Doomed Damsel: Isabella, the tragic herbalist

 Painters love a doomed damsel as a subject. The pre-Raphaelites were particularly fond of combining long tresses with a touch of anguish.

As happened to Hamlet's Ophelia, doomed damsels usually bring their tragic fate upon themselves by falling in love with rotters.

In the case of Isabella, an Italian lass, the rotters were her two brothers, not her lover, but love was, as usual, the root cause of her doom. (No pun intended.) The whole thing was a disaster: nobody won except the painters.

It all began when Isabella fell in love with Lorenzo, a carpenter employed by her brothers. Hoping to marry their sister off to a rich guy instead, the brothers hit upon a cunning plan to cope with the Lorenzo situation: they lured the carpenter into the forest, where they killed and buried him. They told Isabella they had sent him on a business trip, but Lorenzo's ghost came to her in the night and told her everything, including the location of his grave.

Isabella found the grave, but rather than put a posy on it and say a little prayer, she chose to dig it up in order to take him home with her. The late Lorenzo was a strapping lad - finding his body too heavy to carry, she hacked off his head and tucked that under her arm to take home. Here she put it in a terracotta pot, covered it with potting soil and sowed basil seeds on top.

The basil did rather well, as you would expect: all that organic fertiliser. She watered it with her tears and spent hours hugging the pot and talking to the plant. (She may have been an ancestress of Prince Charles.) One wonders if she used bits of the basil in the pasta sauce she cooked for the brothers.

People started calling her weird for spending all her time mooning over a pot of basil and the brothers couldn't interest any rich guys in marriage with a madwoman, however beautiful.

So they hit upon another cunning plan: they would steal the pot of basil. With the object of her obsession removed, they hoped Isabella would return to normal. Unfortunately the two broke the pot and saw their victim's head. Realising the game was up, they fled the jurisdiction. Isabella, bereft of Lorenzo, basil and all, pined away and died.

Keats wrote a poem about her; Holman Hunt, John Millais, John William Waterhouse and John White Alexander painted her, but it seems the Italian police ignored the whole thing! Had it happened here, Melbourne's Finest would have sent Forensics to check out the crime scene, arrested the whole lot of them and arranged counselling for Isabella.


Get the Kleenex ready for next month's sad but mystifying tale – the story of Elaine.

Fancy meeting you here!

My mother, who was an art teacher, had unorthodox ideas about the interior decoration of her children's bedrooms. My friends had framed pictures of Disney and Beatrix Potter characters on their walls, which were gradually replaced by sellotaped posters of Cliff Richard and Elvis as teenagery set in.

No framed Peter Rabbit or sellotaped Elvis for me and my sister! My mother had a vast supply of A3-sized reproductions of famous paintings. She subscribed to an art magazine which featured a different one as a centrefold each month. She pulled them out and stuck them on cardboard, ignoring the staple holes. She clothes-pegged them, three at a time, to a piece of clothesline which she had nailed to the wall facing our beds. She changed the pictures every couple of weeks. Throughout my childhood, I saw those pictures first thing in the morning and last thing at night: if I ever happen to run into Pope Julius II or Mona Lisa at the MCG or the Boxing Day Sales, I will recognise them immediately and greet them like old friends.

Over the years, I have in fact run into many of these old friends in various art galleries in the world, and it always comes as a delightful, if rather disconcerting, surprise. For one thing, in my mind all these pictures are A3 size, so I have to make what in some cases is a very considerable mental adjustment. Holbein's "Ambassadors" in the National Gallery, London, (which I discussed in a previous WASP article) is two metres square – a far cry from the A3 print along which I used to squint to see the skull appear.

An even bigger surprise than the size, is always the colour: even with today's cutting-edge technology, reproductions never get the colours perfectly right. In the 40s and 50s when I grew up, they hardly ever even came close.

