunningly beautiful) Gary Cooper.

Incidentally, the film contains what I think is the worst acting I have ever seen from Barbara Stanwyck. In the final scene of the film, she flings herself at Gary Cooper and begs him not to throw himself off the top of the building. He tears and emotionalism are utterly out of keeping with her character; she looks unconvincing; he believes she is in the pay of D B Norton and not to be trusted. After all, if he dies, she loses her job – she has a vested interest in keeping him alive. Not a very edifying moment for the movies.

Is Period Piece trivial?

It is certainly surprising that a book published more than 75 years ago, an autobiographical account of growing up in Cambridge, should still be in print. But Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece is not a typical autobiography. It continues to sell because of its charming touch. It is a book that seems disarmingly slight. The author’s light-hearted, self-deprecating tone obscures some serious messages that are conveyed – perhaps so much so that many readers are happily diverted into not noticing if it has any serious point at all. Perhaps it’s only possible to realise the subtle power of this book when you read the rather heavy-handed judgement on it by more modern critics. Mary Beard, for example, in the London Review of Books (19 September 2002), is very dismissive. She quotes admiringly Simon Raven’s review of the first edition, describing Raverat’s “minor Proustian skill”. Worst of all, she looks down on it as (the shame of it!) a local title: “the book … in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike”). Although the book continues to sell, Beard makes it clear that “the book is more bought than read”. There is a certain sneering tone in Oxford and Cambridge Universities that dismisses any work that attempts to be popular. According to Beard, Period Piece

certainly trades on the archly self-proclaimed nostalgia of its title, and on the wry vista it offers onto a lost world, through the childhood recollections of an elderly woman … three hundred pages of memoirs that are largely devoted to the sanitised minutiae of a privileged Victorian childhood. 

 That’s precisely it! Anything other than high culture is condemned. In reading Raverat’s memoir, we are aware of the vast transformation of the aristocratic world in which she grew up, and how much it had changed by the time Raverat described her upbringing. In other words, it is a very knowing memoir. For some reason I cannot fathom, Beard condemns Raverat for writing the book when old, and even for not making a better marriage: “Gwen married Jacques Raverat, middle-ranking artist and one of her neo-Pagan friends”. Clearly, then, not a good choice. One of the great successes of the book is the remarkably vivid pen and ink drawings illustrating the scenes she describes. They have a charm and an immediacy of Ardizzone or Edward Bawden. You could describe Raverat’s art (although I would not) as middle-ranking, or small-scale, or even (heaven help us) lowbrow. It is not mentioned in this review, yet it provided a way for Raverat to express herself vividly and with immediacy.

My reading of the book is very different. This book is indeed a period piece, a remarkable piece of social history that represents the best type of history: giving a greater awareness of the sheer strangeness of Cambridge. How could such a tiny institution, such a hothouse atmosphere, be responsible for most of the thought leaders and actual leaders of the Britain of its day? Is it possible that such elitism still persists, in quite fundamental ways, so that even though women are admitted to the exclusive club, the hegemony largely remains intact?
What are Beard’s criticisms of the book?

1. Its "faux-naivety." I think Raverat knows exactly what she is doing in this book; what you condemn as an adult you accept as a child, and whatever the age at which Raverat wrote the book, she captures wonderfully some of the fears and dreams of a young girl. 
2.  "Self-serving censorship and selectivity" – Beard claims that by leaving out details such as the death of her governess from cancer, Raverat can concentrate on her “litany of more trivial domestic disasters”. For me, one of the most chilling aspects of the book was the social upheaval and class struggle taking place all around Raverat’s privileged upbringing. 
3.  Beard claims the book gets lost in detail, “for all its promised glimpse of mythical Cambridge”. Beard claims that Period Piece is part of the myth-making, that Raverat was “an old lady who may not be most fairly remembered for her part in the mythology of Cambridge croquet mallets, dreary domesticity and early bedtimes”. This is a bit like claiming Jane Austen is responsible for the vast numbers of costume drama escapists who escape to a never-never land that is not actually part of her novels at all. 
4.  Its “cloyingly sentimental perspective on the sun and strawberries of late Victorian privilege, unmitigated … by much interest in social justice.” On the contrary, this book revealed more about the reality of Cambridge than any number of undergraduate and staff memoirs. For the most part, Cambridge memoirs miss out on the everyday. 
5. Weirdly, Period Piece is condemned apparently because the people described are no longer famous: “its complex cast of late Victorian characters who – like Richard Jebb – have long since ceased to be household names, if indeed they ever were”. You should read the memoirs of pop-star groupies if you are seeking this sort of thing. Beard then goes on to quote approvingly some of the eccentricities in the male members of the family noted by Raverat. But it’s simply not true that the eccentricities were only male. Raverat describes her own mother, incapable of cooking yet convinced that she is in charge of the household, rationing the soap in such a regimented fashion that the domestic staff quietly subverted her authority by keeping stocks of essential items available from alternative locations. 

