Modern Painters | Dec 2008/Jan 2009

He Who Laughs Last
PAINT LIKE TITIAN! JUST 10 GUINEAS A POP! HOW A FATHER-DAUGHTER TEAM PULLED A FAST
ONE ON BENJAMIN WEST.

For a few months in 1796, a young woman of humble origins held the British art establishment in the palm of her hand. Ann Jemima Provis’s mother died when she was three, and her father, Thomas
Provis, was a “sweeper of the court” at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. Though his daughter was passionate about drawing and painting, Provis encouraged her to take up needlework, one of the few ways women could make a living. But eventually he assented to her wish to be an artist, even offering her a manuscript describing the elusive painting techniques used by Old Masters that his grandfather, who once captained an East India Company ship, had picked up somewhere in Italy. Ann Jemima devoted herself to studying and refining the techniques detailed in the manuscript; her obsession was such that she was treated for “mental derangement” by two well-known London doctors. But her industry paid off. She became a gifted miniaturist, and her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy.

This, at least, is the story Thomas Provis probably fed Richard Cosway, a flamboyant portrait painter, when he tried to sell him on the idea of a manuscript holding secrets long considered lost—every last one of them completely bogus. If Cosway smelled a rat, he didn’t let on, instead suggesting Provis take it to Benjamin West, then the president of the Royal Academy of the Arts. Provis approached West. The original manuscript, he told him, had been destroyed in a house fire, but fortunately Provis was perspicacious enough to have made a copy. Would West like to see it?

West proved an easy mark. Born in Pennsylvania in 1738, he had worked hard to overcome his foreign roots to gain stature as a gentleman and a well-respected painter in London. He was one of the first American artists to embark on the Grand Tour, traveling throughout Europe to study the great masterpieces, and he lingered in Italy, determined to work out the methods used by his Renaissance heroes, particularly Titian. Though he thought he came close once or twice, West never quite cracked the method behind Titian’s “divine” color. He moved to London and established himself in King George’s court, and eventually was named Joshua Reynolds’s successor as president of the Academy in 1792. Reynolds, like West and so many others, was obsessed with deciphering the Old Masters’ formulas, and allegedly bought a painting by Titian in order to strip it slowly, layer by layer, to determine its makeup. Should West succeed where Reynolds had failed, his reputation was ensured. West eagerly accepted the invitation to try out the Venetian formula at the Provises’ home, under the guidance of Ann Jemima.

But the initial attempt to use the technique, in late 1795, was not a success. After West suggested the ground on the canvas seemed not quite right, the Provises readily agreed, and offered to prepare another. West tried again, several months later, this time with more promising results. He showed this painting to a colleague, declaring, “a new Epocha in the art … would be formed by the discovery.” He painted portraits of his two sons and chose subjects for two larger canvases, Cupid Stung by a Bee and Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes.

But Provis, who had expected to be paid for his assistance, was less pleased with West’s apparent triumph. He took his grievance to Joseph Farington, another Academy member, who formed a small faction of artist friends outraged by West’s possessiveness. West backpedaled. He’d always planned on reporting Provis’s discovery, he explained, and on compensating him appropriately for it. He suggested that they all share the manuscript by forming a syndicate. Each member would contribute 10 guineas with the idea that the total sum eventually paid to Provis would be no more than 600 guineas (roughly the price of a prize-winning racehorse). The agreement was that Ann Jemima would teach them the technique, and until that amount was reached, they would keep it to themselves.

And so began an elaborate and ingenious swindle. Ann Jemima gave lessons to the syndicate (not all of whom were convinced of the manuscript’s authenticity). West finished Cicero and showed it at the Royal Academy’s exhibition in 1797. But the painting didn’t exactly launch a new epoch. Because the manuscript advised first laying down a dark red, absorbent ground, followed by the liberal application of something called “the Titian shade,” which was a combination of Prussian blue and ivory black, the canvas is quite dark, as though the figures were being lit by moonlight. The figures were more or less outlined in chiaroscuro, so there is something vaguely cartoonish about the final result, and the surface looks worked over. (Conservation research proves that West struggled to apply the paint, since the ground seems to have dried quickly and cracked.) “Instead of possessing Titian’s warmth divine,” one critic wrote in the Observer, West’s pictures evidenced “nothing but the chalky & cold tints of fresco & that gaudy glare & flimsy nothingness of fan painting.”

