The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The art that stole our hearts…
As the Frick Collection, the world’s finest private gallery, moves to a new home, five famous fans introduce their pick of its paintings
Vermeer’s picture of a moment in time is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen
These painters were freaks of devotion, providing eyeball kicks for acolytes like us
stoned after school and wandering in Central Park.
Peter knew about the Frick. We thought the name was funny. Though we paid admission, it felt as though we were sneaking in. Peter already had his favourites there, and he led me to them. It felt like a kind of rebellion against modernism, to be so interested in virtuosity – in photorealism before photography, in the Vermeers, the Dürer drawings, above all, in the Holbeins. Cromwell and More.
Peter and I did this three or four times, enough that it seemed legendary, a rite: we blew joints on boulders in the sweaty, busy park, then threaded among the rollerskaters and blaring boomboxes, moving west to east (we’d have got off the C train at 81st Street, probably) to Fifth Avenue. Then, giggling, entered the hushed, cool stone temple. We weren’t, as I say, sneaking in, yet we still felt like spies, like invaders – termites in the elephant temple, worms in the bud. We alone understood that the art was psychedelicised, talking to us through the centuries. These painters were freaks of devotion, providing eyeball kicks for acolytes like us.
Cromwell was a pinched nerd. He reminded us of one of our uptight painting teachers. We dug his hand, though. We stared a lot at that hand. More was our favourite, More was sublime. I was into science fiction and knew he’d written Utopia.
Whatever it was. And More had that outlandish beard stubble, the weird “S-S-S” necklace, and, above all, the velvet sleeve. The sleeve was ecstasy, the sleeve should be illegal, the sleeve was Utopia. We fell into the sleeve. If you look close, we’re still in there, falling.
Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning never fails to hit me with a keen stab of longing. The limpid light washing the scene is the light of my memories, the happy ones anyway. Turner was a Thames river brat, and, born 170 years after him, so was I. As a child, Turner was taken to live with his uncle at Brentford, and there he began to draw, so that light, sky and water were always an indivisible chain of sensation. When he painted the river flowing past William Moffatt’s suburban villa, he was himself living not far away at Twickenham.
He was in his 50s when Moffatt commissioned him to produce this picture of his idyll, but he had been experimenting for decades on liquidating (I use the word advisedly) the boundary between watercolours and oils – between what was sometimes regarded as the medium of amateur gentility and that of the professional painter. In 1805, he had taken to the Thames to sketch, on canvas and panel, while actually afloat on the stream, and those sketches encompass a miraculously experimental range of textures from dense to airy.
The Frick painting, like its “Evening” pair in the National Gallery in Washington, thins out the pigment so that it seems to be floated or breathed on to the canvas: a scrim of blonde light flooding everything, turning the quotidian moment into a paradisal beginning of the day.
Rivers coursed through Turner’s sensibility like blood; he spent time in France and Germany sketching the illustrations for tourist books. But the Rhine and the Seine were operatic romances; the Thames was the site where history, personal memory, and the fugitive idyll of English life flowed together. It’s the necessary hero of his grandest visions: The Fighting Temeraire, and Rain, Steam and Speed, both visual poems on the caprices of time. But he also sketched the serpentine meanders of the river from high on Greenwich Hill, as it snaked through the clotted throng of London or lit with fire on the night when Parliament burned down.
But the Frick painting is in an intimate key, one where landscape and genre melt together in that dewy morning radiance. It’s a busier picture than it seems at first sight: a racing boat is out for practice; the odd wherry and barge are at work; Moffatt’s gardener has already been cutting the lawn and is sharpening his scythe to finish the job before the summer sun makes the labour too hot; there are signs of drowsy ease; a besom lies on the grass; a wheelbarrow awaits the sweet-smelling trimmings; the “Limes” (or linden trees) that gave their name to Moffatt’s house, spread like parasols out of their pollarded length of trunks. And at the end of the little avenue, two men, perhaps the rich brewers, stand in easy conversation: one with his face to us, the other leaning as one would over the low wall watching the shift of silvery water.
It is 1826. Somewhere in England, there are millworkers, toiling in dirt and darkness; somewhere in England radicals are fuming at the brutal arrogance of the aristocrats who own land and much of the British constitution with it; the king is a bloated hulk of indolent vanity. Byron had died of sepsis at Missolonghi; Wordsworth and Coleridge were in reactionary retreat. But at Mortlake, for one morning, a numinous light lands on a scene of perfect sweetness with the delicate intensity reserved for dreams or the passing vision we all hope to catch and keep all our lifelong days.
On every return to New York, I make time to revisit the Frick. It is unique in that it is the only museum to retain an atmosphere of the grand residence it once was. However, the real reason I go is to make a pilgrimage to see the Rembrandt self-portrait I first saw as a young actress.
I recall standing before it, admiring the mastery of Rembrandt’s brushstrokes, noting that nothing unnecessary was present; the simplicity and truth of his approach was a lesson in artistry that transcended the barriers among all disciplines. I remember thinking, “That is how I want to act.”
Learning this lesson was one thing, putting it into practice quite another. I think I am getting there. Gradually.
DIANA RIGG ON Self-Portrait (1658) by Rembrandt van Rijn
Diana Rigg died on Sept 10 2020