"Petrified in Radiance": Beckett, Dutch Painting and the Art of Absorption

Abstract

In 1924, in sole issue of Dublin journal The Klaxon, Thomas MacGreevy contrasts Cubist with what he calls the dead Dutch boors hanging in Irish National (24). MacGreevy's dismissal of large collection of seventeenth-century Dutch genre in Merrion Square is a typically Modernist one. The novel and genre came into being at same time and have often been seen as expressing world view and modes of consciousness of a new bourgeois class. These pictures of tavern interiors, peasant homesteads and other quotidian scenes were also very important to rise of a specifically realist fiction in England and France two centuries after they were painted. George Eliot, Balzac and Hardy all drew on details and concerns of Dutch genre as both model and justification (Yeazell, 57).By attacking them, MacGreevy is attacking a whole aesthetic.And yet this dismissal is also at odds with taste of his friend Samuel Beckett (though they were not of course to meet for another four years). Beckett was very keen indeed on Dutch art of period, as is evident from a notebook, dating most probably from end of 1934, packed with his notes on Reginald Wilenski's Introduction to Dutch Art (1929). It also contains lists of Dutch paintings he saw in Dublin, London and Paris (UoR MS5001). Ironically, it was probably MacGreevy who suggested this book to Beckett when latter wrote to him in October 1932 asking, Can you recommend me an informative book on Dutch painting (Beckett 2009, 129). In another lonely letter, written from London three years later, Beckett says:I wish you were to talk pictures, though know you don't talking much of Dutchmen. thought Teniers was last word inNetherland drawing till looked into Brouwers, alas so scarce. found a lovely one in Victoria and Albert, a man playing a lute [...] Also in V & A an adorable tiny Terborch, portrait of a man in black, tucked away behind a screen.(246)The two paintings mentioned here typify two aspects of Dutch and Flemish of seventeenth century. Brouwer's Interior of a Room with Figures (c. 163 5-38) depicts a tavern scene, with a rather louche-looking musician leering at viewer, while a woman prepares food and a cat licks from an upturned bowl on dirty floor. Terborch's Portrait of a Man in a Black Dress (late 1660s) meanwhile is intensely formal, starkly composed in black and white. The way former hovers between realistic and grotesque appealed to Beckett all his life; however we will be paying more attention here to Beckett's interest in Dutch portraiture and questions of interiority that it raises for his own depiction of subjectivity.In September 1932 Beckett wrote, again to McGreevy: I seem to spend a lot of time in National Gallery (2009, 121). The request for book two months later suggests that it was excellent collection of Dutch that he was looking at, paintings such as Portrait of an Old Lady by early Flemish painter known as Master of Tired Eyes, now ascribed to Pieter Vereist. This picture, with its veiled, impassive, inscrutable yet decidedly melancholy gaze is typical of one strand of Dutch and Flemish portraiture to which Beckett was particularly drawn. Beckett mentions in September letter and will later evoke it in More Pricks than Kicks to describe a character who approaches Belacqua in a bar: like face in National in Merrion Square by Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend an infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in (Beckett 2010, 38). The oppositions that emerge in Beckett's response to picture - distance and narrowness; nullity and luminosity; radiance and petrification - succinctly convey a dialectic of intimacy and exclusion that this essay will argue are central both to Beckett's attraction to these paintings and way that they function in his work. …