art norma clarke

Rooms for Render This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and

Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century

By Rebecca Birrell (Bloomsbury Circus 384pp £25)

Teacups, fruit, flowers. Unlike grand mythological or historical subjects, or commissioned portraits, or pictures of ships at sea at sunset, the still life speaks to us of domesticity. Does it have ‘an affective power’ other genres can’t boast? And if so, what is it about the representation of everyday objects that is so moving, and in what ways have women artists made it their own? Rebecca Birrell urges us to ask new questions about gender and genre, domesticity and work. She wants us to look searchingly at Vanessa Bell’s apples in a bowl, Dora Carrington’s two china dogs on the mantelpiece, Ethel Sands’s chintz couch and quiet, well-appointed rooms, Gluck’s flowers, the corner of Gwen John’s lodgings in Montparnasse and Nina Hamnett’s saucepan, and think differently about them in the context of their creators’ lives.

This Dark Country is presented as a blend of group biography and art criticism. The artists formed a loosely linked network (not a group) in an era that saw greater freedoms for women: they could study at art colleges, rent bedsits, reject marriage – seen here as by definition oppressive and toxic to artistic aspiration – and choose alternative kinds of intimacy. Carrington loved Lytton Strachey, a homosexual. One of her best-known paintings is The Mill at Tidmarsh, with its two black swans in the foreground and the mill set slightly back. It has an odd and stirring beauty, a mix of tension and peace. Birrell notes that it was painted before the house became home to Carrington and Strachey in 1918. She reads The Mill at Tidmarsh illuminatingly as an ‘exploration of the genre’s charged threshold’, the mill serving as a stage set for escape from an ‘awful’ childhood and, in Carrington’s words, a ‘communal nest for breakers of the law’ (conscientious objectors as well as queers).

Not all Birrell’s analyses are as happy as this. More than once I found myself thinking: pictures can be made to say anything. The glimpses of the author in the archives turning up previously overlooked drawings or reading in a cold attic at Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s home, are a reminder of her scholarly credentials. Birrell wears her views on her sleeve: a social order that

‘The Open Door, Auppegard, France’ by Ethel Sands presented wifehood and motherhood as necessary for the completeness of women’s selves was structurally hostile to the free play of female art and intellect. Charleston is aptly described as a ‘queer arcadia’ and I liked the discussion of its interior decoration as an expression of the intimacy between Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, a married woman and a homosexual man creating new designs for coupledom and family. But it’s a flight too far to suggest that a rapid upper-body sketch of a man in a Paris cafe in 1952 can explain Vanessa’s marriage to Clive in 1907 on the grounds that scribbled in the space where the lower body belongs are calculations about expenses. The numbers, apparently, function as ‘a substitute limb’, doing ‘the work of addition – of production, of generation’ of the sex organs in the concealed crotch. She married him for his money, in other words, to ensure ‘access to her art’.

There is a bit too much portentous silliness of this kind, introduced with statements like ‘It is possible to see…’, and claims that such-and-such ‘invites reflection’. The project as a whole, however, is not at all silly. At its heart is the challenge of understanding the lives and works of women whose desires and ambitions often demanded secrecy, evasion and ambiguity. Misogyny was, and frequently still is, a fact. Gluck didn’t want to be called ‘Miss’ because it advertised her potential marriageability and in the world of art signified amateur status: any ‘Miss’ with a paintbox could paint flowers. Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson shied away from public attention as a couple, although their lives were entirely oriented around one another. Birrell looks beyond what Vanessa Bell called the ‘fatal prettiness’ of Sands’s interiors: rooms open onto other rooms in her paintings and in none of them is Nan to be found. (Think of all the depictions of women in men’s interiors, having baths, pulling on stockings, sewing, knitting.) Birrell also does her best to leave out Rodin from her account of Gwen John’s life and art and ‘let the women rush in’. She writes convincingly of the happiness John found in being alone, remaining unmarried, maintaining friendships with women, filling reams of paper with her thoughts and putting her time and energy into her art. No less convincingly, she links what she sees as a fascination with repetition with the dread of a commonplace woman’s life, such as that to which John had seen many of her friends succumb, not least her brother’s wife: endless housework and monotonous labour with nothing to show for it.

This Dark Country argues that in the simplest paintings of familiar things we can find rebellion. More, that such works offered women a unique space in which

Literary Review | august 2021 8