I loved looking at the little Infanta Margarita by Velasquez, in her bubble-gum pink hoop skirts and long golden tresses – that, to my eight-year-old mind, was how a princess should look – not like the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose who wore smocked frocks and white ankle socks just like mine!

Thirty years later I ran into the Infanta, in the Prado in Madrid. The bubblegum pink frock was a lovely muted shade of apricot and she was four times taller than I remembered her, but there she stood, the same little princess, looking gravely at me just the way she used to, but without the staple holes in her forehead.

A picture that fascinated me as a child was Ghirlandaio's double portrait of an old man and a boy, presumably his grandson. At that age I was oblivious to the loving relationship between the benevolent old man and the trusting child. All I could see, was the grandfather's nose, a mass of bulbous growths.

When I eventually saw the original in the Louvre, I could look at it with an adult's perspective. The picture is dominated by the noble ruin of the old man's face, in contrast to the perfect and childishly chubby face of the little boy, complete with wavy golden locks.

The ravaged old face and the beautiful young one contemplate each other with affection – the painter has unerringly caught a fleeting moment of tenderness.

This picture is a perfect illustration of what Renaissance philosopher Leon Battista Alberti meant when he wrote that a good portrait painter possesses a truly divine power, making the past present and representing the dead to the living many centuries later.

Visiting the NGV's wonderful portrait collection is always an adventure: you never know whom you'll meet in the next room: Cleopatra, the Doge of Venice or King David - they all live in St Kilda Road and you can visit them free of charge, any time you like!

Isn't Melbourne Marvellous?

Aubrey Beardsley

I was born in Brighton, in 1872. My father was a ne'er-do-well, descended from London jewellers, and my mother was a governess. I was diagnosed with tuberculosis at seven, famous at 20 and dead at 25. I had very little formal art training: I attended Bristol Grammar School as a boarder for four years, and then became a clerk at a London insurance company, where I did not remain long.


Oscar Wilde described me as having "a face like silver hatchet and grass green hair." Oscar exaggerated: my hair was not green, but I was certainly a weird-looking fellow.

Both my sister Mabel and I were considered by our parents to be artistically and musically gifted. Mabel later became an actress.

I admired the Pre-Rapaelites and met Burne-Jones, who took me under his wing, arranging for me to attend night classes at the Westminister School of Art -- the only formal training I ever received.

Although a member of the homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and the English aesthetes, I was basically heterosexual, though my only female partner had been my adored elder sister Mabel, with whom I had an ongoing incestuous relationship that had started in our childhood. Rumours that she miscarried or aborted my child, were fuelled by the drawings of diminutive foetus-like monsters which started to appear in my work by 1892.

My first commission was to illustrate J. M. Dent's edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur.

The next year Wilde's scandalous play Salome was published in its original French version, and I was commissioned to illustrate it. This assignment was the beginning of celebrity but also of an uneasy, and at times unpleasant, friendship with Wilde, which officially ended when Wilde was tried and convicted of sodomy.

My fame was established for all time when the first volume of The Yellow Book appeared in April 1894. This famous quarterly of art and literature, for which I served as art editor, brought my work to a larger public. It was the venomous elegance of my startling black-and-white drawings, title-pages, and covers which made the journal an overnight sensation.

Although well received by much of the public, The Yellow Book was attacked by critics as an outlet for the "indecent" work of Wilde and his aesthete cronies. In April 1895, following Wilde's arrest, I was dismissed from my post, even though Wilde had in fact never contributed to the magazine. Soon afterwards, however, I was appointed art editor of The Savoy, a magazine similar to the Yellow Book. I continued to illustrate books . Among these were editions of Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Ben Jonson's Volpone, and The Lysistrata of Aristophanes.

I became renowned for my dark and perverse images and grotesque erotica. My most famous erotic illustrations were on themes of history and mythology, including my illustrations for Lysistrata and Salomé.