As Beard herself notes, the book describes in chilling detail, without overt criticism, the emptiness of women’s everyday lives. Her description of a shopping expedition to London is astonishing, if only for the unbelievable wealth displayed by her mother and family. If ever a book inspired me to promote female education, this is it. One of the successes of Period Piece, somewhat like Little House on the Prairie, is the restricted world view. Laura Ingalls Wilder writes, we realise as adults, with breath-taking naivety about the rights of white settlers to take native American land. Nonetheless, there is a vividness about Wilder and Raverat that is compelling. We cannot justify their social attitudes, but they are described with such chilling perfection that the effect is way more powerful than any lecture theatre. I would have every Cambridge undergraduate read Period Piece before meekly accepting the ludicrous late Victorian practices that persist at Cambridge colleges today, perpetuating an obsolete social order and elitism. Cambridge has changed far less than Ms Beard seems to suggest. The dismissal of, and blindness towards, the city of Cambridge remains breath-taking.

In her quiet and understated way, Raverat writes a more chilling condemnation of Cambridge privilege than any number of social tracts. Not so much Period Piece as A Tract for our Times. Without any male assertion of grand themes and major theories, Raverat strikes a blow for a female consciousness. Those little line drawings speak volumes. For me, one of the book’s great achievements is to celebrate a woman’s life that should have been systematically trivialised and ignored by the male-centred elitism of late nineteenth-century Cambridge. All possible steps were taken to prevent women studying, succeeding, becoming in any way memorable in the Cambridge of her childhood. Yet in this book Raverat makes her own unconsidered, irrelevant childhood something to celebrate. She has transformed her mundane upbringing through her words and pictures. She is remembered - while hundreds of male Cambridge professors who lived at the same time are not.

Interior design: modern or comfortable, but not both?

I like looking at pictures of people at home. There's something quite comfortable about domestic interiors, especially if they are from the past. In contrast, modern art is often controversial: you might argue about Tracy Emin, but nobody gets too het up about Van Eyck. Art that happened several centuries ago is somehow safer, and perhaps even taken for granted by the majority of people. You don't often hear the cry "it's not art" for paintings over a hundred years old. Some of the controversy appears to have arrived with the concept modern; at at some time in the 19th century, art starts to be modern (or perhaps more precisely, to think of itself as modern). How much grief has that simple word “modern” caused! Baudelaire was one of the first to use the term, even if he picked the wrong man to describe as modern (Constantine Guys, all but forgotten today). 

Like many terms, "modern" has several implications and shades of meaning around it. It doesn't just mean contemporary; if you believe Mr Rybczynski (and many others share this idea), “modern” in architecture and design is in many ways the opposite of “comfort”. A modern chair is not comfortable; it’s not even supposed to be comfortable. At least, that’s what some people would have us believe.

Rather surprisingly, Peter Thornton (in Authentic Décor, 1984) seems to share this opinion, albeit in a rather less overt fashion. Only those dedicated readers who have battled their way through the small print describing each of his chosen 50-year periods in the history of interior design (each introduction a compressed yet tantalizing overview), will notice the following passage, slipped in between discussions of minutiae such as the length of curtains, the position of chairs in a room and the distinction between Louise Quinze and Louis Seize style (not much, in case you are interested). The passage occurs in one of Thornton's introductions to the modern period, 1870 to 1920, in which he writes of the “main tradition”, the mainstream of design in this period, against which Morris and the Bauhaus reacted. During this period,

delightful, extremely comfortable, and in no way despicable interiors were created in this widely accepted mode right into the 1920s. The reason for their having received so little attention from the historians is presumably that they could not be seen as paving the way towards the Modern Movement. Failing a test of progressiveness, such interiors were good for a sneer or a scoffing remark… Now in the 1980s when the Modern Movement itself is coming to be judged more critically, it may well be that a rather more balanced assessment of the alternatives will emerge.

This is remarkable. It suggests nothing less than a revisionist view of much of 20th-century art history, primarily Nikolaus Pevsner, if you accept David Watkin’s view of the Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), which Watkin describes as “an attempt to persuade the English to accept the Modern Movement as the only style in which a modern man ought to express himself.”  That explains why all those poor schoolchildren suffered in the glass panels of modern school design, such as Hunstanton Secondary School (by Alison and Peter Smithson, 1954, one of the early examples of Brutalist architecture in Britain). 

Perhaps Thornton’s implication is that modernism and comfort are mutually incompatible goals; in the 20th century you can be comfortable, or you can be stylish, but not both, Thornton seems to imply. This seems rather simplistic, given that his book describes three hundred years of people wilfully choosing the uncomfortable option. For them, “stylish” and “comfortable” were certainly not considered in the same breath. One astonishing image from Thornton’s Authentic Décor shows a new build of a medieval hall, the very example of uncomfortable and unsuitable architecture that most people were reacting away from. The image shows Shiplake Hall, completed in 1890 to look like a medieval hall that had been adapted to use in the 19th-century.

Can you be modern and comfortable? You wouldn’t think so from Authentic Décor, yet Jim Ede, at Kettle’s Yard, seemed to manage it quite effectively. Is that a lesson for us? 

Peter Thornton on comfort

Regular readers of this column will have noticed that Witold Rybczynski, in his Home: A short history of an idea, failed in my opinion in a recent post to define comfort or to identify at what point “home” came to represent “comfort”.  Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the last two thousand years has seen some kind of development towards an idea of comfort that most people are familiar with today. Look at any contemporary advert for a sofa, and you can see a very clear and tempting idea of comfort being presented to you.

Undeterred by the lack of a clear signpost in the book on home, I have moved on to the books Rybczynski quotes as his inspiration: titles by Mario Praz and Peter Thornton, both writers known for their writings on interior decoration. Thornton’s Authentic Décor: the domestic interior 1620-1920 is a fabulous visual index of interior views, each of them created at the time of the original décor, and so authentic. It’s a lovely idea and one that, I felt, could provide clues towards identifying comfort and what it comprises.

Does Peter Thornton explain comfort? Not really. Nonetheless, there are a couple of tantalizing mentions of comfort, which provide some guidance. Thornton quotes Henry Wotton's  Elements of Architecture 1624): “Well building hath three Conditions – Commoditie, Firmness and Delight”. He continues:

The word comes from the French commodité, which means convenience but carries an implication of comfort. Creating commodité was indeed an important aim of leading French architects in the second half of the seventeenth century. One might even say that comfort as we understand it was invented by them during that period. 

Nonetheless, Thornton almost invalidates the whole idea of comfort in his dismissive description of the other title of inspiration for Rybczynski: Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration. I haven’t been able to get hold of this book yet, but Thornton (quoting Hugh Honour) describes it as “not interior decoration but the visions and fancies prompted by paintings of interiors”. Well, It’s those “visions and fancies” that interest me. I’m not so interested in the specific items of furniture in use at a certain time, rather in what that furniture (or lack of furniture) meant to the people involved.

To give you a visual idea. It looks to my untrained eye that there was a development towards comfort at some point in the period covered by Thornton’s book, and perhaps it took place in the seventeenth century. Compare the following two illustrations:

In the first picture, from 1630, a family is arranged for a group portrait. They look stiff and formal, and the room in which they are based is not geared around comfort – no carpet, no soft chairs (it looks like the man is sitting on a wooden bench). 

Now move to the elegance of a Parisian house in the 1640s. There is a fire burning, women are seated around a table conversing comfortably, perhaps reading books to each other. There are what appear to be soft chairs In a row under the window. The windows have some kind of curtain. There are wall-hangings. All in all, this second picture presents to me a vision of comfort, while the first picture does not. Whether that means a decisive shift in taste in just ten years is something to be investigated further; but the contrast between these images is, I think, very clear. One displays comfort, one does not. Now, you could argue that these images represent very different situations. One is a formal family portrait, the other a relaxed gathering. Perhaps that suggests that comfort was invented by the French, rather than the Dutch, and the Dutch only discovered such ideas much later.