Guest Blogger: Professor Nicholas Jones
“Over spring break, I made a quick trip to New York, where I spent a number of hours in the AMAM’s and the Metropolitan Museum’s “Side by Side” exhibition.
Some visitors, who probably had no connection with Oberlin, were nonetheless clearly interested in these works that had suddenly appeared alongside works they may have already known well.
Other visitors (students? alumni?) were holding the Met’s brochure with the AMAM’s Monet on the cover, and finding their way around the scattered locations where the Allen’s works mingle with the Met’s collections. The guards were alternatively amused and (perhaps) a little annoyed by our frequent requests to interpret the map that accompanies the exhibition: one of them expressed the opinion that the museum should have put all the Oberlin paintings together in one room.
Makes sense, logistically, although that would have eliminated the “Easter-Egg hunt” aspect of the visit, which was fun for us. More seriously, if all the paintings were in one room, they would not be interacting with the Met’s collection. That interaction was the really innovative and interesting part of the exhibition.
Take our Joseph Wright of Derby painting, “Dovedale by Moonlight.” It is hung amongst other English 18th-century paintings, mostly portraits. Above it is a beautiful John Hoppner family piece; to its right a Reynolds of an army officer; across the room the gorgeous Lawrence portrait of the actress who was to become the Countess of Derby (Wright’s home county, of course).
There is an outdoorsy quality to them all. “Dovedale,” with its peaceful natural landscape, fits in with these portraits. The English loved to paint its celebrities in the out-of-doors, to give them the fresh cheeks of those who were accustomed to walk a lot, to fit them with beautiful English horses and put them next to sturdy English oak trees. Lawns and shrubberies, the big sky and fascinating clouds of an English sky, the northern light softened by the humid landscape, work together with Wright’s landscape to create a sense of a national identity close to nature.
But, as I’ve learned over years of studying the Wright in Oberlin, it’s a complex piece. The Met brought out more of that complexity in surrounding it with all these portraits. With all those expensive paintings of well-fed and beautifully-clothed lovelies, the absence of people, the mysterious sense of a certain uncanniness, in the Wright came out even more starkly. Why are we out there in the moonlight, in a silent and mysterious river valley? Where is everybody? What does the painting ask of us who look at it?
The painting on the next wall, to the right — Gainsborough’s “Wood Gatherers” — brought this out, too. Here, we have a forest with several ragged kids gathering firewood, in what must be a life of poverty. On one hand, the picture is one of those irritating examples of the art of “the picturesque poor.” On the other hand, we could see it as one of the greatest of those portrait-painters of the rich giving us for a moment the other side of the social picture.
The Gainsborough is a painting that makes us search deeper, for a moment, than the surface charm and glitter of those attractive portraits that hang all around. Like “Dovedale by Moonlight,” with its sense of mysterious and uncertain shadows, it suggests a darker aspect to the English cult of nature.”
Professor Nicholas Jones is a Professor of English at Oberlin College.