During the last four months of my life I was ravaged by chills and haemhorrages, but continued to work feverishly on my drawings for Volpone, even when I was finally bedridden. In November 1897 I went to Menton in the south of France on my doctor's advice, and four months later I died there.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

John Donne said no man is an island, and certainly no artist is an island – everyone is influenced by the work of those they admire and study. When looking at paintings by the great artists, one is often conscious of nuances and echoes of the works of other artists: Rembrandt uses light and shadow in the same way as Carvaggio, look at a Canaletto sky and you see Claude Lorrain's way with light, every time you clap eyes on a Rubens you can't help thinking: "this guy has seen a Titian or two!"

Sometimes there is no more than a striking similarity between two paintings that indicate how one artist's work influenced another: a case in point is Sargent’s "Fumée d'Ambre Gris" and Whistler’s "White Girl" – both are studies of white on white and in some ways Sargent surpasses Whistler in his handling of showdows and the play of light accents. Whistler was older and vastly more popular than his fellow-American ex-pat, who admired his work and studied it.

Why does Manet's "Olympia", which scandalised Society even more than his "Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe", look so familiar? The painting was inspired by Titian's "Venus of Urbino", which in turn is a dead ringer for Giorgione's "Sleeping Venus".

What I enjoy most of all, is when I come across a painting which is a parody, a re-interpretation or perhaps an homage to some other famous work. Something in the manner of the remakes of famous movies – when Gus van Sandt remakes Hitchcock's "Psycho", is it homage or does he think he can do it better?

Rene Magritte did a series of paintings that was based on well-known paintings by the earlier French artists Jacques Louis David, François Gérard and Édouard Manet. Characteristic of this series was Magritte's substitution of coffins for the people in the original paintings. Magritte's version of David's famous portrait of Madame Récamier is both disturbing and surprisingly humourous, particularly when you catch a glimpse of the remains of the original sitter's gown squeezing out from underneath a coffin, instead of cascading over a young seductive woman.

I saw Magritte's coffin version of Manet's "The Balcony" in an exhibition in Antwerp, but it didn't mean much to me at the time. It is only when I saw the original Manet at the NGV, where it was the star turn of the Impressionist exhibition, that I did a classic double take and realised where I had seen this group before. I couldn't wait to get home and look at my Magritte book!

Our own James Gleeson in his turn pays homage to the great Surrealists: several of his works, in the retrospective the NGV held a few years ago, are very reminiscent of Magrittes I'd seen in Antwerp's Stadsmuseum: meticulously drawn everyday objects in an extraordinary context: the "magic realism" that Magritte pioneered. Indeed, Gleeson also echoed Magritte's trick of creating surrealist versions of famous paintings: I was delighted and amused by a large canvas called "Faux Delft by day/night" …

When I first looked at it, it seemed so familiar, yet I knew I had never seen it before. Then it dawned on me that I was looking at Vermeer's "View of Delft", rendered surrealistically! Instead of the Dutch ladies in the foreground, Gleeson had painted himself at his easel. He used the same palette of colours and kept the skyline similar, although Vermeer's buildings are now bottles and pelicans and weird animals, with the same silhouettes. I like a painter with a sense of humour!

Among the Archibald finalists of 2005 was Rodney Pole's portrait of fellow-artist Kerrie Lester, that gave me a great deal of pleasure and amusement. I have always liked Goya's imperious Duchess of Alba, and this was unmisktakably Kerrie Lester channelling the Duchess: the stance with down-pointing finger, feet turned out in their winkle-picking shoes, the red sash, the imperious stare – even the background is the same.

Picasso had a deep admiration for the work of his fellow Spaniard, the great Velasquez, and in a true act of homage, he painted a series of 58 interpretations of "Las Meninas", one of the world's most famous paintings, between August and December 1957. The paintings fill the Las Meninas gallery of the Picasso Museo in Barcelona, Spain.

Have you come across other examples of artistic homage? Let me know!