Disillusionment was rapid. West tried to distance himself from the scandal, but it was too late. On July 25, 1797, the Anglo-Irish painter James Barry wrote a scathing open letter to the Dilettanti Society, roundly condemning those who had been taken in by what had so obviously been a hoax. “Such a concurrence of ridiculous circumstances, of so many, such gross absurdities, and such busy industrious folly, in contriving for the publicity and exposure of a quacking, disgraceful imposture, is, I believe, unparalleled in the history of art.”

West never fully regained his standing. After some political shake up at the court, he resigned his presidency of the Royal Academy in 1805, but returned a year later, and continued in that role until his death in 1820. Today he is remembered as an important artist whose neoclassical works paved the way for Romanticism, but he never achieved the level of greatness to which he aspired. Unsurprisingly, no mention of the Venetian Secret appears in his “authorized” biography by John Galt, and the entire incident might have receded permanently from history as no more than an amusing footnote, were it not for an exhibition, currently on view at the Yale Center for British Art, that revisits the “quacking, disgraceful imposture.” This compact but brilliant show juxtaposes the 1797 painting with a copy West made eight years later, well after the manuscript had been exposed as a fake. Although they share the same imagery, the two works are noticeably different. Whereas the earlier painting is purplish, almost garish, the later work is in a much warmer spectrum, the paint manipulated with a surer hand (which is probably due to West’s familiarity with the composition).

How could West, obviously a man of no small intelligence, be so easily fooled? He wasn’t alone in thinking that some special formula must exist. (In fact, niche markets trafficking in “Old Master mediums” continue to turn a tidy profit.) As early as 1768, Barry, always happy to point out the failings of his fellow artists, wrote from Rome to his patron, Edmund Burke, about painters who “not knowing what to do with the common materials, are ready enough to imagine the fault does not lie in them, and desperately run adrift in the search of a terra incognita.” But there may be another reason why West was so quickly taken in. According to the show’s catalogue essay, “West’s ambitions were innate, proud, and strong. At times he seemed comically puffed up.” The artist’s supercilious affectations no doubt hid a deep insecurity about his inability to ever fully assimilate. The subject he chose for the debut of his “Titian coloring,” Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, speaks volumes about how West viewed himself and wanted others to view him. A leader newly arrived from Rome, Cicero was shocked that his subjects, the disinterested and lazy Syracusans, had neglected to maintain the tomb of the famed mathematician Archimedes, and had even forgotten it ever existed. The painting depicts Cicero triumphantly revealing the tomb to the amazed Syracusans, who presumably were forever grateful for having had this native hero restored to them. West surely intended the parallel to be obvious. As an outsider, he was resurrecting a ground-breaking technique that the Europeans had carelessly not bothered to pass down through the ages.

Lucky for us, the exhibition not only offers the pleasure of viewing West’s hubristic exploits but also a glimpse at the resulting hubbub. A bawdy song, reprinted in the catalogue, gaily insinuates that Ann Jemima’s clandestine art lessons came with licentious side benefits. The show also features a fabulous etching by James Gillray, who was known for his dead-on satirical prints, which ingeniously lays out the major players involved. The most prominent is the figure of Ann Jemima, standing at an easel, brush in hand, painting a portrait of Titian (who, with his hair and beard unkempt, stares wildly out from the canvas like a ghoul or madman). In the lower left corner is a stack of discarded canvases inscribed with the names of the artists who rejected Provis’s manuscript outright. At the bottom of the list is the name of a 22-year-old rising star, Joseph M. W. Turner. Perhaps the most telling detail of the show, Turner’s presence on Gillray’s print reminds us how critical a moment this was for art, as followers of neoclassicism and historical painting were being slowly superseded by adherents of modernism, those eager to capture the effects of a nascent industrial culture. Simply put, while West and his cohorts were looking to the past for inspiration, Turner was looking at the present, thereby offering a window into the future.

But what of Ann Jemima Provis? Though her father was appointed Yeoman Porter of the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, and lived a long and healthy life, she effectively disappeared; there are no records of her after the scandal died away. Yet when West made his copy he added more people to the crowd of onlookers, including a young woman in the background. The figure would not be noteworthy except for a plausible (though totally unofficial) explanation offered for her presence by the curators. With her hand outstretched, reaching toward the tomb, the woman in the second painting bears a resemblance to none other than Gillray’s depiction of Ann Jemima. Should this theory be correct—and the visual correlation is convincing—then you can’t help but forgive West his gullibility and single-minded ambition. If he added the woman in sly homage to the scam, then this bit of news suggests he possessed one of the greatest gifts any artist could ever offer his audience: a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor.

“BENJAMIN WEST AND THE VENETIAN SECRET” IS ON VIEW THROUGH JAN. 4, 2009, AT THE YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT.

