What’s the story behind the similarity between the Tate Gallery’s little William Blake watercolour Oberon, Titania And Puck With Fairies Dancing, 18″ x 26″, from 1786:
and the composition of Matisse’s two huge Dance paintings? The first, the sketch from 1909, is now in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York:
The wonderful 1910 final version is in St Petersburg, in the Hermitage:
Not knowing the Blake, I only just noticed the resemblance. Could it be coincidence that his left-hand figures have exactly the same twisted-trunk turning form as Blake’s does? In all three paintings there is a curved line you can follow from the tip of the left foot all the way upwards to the end of the left hand. There are other similarities: the right-hand foreground figures who are all nearly flying and the grey or green circle on the ground that the figures dance around. (As Nijma points out below, Titania’s fairies dance in a fairy ring, which accounts for Blake illustrating it, but there’s no such narrative explanation for Matisse’s circles, which simply underline the circular dance of his figures.) The linked arms are made more of by Matisse than by Blake: Matisse gets my eye to move clockwise round the group by way of the swooping arms, but there is the beginning of that in the Blake too. No other contemporary painting of dancers uses this device at all as far as I know, not even the ones by Matisse.
The hands just don’t meet in Matisse ‘s foregrounds; they certainly aren’t just big modernist copies of the Blake image, but there’s no mention of the similarities between the works either–at least, not anywhere I’ve looked. William Blake is not even in the index of Hillary Spurling’s Matisse biography. She says that Matisse first used the motif of the ring of dancers on the beach in the background of Le Bonheur de Vivre of 1906, where their arms aren’t linked together as they are in the Blake. According to the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones:
An unlikely source for the figures in Dance was an artist – a primitive in Matisse’s eyes – who lived in the heart of a modern city: JMW Turner. Matisse made a special study of this overwhelming British colourist – who, like him, loved the Mediterranean – on his honeymoon in London in 1898, when he looked repeatedly at Turner’s art in the National Gallery. You could hang Dance next to Turner’s paintings and the emotional use of colour to blaze a path between the imaginations of artist and beholder would immediately strike you as similar. Turner’s Mediterranean scenes are peopled, too, with Arcadian figures. The five figures in Dance look uncannily like a group of dancers in Turner’s The Golden Bough and reminiscent of dancers in other Turner paintings such as Apuleia In Search Of Apuleius, which was on view at the National Gallery in 1898. What makes them so similar is the serpentine loose depiction of the bodies, which in Matisse is deliberate and in his model was an accident. Turner didn’t paint people very well. His figures are ungainly, rough – in short, “primitive”.
It’s odd that Jones–a Blake lover if ever there was one–doesn’t mention Blake’s watercolour. Here is a detail from Turner’s The Golden Bough:
It’s a background group that seems more like the dancers in Le Bonheur de vivre than to either of Matisse’s Dance paintings.
It’s not clear to me that Matisse would have had an opportunity to see the Blake; it was in the private collection of a South African ostrich-feather tycoon called Alfred A. de Pass, until 1910.
A Bad Guide 
Does look like direct inspiration for Matisse.
Too bloody right it does. But did artists have postcards of old artworks on their studio walls in 1909? I don’t think so.
I prefer the Leningrad version to the MOMA Matisse, but in some ways I prefer the Blake to either of them.
in some ways I prefer the Blake to either of them
I prefer it too. I’d never seen it. The Blake figures look like they’re really dancing.
In the Matisse, the figure on the left side appears to be twisted into a position it would be hard to get out of without losing balance. Going counterclockwise, that “flying” figure seems to be falling rather than flying. Any second now she’s going to fly onto her gob (Ger.loc., auf die Fresse fliegen). Of the two background figures, the left one has a poker up her butt, and the figure to her right seems to be sitting down.
Here’s another one, but it wasn’t the one I was thinking of.
I suppose it was Bottecelli I was thinking of, but only three graces dance.
They aren’t the same, though. It’s the Blake that Matisse copied. I didn’t know he did that kind of thing.
Not the same painting though. Five figures instead of four, and they’re in different positions–facing different ways and holding arms up not down–tiptoe or flatfoot. Blake’s dancers are graceful, Matisse’s are not. They have two legs and two arms though, so they’re similar in that way.