A Haarlem Genius

The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals by Michael Kernan

A set of ancient notebooks turn up in a Long Island garage and Peter Van Overloop, a Columbia graduate student, sets to translating them. He finds himself immersed in the life and times of the Dutch painter Frans Hals, for the notebooks seem to be the painter's diaries.

Hals was a prominent citizen of Haarlem, where a flourishing artistic community included painters like Jacob van Ruysdael, Pieter Saenredam and Jan Steen. I particularly enjoyed learning more about Judith Leyster, who was a pupil of Hals and one of my favourite painters.

Hals emerges as a thoroughly funny, charming man and the book is a fascinating portrait of the way of life in his era. He was much in demand to paint the portraits of the Great and the Good – we learn about the social mores among the elite citizens of the time.

I was very interested in the story behind the huge group portraits he painted of the officers of the militia regiments of the city. Indeed, his only known self-portrait is as a face in the background of one of these.

It was very fashionable for prominent men to hold officer rank in a militia regiment – largely a ceremonial position in a peaceful and prosperous country. They liked having group portraits in their elaborate uniforms: Hals' contemporary, Rembrandt, famously painted the Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, better known as the Night Watch. Hals painted several large canvases of militia banquets, now hanging in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem.

I first read the Dutch version of this book, which I found in a bookshop in Haarlem while I was visiting my daughter, who had a flat near the Frans Hals Museum. I enjoyed popping in for half an hour every day so I could spend time getting to know the whole collection, which includes works by many other artists contemporary with Hals.

The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals is freely available in a good English translation. A seamless merging of literary invention and historic fact, it is remarkable, unforgettable novel. A four-page color insert showing some of the paintings referred to by Hals makes these "diaries" all the more realistic and engaging.

The Prettier Bonaparte

Venus of Empire
by Flora Fraser

This book is not really about art, except insofar as it describes how Canova came to sculpt the famous portrait statue of Pauline Bonaparte, the Princess Borghese.

It is a biography of Pauline, youngest of Napoleon's seven siblings. Napoleon was very dedicated to his rather mediocre family and made all his brothers Kings, except for Lucien who displeased him and had to be satisfied with being Prince of Canino.

None of them really made much of a mark in the history books, with the exception of Pauline. She is chiefly remembered today for her scandalous amours and for "Venus Victrix", the magnificent life size marble sculpture by Canova. I am sure many of our members have seen it in the Borghese Palace in Rome.

Flora Fraser has written a well-researched and very entertaining account of the fair Pauline's tumultuous love life, set in the context of the upheavals in Europe at the time. Of all his siblings, Pauline was the most loyal to Napoleon and was the only one to accompany him into exile on Elba. There was talk that she also had an incestuous relationship with him, but Ms Fraser tends to discount that as malicious rumour.

Napoleon tried with indifferent success to curb his sister's flamboyant lifestyle. Said to be the most beautiful woman in Europe, Pauline was impetuous, cruel, spendthrift, wildly manipulative and a bit of a nymphomaniac. Which is, of course, why it's such fun to read about her!

In England, the Regency period was at its height and this book reads like a spiced-up version of a French Georgette Heyer. We learn about Pauline's social life, her fashionable wardrobe, her schemes to hide lovers from her brother’s spies, her sybaritic retreats to fashionable spas, a lot of society one-upmanship and a great deal of high-end shopping. Pauline liked jewellery and plenty of it. She also liked to redecorate, lavishly and at vast expense, any new palace she moved into.

Her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, commissioned the portrait sculpture, which caused a bit of a scandal at the time, because nude portraits of high-ranking ladies were unusual. Strategically-placed drapery was the accepted thing.

Pauline is shown as the victorious Venus, half-reclining and holding an apple in her right hand. This alludes to the Judgement of Paris, when he awarded the golden apple to Venus (Goddess of Love) over the competing charms of Juno (Goddess of Marriage) and Minerva (Goddess of Wisdom).

