A few weeks ago, I imagined which ten volumes I would select for my personal library were I to find myself locked up in a prison cell or perhaps washed up on a desert island. More recently, I offered a handful of poems for Halloween. Now, I have selected six paintings for the walls of my imaginary private art gallery.

First would be the Wilton Diptych, the fine example of late medieval English art which exudes the very spirit of Merrie England. The left panel depicts King Richard II, kneeling in prayer beside three saints, Edmund the Martyr, Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist. The right panel depicts the Madonna and Child surrounded by a company of angels, one of whom holds aloft the Cross of Saint George. This would be the painting on my imaginary wall before which I would place a prie-dieu, enabling the viewer to begin his tour in a prayer of thanksgiving for the beauty he is about to see.

My next selection would be the Portrait of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi (1604), which is now usually attributed to Annibale Carracci but was until recently believed to have been painted by Dominichino. Irrespective of the true identity of the artist, I have admired this painting ever since I first saw it in York Art Gallery. I am astonished by the dexterity with which the artist renders the priest’s eyes, the hint of a smile on his lips, the detailed realism of his hands and fingers, and the shades of white and gray on the paper he is holding. This is portraiture at its most accomplished.

The third selection, Rain, Steam and Speed by J. M. W. Turner (1844) offers a stark and even startling contrast to its predecessor on my imaginary wall. Unlike the realism of the portrait of Monsignor Agucchi, Turner’s painting is an example of what might be called proto-impressionism or pre-impressionism, which anticipated the work of the French Impressionists a few decades later. In addition to its impressionistic style, the subject of the painting, a steam engine on the Great Western Railway, would have seemed ultra-modern, depicting new technology which enabled people to travel at speeds which would have been unimaginable only a generation earlier.

At the other end of the technological spectrum, The Hay Wain by John Constable (1821) depicts a rural and rustic idyll which would be swept away by the steam and speed which Turner evokes. Constable’s landscape shows the beauty of the East Anglian countryside, on the borders of Essex and Suffolk, the two counties in which I spent my own idyllic childhood. As such, it works on me in two distinct nostalgia-drenched ways. It offers entry into the Shire of my agrarian dreams, the pre-industrial home for which my luddite heart yearns, and it offers re-entry into the innocent naiveté of my own rural childhood. As one’s eyes gaze on Constable’s scene of pastoral tranquility, one’s ears can hear the strains of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, taking one’s heart to places beyond Turner’s and modernity’s steam and speed, and beyond the reach of earthquake, wind and fire, to John Greenleaf Whittier’s “still, small voice of calm”.

My fifth selection would by Monet’s Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight (1892-4), a work that shows God’s Creation kissing in glorious light the fruits of man’s sub-creation. The stones surge skywards in praise and the light pours down in benediction! This is art which manifests the mystery of art. The architect and the builders of the cathedral give back to the giver of the creative gift the fruits of the gift given, and, in return, the giver of the gift baptizes the fruits of their labour with the light of his love. It is this mystical kiss of light that Monet immortalizes on canvas.

My imaginary art gallery would be unimaginable without at least one Pre-Raphaelite painting. I will complete my selection, therefore, with one of the many that could have been chosen, John Everett Millais’ Mariana (1851). Millais’ painting was inspired by Tennyson’s poem of the same title (1830) and by a later Tennyson poem on the same theme, “Mariana in the South”, both of which were inspired by a character in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. As with “The Lady of Shalott”, Tennyson’s two “Mariana” poems express a forlorn and melancholy longing for love, accentuated by a sense of exile and isolation from human companionship. This is reflected marvelously in Millais’ painting. The altar in the background is suggestive of Mariana’s prayers to the Virgin in Tennyson’s “Mariana in the South”, conveying spiritual depth to her sense of loneliness, whereas the vivid splendour of the colours in the foreground are simply breathtaking. We can see the failing light through the stained-glass windows, and we feel as though we can touch the fallen leaves that bestrew the floor at Mariana’s feet and the velvet of the dress that she wears. I am always in awe at the way that the greatest artists can texturize their work, bringing fabric to life. Certainly, Millais succeeds in doing so to an extraordinary degree in this stunning painting.

Having surveyed the six paintings on the imaginary wall of my equally imaginary art gallery, I’ll return from whence I began, kneeling at the prie-dieu in front of the Wilton Diptych to thank God for the goodness and truth of such beautiful works of art.

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All images are in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Wilton DiptychPortrait of Monsignor Giovanni Battista AgucchiRain, Steam and Speed; The Hay Wain; Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight; and Mariana.

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