“The Dance is one of the few wholly convincing images of physical ecstasy made in the twentieth century. Matisse is said to have got the idea for it in Collioure in 1905, watching some fishermen and peasants on the beach in a circular dance called a sardana. But the sardana is a stately measure, and The Dance is more intense. That circle of stamping, twisting maenads takes you back down the line, to the red-figure vases of Mediterranean antiquity and, beyond them, to the caves. It tries to represent motions as ancient as dance itself.”
source (and links to more images):
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/matisse.html
There’s a companion painting about music.
There’s some mountain in France that everyone painted, it’s interesting to see the same subject seen by Cezanne, pointalist, surreal etc.
Matisse has no spectators and no men.
The Hermitage version has men. I think.
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/matisse/dance_hermitage.jpg.html
Nijma: The Montaigne St. Victoire near Aix-en-Provence here.
I suggest the critic you quoted is a pseud. He posits Matisse watching a sardana, then promptly says it’s a totally different kind of dance …typical, IMHO.
William Carlos Williams, “The Dance”:
In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.
Tweedle of bagpipes is exactly right. Thanks, Language. Here it is. It is a great picture. And look at the tiny figures in the foreground. This is supposed to have been what they were dancing to, according to this Harper’s Magazine article.
ET: Matisse has no spectators and no men.
Hi there, ET. That’s right, although Blake’s dancers–the fairies–all look like girls to me. Puck isn’t dancing, he’s banging bones together rhythmically. The Blake is called Oberon, Titania And Puck With Fairies Dancing (they’re from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and the Matisse is just Dance, so it’s a different subject and there are many other differences between the paintings besides their size and the one-hundred-and-fifty years that separate them in time. One other similarity I noticed, though, is the circle on the ground that the dancers are dancing around is in both pictures. I would bet my life that Matisse had either seen the Blake image or, possibly, another image that connects both paintings.
Don’t bet your life. It could be a wild coincidence, or a case of two minds being struck by the same cosmic ray. Terry Pratchett writes:
“Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.”
Yes, I think Terry Prachett has some awful thing like Alsheimer’s, doesn’t he? We bet our lives all the time. I always heard I had the same chance of being struck by lightning as I had of winning the NY lotto. Well, I played it a few times; I never contemplated staying indoors during a thunderstorm, though.
Lightning-strike is not comparable to lotto, because you can’t buy a ticket, and because if you win, you lose. Lotto is different.
I have yet to find anything of interest in the bits of Terry Pratchett that people quote. That’s possibly due to my general belief that any author whom lots of people like to read will fail to interest me.
I have a nagging feeling that I have arranged my value system in such a way that that is true. My aesthetic principle is “Popular ? No thanks !”. It’s simply the obverse of what the masses think, of what makes them masses: “Popular ? Yes please !”
Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.
The weightier stuff will never have much mass appeal.
I will have to try to resist the impulse I now feel to choose some really funny Terry Pratchett bit and try to make Stu laugh at it. The quote that I offered was not chosen on that basis; it was more like a nod in the direction of anyone who knows the reference. (In one of his books Pratchett has a traveling ragtag theatrical troupe complete with the fast-writing Discworld equivalent of Shakespeare. He offers the spectacle of this genius at work being repeatedly struck unawares by various surprising unconnected bits of drama that to us are clichés, and then incorporating them into whatever he is working on at the time.)
You’ve read all Nietzsche’s bestsellers, Stu. I’d been wondering if you like Christopher Isherwood, but I expect he’s too popular for you.
I’ve never read anything by Terry Pratchett.
I share your aversion to following the crowd, Stu, and I pride myself on having become a Pratchett fan before most of my friends had heard of him: my expatriate ex-wife pointed me at the Discworld books back around 1991, IIRC.
By the way, the obverse is the front side of the coin; but you probably knew that. The head, not the tail.
Um, by the way, I haven’t been able to get to languagehat.com for a day or two. I don’t think it’s just me, although I have had intermittent trouble at other sites as well …
I haven’t had any trouble myself in getting through to language Hat, though I’ve had a bit of trouble with some of the content.
You’re much more likely to be struck by lightning.
The numbers depend on exactly what you’re computing, but it seems consistent that lightning is less than one in a million and big payout lotteries are one in some millions.