For goodness' sake, why did the runners-up even bother to compete? Did they really think a young man with all that testosterone sloshing around his system might pick Marriage or Wisdom? Puh-lease! He was sorry later, mind you: it doesn't do to offend a goddess, never mind two!

Canova, on the other hand, was not in the business of offending anyone, least of all the Emperor. Napoleon, having seen and admired his sister's marble portrait as the nude Venus, commissioned a companion piece of himself as a nude Mars. A bit disturbing … maybe there was something in those rumours after all!

Anyhow, Canova very sensibly did a flattering job. He made Napoleon look like a man who is no stranger to the gym. Many of our members may also have seen this statue: ironically, it stands in the stairwell of Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington's mansion near Marble Arch in London. It was given to him by the British Government, who purchased it from the Louvre after his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1816.

Another touch of irony is its title: "Mars the Peacemaker". Now all we need to complete the set is a statue called "Mother Teresa the Warmonger."

Lisa Gherardini

I was born into the wealthy Gherardini family in Tuscany in 1479 and grew up at the Villa Vignamaggio, our ancestral home. When I was sixteen, I married a wealthy silk merchant from Florence.


My husband, Francesco, had a very good friend whose son was a painter. He commissioned his son to paint my portrait, as a gift to my husband. The sittings started when I was 24, but the picture was not finished until four years later. By that time I had five children and was a good bit plumper that when he started.

The artist had many irons in the fire – he was always flitting off to work on another of his projects and left many of his paintings unfinished. Meanwhile, I looked forward to the times when he showed up to work on my portrait – he told me wonderful stories that kept me enthralled so that I should not fidget.

A lot of the time I didn't understand what he was talking about, but I didn't like to let on, so I just sat there with a smile and tried to look intelligent. Sometimes he was depressed and muttered about being "a time-warp Robinson Crusoe":

"Never buy a cheap knock-off trans-temporal capsule in Hong Kong!" he would growl at me, "you'll find yourself stranded where dentistry is unheard of!" And then he told me to smile with my lips closed. "We don't want to freak out the punters at the Louvre with that orthodontic disaster area in your mouth– it will just encourage that maniac Dan Brown!" I had no idea what he was on about, but I obediently closed my mouth and tried to look mysterious and enigmatic.

When he was in a good mood, he told me stories about the mythical kingdom of Hollywood, the goddess Marilyn, the great wizard Billgates and many other fantasies about things like flying machines, singing beetles, rolling stones and moving pictures.

My portrait was one of the first to portray the sitter with a landscape in the background: another groundbreaking innovation! The ethereal, timeless scene behind me is a valley just a few parsecs from Betelgeuse, he told me, where he once spent a very pleasant holiday on a cheap Richard Branson Space Excursion. I just smiled enigmatically. My geography was never very good. Betelgeuse must be somewhere in Spain.

James Gleeson at the NGV

James Gleeson is not for sissies. His work is disturbing, sometimes terrifying, but always thought-provoking. His compelling images have a terrible beauty that fascinates even as it repels.

Gleeson himself said that he has never believed that art should be limited to "what is conventionally considered beautiful … I think art should be all-embracing: it should cover every aspect of existence and that includes what you technically call ugliness, terror, fear and anxiety. I think it's all part of life. I was born in the second year of the First World War; then there was the atmosphere of the '30s when you knew there was going to be another war. The idea of war and destruction has always been part of existence."

I spent a morning at the exhibition – took time out now and then for a restorative dose of caffeine and a chocolate biscuit which the girl in the cafeteria assured me had negative calories. Thus fortified, I could go back for another dose of the strange and beguiling world of James Gleeson.

During the 1940s, his work was imbued with images of war and violence. "The Sower" (1944) and "The Citadel" (1945) were two paintings from this period that I found particularly powerful.