Modern Painters | Dec 2008/Jan 2009

He Who Laughs Last
PAINT LIKE TITIAN! JUST 10 GUINEAS A POP! HOW A FATHER-DAUGHTER TEAM PULLED A FAST
ONE ON BENJAMIN WEST.

For a few months in 1796, a young woman of humble origins held the British art establishment in the palm of her hand. Ann Jemima Provis’s mother died when she was three, and her father, Thomas
Provis, was a “sweeper of the court” at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. Though his daughter was passionate about drawing and painting, Provis encouraged her to take up needlework, one of the few ways women could make a living. But eventually he assented to her wish to be an artist, even offering her a manuscript describing the elusive painting techniques used by Old Masters that his grandfather, who once captained an East India Company ship, had picked up somewhere in Italy. Ann Jemima devoted herself to studying and refining the techniques detailed in the manuscript; her obsession was such that she was treated for “mental derangement” by two well-known London doctors. But her industry paid off. She became a gifted miniaturist, and her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy.

This, at least, is the story Thomas Provis probably fed Richard Cosway, a flamboyant portrait painter, when he tried to sell him on the idea of a manuscript holding secrets long considered lost—every last one of them completely bogus. If Cosway smelled a rat, he didn’t let on, instead suggesting Provis take it to Benjamin West, then the president of the Royal Academy of the Arts. Provis approached West. The original manuscript, he told him, had been destroyed in a house fire, but fortunately Provis was perspicacious enough to have made a copy. Would West like to see it?

West proved an easy mark. Born in Pennsylvania in 1738, he had worked hard to overcome his foreign roots to gain stature as a gentleman and a well-respected painter in London. He was one of the first American artists to embark on the Grand Tour, traveling throughout Europe to study the great masterpieces, and he lingered in Italy, determined to work out the methods used by his Renaissance heroes, particularly Titian. Though he thought he came close once or twice, West never quite cracked the method behind Titian’s “divine” color. He moved to London and established himself in King George’s court, and eventually was named Joshua Reynolds’s successor as president of the Academy in 1792. Reynolds, like West and so many others, was obsessed with deciphering the Old Masters’ formulas, and allegedly bought a painting by Titian in order to strip it slowly, layer by layer, to determine its makeup. Should West succeed where Reynolds had failed, his reputation was ensured. West eagerly accepted the invitation to try out the Venetian formula at the Provises’ home, under the guidance of Ann Jemima.

But the initial attempt to use the technique, in late 1795, was not a success. After West suggested the ground on the canvas seemed not quite right, the Provises readily agreed, and offered to prepare another. West tried again, several months later, this time with more promising results. He showed this painting to a colleague, declaring, “a new Epocha in the art … would be formed by the discovery.” He painted portraits of his two sons and chose subjects for two larger canvases, Cupid Stung by a Bee and Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes.

But Provis, who had expected to be paid for his assistance, was less pleased with West’s apparent triumph. He took his grievance to Joseph Farington, another Academy member, who formed a small faction of artist friends outraged by West’s possessiveness. West backpedaled. He’d always planned on reporting Provis’s discovery, he explained, and on compensating him appropriately for it. He suggested that they all share the manuscript by forming a syndicate. Each member would contribute 10 guineas with the idea that the total sum eventually paid to Provis would be no more than 600 guineas (roughly the price of a prize-winning racehorse). The agreement was that Ann Jemima would teach them the technique, and until that amount was reached, they would keep it to themselves.

And so began an elaborate and ingenious swindle. Ann Jemima gave lessons to the syndicate (not all of whom were convinced of the manuscript’s authenticity). West finished Cicero and showed it at the Royal Academy’s exhibition in 1797. But the painting didn’t exactly launch a new epoch. Because the manuscript advised first laying down a dark red, absorbent ground, followed by the liberal application of something called “the Titian shade,” which was a combination of Prussian blue and ivory black, the canvas is quite dark, as though the figures were being lit by moonlight. The figures were more or less outlined in chiaroscuro, so there is something vaguely cartoonish about the final result, and the surface looks worked over. (Conservation research proves that West struggled to apply the paint, since the ground seems to have dried quickly and cracked.) “Instead of possessing Titian’s warmth divine,” one critic wrote in the Observer, West’s pictures evidenced “nothing but the chalky & cold tints of fresco & that gaudy glare & flimsy nothingness of fan painting.”

