You can buy a bag of ten tulip bulbs for less than a tenner and, in April or May, see a display of black flowers. ‘Twas not ever so.
Tulips had been introduced to Europe in the middle of the 16th century but it was only for three years in the 1630s that tulip mania gripped the Dutch Republic. One rare bulb was worth ten times the annual wage of a skilled artisan, it is claimed. More pertinently the income per head of the Dutch was the highest in the world, perhaps a necessary condition for a price bubble then – and today?
Be that as it may, Alexandre Dumas set his 1850 novel, The Black Tulip, in the period. You may remember, based on a film I saw last year, I found The Count of Monte Cristo unsatisfactory. There’s so much to read I did not expect to read Dumas again but I forgot to take a book to read on the tube and bought the Tulip at the National Gallery. I must eat my words. It is little more than two hundred pages and the historical digressions do not weigh the plot down. In short, thoroughly enjoyable.
*****
“From Philadelphia to Gloucestershire, hear the story of a great American artist and his finest painting.
See Edwin Austin Abbey’s huge study for ‘The Hours’, the celestial scene that decorates the ceiling of the House of Representatives Chamber, Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg. His most important work, created late in his career, it was to be his last.
A friend of John Singer Sargent, Royal Academician, successful artist and illustrator – Abbey, born 1852 in Philadelphia, left the US in 1878 for the UK, where he would live for the rest of his life. He produced ‘The Hours’ in his Gloucestershire studio, then the largest art studio in Europe, from where both the study and mural were shipped to the US.
Abbey’s career spanned an age of renewal in America, one of national expression, optimism and ambition that drove new, grand public architectural commissions like the State Capitol building and inspired literature and the arts.
In the painting’s harmonious composition, allegorical female ‘hour’ figures flow in a circle against a starry sky of graduating shades of blue that mark the shift from day to night with the sun and moon at either side.
Sketches and drawings in the exhibition, gifted by his widow to Yale University Art Gallery, show how Abbey devised the rhythmic scheme.
A known and celebrated artist in his day, Abbey’s ‘The Hours’ returns for us to enjoy again this, largely forgotten, giant of American art.” (National Gallery)
This is a small exhibition. There is the spectacular study for The Hours and five other smaller works. There hasn’t been an EAA exhibition for more than twenty years and that was in New York; about time an enterprising curator put one together in England. They could start by knocking on the door of the Royal Collection.