Bigger Turner on Flickr.
Here is 1000 px Turner:
http://www.panisbet.com/studio/popups/pic15.html
And Picasso did circle dancing:
Paul, that wasn’t a particularly high quality site I linked to, but it had lots of Turner’s images. The same content has been scraped unattributed to some 200 other websites, you’ll never find out who wrote it, but someone did and it’s an explanation.
And of course Tatania’s fairies dance in a circle. Haven’t you ever seen the fairy ring of mushrooms in a forest where the fairies have been? There is some boring “scientific” explanation about spore dispersal and exhausting the soil nutrients in the center, but everyone knows it’s where the fairies dance.
More Picasso, I can’t resist. He did dancing with goats.
Dance of the Sheppard:
Danse Nocturne Avec un Hibou (Nightly Dance with an Owl):
Oops, shepherd.
Finally, here’s a a cropped version of the Turner in .png format; jpeg files seem to have so many odd artifacts:
Don’t know why it’s stripping out my code. Again:
Turner detail.
This isn’t my night. Double checking, the Dance of the Shepard didn’t come through either. Once more.
I seem to do better with cough syrup.
everyone knows it’s where the fairies dance
Sorry, time for a P. G. Wodehouse excerpt. Madeline speaks and Bertie narrates:
“When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy queen.”
Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the point.
the obverse is the front side of the coin
Yes, that’s what I meant. The two aesthetic principles are two sides of the same tuppence.
I’d been wondering if you like Christopher Isherwood
Who knows his Firbank, knows his Isherwood. I bet you haven’t read Christopher and His Kind, the first volume of his autobiography (I just saw at amazon that there is a second volume I didn’t know about). There’s a passage with a little sociological observation about S&M and his German rent boys in Berlin that applies to a certain extent even today.
I suspect, though, that there’s nothing specifically German about it. Just an aspect of sexual exploitation.
I used to think that rabbits were gnomes
I remember that passage !
He offers the spectacle of this genius at work being repeatedly struck unawares by various surprising unconnected bits of drama that to us are clichés, and then incorporating them into whatever he is working on at the time
Now that sounds funny. So long as it doesn’t amount to the old saw about Shakespeare, who is supposed to have “universal appeal” because he deals with all that is most human in us etc. etc.
I prefer writers who can turn clichés inside out and startle the bejesus out of you. Such as Luhmann.
Here’s an easely photo of Isherwood and Bachardy.
MMcM:You’re much more likely to be struck by lightning. The numbers depend on exactly what you’re computing
One in six thousand during an 80-yr lifetime. It seems practically certain, but Hey! You never know!
Grumbly, I have got Christopher & His Kind somewhere; I’ll dig it out. I met him after a reading he gave of it in the late seventies, in SF. He was very nice, very modest. I like that photo with his eye coming through the easel legs.
I went to art school with a girl who was exactly like Madelaine Bassett. This was before Photoshop. She loved bluebells, and she printed 8×10 photos of her Persian cat, substituting star-shaped bluebells for the cat’s eyes. They were quite frightening.
Nij & MMcM, thank you both very much for the links to better-quality Turner images.
the fairy ring of mushrooms in a forest where the fairies have been
In my experience, fairy rings are in meadows, not forests.
As a child in France I heard an old man explain that fairy rings are created by hares dancing in a circle at mating time.
Hares in a ring.
“The silk road” is always the excuse for things popping up in different corners of the world; however, common sense tells me it was done by aliens.
Bugs Bunny has a different theory.
I met him after a reading he gave of it in the late seventies, in SF.
Then I guess I lost that round of one-upmanship. But why do you remark that he was a nice and modest guy ? For what reasons had you not been expecting that ?
Well, I don’t see how you could ever expect it from someone you’ve never met, unless you’d been told about them, and I hadn’t, and anyway Auden certainly wasn’t. There’s an interesting introduction to his play about Benjamin Britten & Auden, The Habit Of Art, by Alan Bennett. In real life, Bennett says, Auden was an overbearing old fart, constantly retelling the same old stories, unable to produce good poetry (without the help of Isherwood).
I guess I lost that round of one-upmanship
Not at all. For one thing, I don’t know my Firbank.