Disillusionment was rapid. West tried to distance himself from the scandal, but it was too late. On July 25, 1797, the Anglo-Irish painter James Barry wrote a scathing open letter to the Dilettanti Society, roundly condemning those who had been taken in by what had so obviously been a hoax. “Such a concurrence of ridiculous circumstances, of so many, such gross absurdities, and such busy industrious folly, in contriving for the publicity and exposure of a quacking, disgraceful imposture, is, I believe, unparalleled in the history of art.”

West never fully regained his standing. After some political shake up at the court, he resigned his presidency of the Royal Academy in 1805, but returned a year later, and continued in that role until his death in 1820. Today he is remembered as an important artist whose neoclassical works paved the way for Romanticism, but he never achieved the level of greatness to which he aspired. Unsurprisingly, no mention of the Venetian Secret appears in his “authorized” biography by John Galt, and the entire incident might have receded permanently from history as no more than an amusing footnote, were it not for an exhibition, currently on view at the Yale Center for British Art, that revisits the “quacking, disgraceful imposture.” This compact but brilliant show juxtaposes the 1797 painting with a copy West made eight years later, well after the manuscript had been exposed as a fake. Although they share the same imagery, the two works are noticeably different. Whereas the earlier painting is purplish, almost garish, the later work is in a much warmer spectrum, the paint manipulated with a surer hand (which is probably due to West’s familiarity with the composition).

How could West, obviously a man of no small intelligence, be so easily fooled? He wasn’t alone in thinking that some special formula must exist. (In fact, niche markets trafficking in “Old Master mediums” continue to turn a tidy profit.) As early as 1768, Barry, always happy to point out the failings of his fellow artists, wrote from Rome to his patron, Edmund Burke, about painters who “not knowing what to do with the common materials, are ready enough to imagine the fault does not lie in them, and desperately run adrift in the search of a terra incognita.” But there may be another reason why West was so quickly taken in. According to the show’s catalogue essay, “West’s ambitions were innate, proud, and strong. At times he seemed comically puffed up.” The artist’s supercilious affectations no doubt hid a deep insecurity about his inability to ever fully assimilate. The subject he chose for the debut of his “Titian coloring,” Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, speaks volumes about how West viewed himself and wanted others to view him. A leader newly arrived from Rome, Cicero was shocked that his subjects, the disinterested and lazy Syracusans, had neglected to maintain the tomb of the famed mathematician Archimedes, and had even forgotten it ever existed. The painting depicts Cicero triumphantly revealing the tomb to the amazed Syracusans, who presumably were forever grateful for having had this native hero restored to them. West surely intended the parallel to be obvious. As an outsider, he was resurrecting a ground-breaking technique that the Europeans had carelessly not bothered to pass down through the ages.

Lucky for us, the exhibition not only offers the pleasure of viewing West’s hubristic exploits but also a glimpse at the resulting hubbub. A bawdy song, reprinted in the catalogue, gaily insinuates that Ann Jemima’s clandestine art lessons came with licentious side benefits. The show also features a fabulous etching by James Gillray, who was known for his dead-on satirical prints, which ingeniously lays out the major players involved. The most prominent is the figure of Ann Jemima, standing at an easel, brush in hand, painting a portrait of Titian (who, with his hair and beard unkempt, stares wildly out from the canvas like a ghoul or madman). In the lower left corner is a stack of discarded canvases inscribed with the names of the artists who rejected Provis’s manuscript outright. At the bottom of the list is the name of a 22-year-old rising star, Joseph M. W. Turner. Perhaps the most telling detail of the show, Turner’s presence on Gillray’s print reminds us how critical a moment this was for art, as followers of neoclassicism and historical painting were being slowly superseded by adherents of modernism, those eager to capture the effects of a nascent industrial culture. Simply put, while West and his cohorts were looking to the past for inspiration, Turner was looking at the present, thereby offering a window into the future.

But what of Ann Jemima Provis? Though her father was appointed Yeoman Porter of the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, and lived a long and healthy life, she effectively disappeared; there are no records of her after the scandal died away. Yet when West made his copy he added more people to the crowd of onlookers, including a young woman in the background. The figure would not be noteworthy except for a plausible (though totally unofficial) explanation offered for her presence by the curators. With her hand outstretched, reaching toward the tomb, the woman in the second painting bears a resemblance to none other than Gillray’s depiction of Ann Jemima. Should this theory be correct—and the visual correlation is convincing—then you can’t help but forgive West his gullibility and single-minded ambition. If he added the woman in sly homage to the scam, then this bit of news suggests he possessed one of the greatest gifts any artist could ever offer his audience: a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor.

“BENJAMIN WEST AND THE VENETIAN SECRET” IS ON VIEW THROUGH JAN. 4, 2009, AT THE YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT.