Still Life in Motion: Mortal Form in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Late in the evening on March 28, 1918, a government car rolled to a stop at the bottom of a lane near the town of Lewes, in east Sussex, and deposited a single passenger and a quantity of luggage. passenger, John Maynard Keynes, had just returned from Paris, where he had helped the National Gallery to acquire thirteen works by major European artists at the sale of the estate of Edgar Degas, which proceeded despite the wartime bombardment of the city. In fact, the sounds of the exploding shells from Big Bertha had depressed prices at the auction to such an extent that Keynes able to purchase a few items for himself, and he returned to England with all of this artwork in tow. Unable to carry it all up the lane to Charleston farmhouse, though, he paused to hide a parcel in the hedge near the (Bell, Cezanne). Then, with his more manageable burden, he began to walk toward the house, where, upon his arrival, he declared to the great surprise of its inhabitants, If you'd like to go down to the road, you'll find there's a just behind the gate (Grant). (1) As Vanessa Bell told Roger Fry in a letter she wrote the following week, this eccentric greeting caused a bit of upheaval: We had great excitements about the pictures. Maynard came back suddenly and unexpectedly late at night, ... and said he had left a by the roadside! Duncan rushed off to get it and you can imagine how exciting it all was (212-13). excitement over the painting in the hedge still reverberated years later, and the event lent its title to a collection of reminiscences about Bloomsbury, A in the Hedge, in which Quentin Bell suggested that surely there ought to be some little monument, a small obelisk, a pillar or at least a post. After all, there cannot be many other English hedgerows which have actually housed a Cezanne (136). But in 1918, the excitement over the manner of the painting's arrival soon gave way to the thrill of examining a up close and in color. It had been six years since the last Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery, and at that time, no private collection in England included a painting (Caws 99); none to be seen, as Quentin Bell explains, except in black and white photographs, usually very bad, in avant-garde magazines (138). Little wonder, then, that Vanessa Bell wrote to Roger Fry with such enthusiasm about the small still life, entitled Pommes [Fig. 1]: The is really amazing and it's most exciting to have it in the house. It's so extraordinarily solid and alive (213). (2) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] When Virginia Woolf saw the painting a few days later, once it had been brought into London, she noted the same liveliness, writing about it at length in her diary: There are 6 apples in the picture. What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. Theres [sic] their relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity. To Roger & Nessa, moreover, it a far more intricate question than this. It a question of pure paint or mixed; if pure which colour: emerald or veridian; & then the laying on of the paint; & the time he'd spent, & how he'd altered it, & why, & when he'd painted it--We carried it into the next room, & Lord! how it showed up the pictures there, as if you put a real stone among sham ones; the canvas of the others seemed scraped with a thin layer of rather cheap paint. apples positively got redder & rounder & greener. (3) (Diary 1. 140-41) Here Woolf emphasizes the painters' overwhelming attention to the details of Cezanne's craft, and at the same time that she gently mocks her sister and her friend, she also poses somewhat disingenuously as a naif. This day in April 1918 far from the first time that Woolf had viewed Post-Impressionist painting. She had attended both of Fry's exhibitions and had even dressed as a Gauguin picture with Vanessa for the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition Ball (Froula 15). …