The former is a nightmare of distorted body parts, dragon heads, skulls and jagged, toothlike rocks: flesh, scales and rock are all rendered in tones of brown and grey and seem to be of the same substance. I was reminded of the Greek myth of the fierce, cruel warriors who sprang from the earth when dragons' teeth were sown. Indeed, Greek myth informed a lot of Gleeson's later work.

I imagine that the title must refer to the prophet Hosea's strictures on the Israelites' warring with the neighbours: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." (Not a lot has changed in two thousand years!)

Apocalyptic as "The Sower" is, "The Citadel" is more fearsome. I found myself coming back to the picture several times: the lurid images of mutilated body parts and an eye rimmed with teeth exert a hideous fascination. Rotten teeth chew on an arm, intestines are draped over mounds of cancerous flesh and horrid spiky plants grow at the base, like Triffids feeding on the corruption. The artist seems to say that the wholesale killing in war is just humanity cannibalising itself.

I stood there quietly like a rabbit caught in the headlights – the woman next to me was muttering "Whooo, whooo…" and feebly waving her hands like someone practising the breaststroke. She obviously needed a negatively geared chocolate biscuit.

In 1947 Gleeson went abroad and absorbed the works of the old masters. His work in the 'fifties was inspired and influenced by what he saw, and also by poetry and history. One recognises the influence of Turner in the glowing light effects that he uses in some works.

In others, the colossal figures, dark, looming skies and an aura of menace echoed Goyas I have seen in the Prado: "The Colossus" and "Saturn devouring his children" have that same air of impending doom, and they exude the same dread.

Gleeson pays homage to the great Surrealists too: there were several works that were very reminiscent of Magrittes I had seen in Antwerp's Stadsmuseum: meticulously drawn everyday objects in an extraordinary context: the "magic realism" that Magritte pioneered. Indeed, Gleeson also echoed Magritte's trick of creating surrealist versions of famous paintings: I was amused by a large canvas called "Faux Delft by day/night" …

When I first looked at it, it seemed so familiar, yet I knew I had never seen it before. Then it dawned on me that I was looking at Vermeer's "View of Delft", rendered surrealistically! Instead of the Dutch ladies in the foreground, Gleeson had painted himself at his easel. He used the same palette of colours and kept the skyline similar, although Vermeer's buildings are now bottles and pelicans and weird animals, with the same silhouettes. I like a painter with a sense of humour!

He incorporates self-portraits in some of his works, and says that he never paints anyone else: he did a portrait of his sister once, but it is not good to paint other people, "because they are never satisfied. If you paint only yourself, you have only yourself to satisfy."

Not all the pictures were the stuff of nightmares: there were some extraordinarily beautiful works. I was delighted by "Clouds of witness" (1966), in which nude figures are floating in clouds and in water, tucked into niches and reclining on beaches, all among swirls of luminous gold, white and blue.

I also liked the "Tristan and Isolde" triptych (1952) and the series of very lovely small pictures, about eight inches square, depicting scenes from the Greek myths. "The Nemean Lion" shows a tiny golden Hercules, about one inch tall, with the lion at his feet, both perfectly drawn in every detail, against a fantasy background of free spontaneous swathes of blue and purple. In the same vein, there was a set of pictures of Daedalus and Icarus, tiny, perfect figures with magnificent feathered wings, soaring and falling in a surreal sky. Gleeson said that he drew the figures so realistically because he wanted to bring home that the "super-real" backgrounds, representing the subconscious, are subjectively just as real as the figures.

This is such a magnificent body of work, it is very hard to choose which to single out, but I finally have to mention "The Colonists Arrive" (1998) which intrigued me particularly. It shows a beach on which a small red fire is burning – the only bright touch in the picture. Just offshore is a large oyster shell with an eye looking out from it. Drifting in to make landfall, floating just above the water, are pale phantasms vaguely resembling mythical creatures. I imagined the indigenous folks who had been sitting round that fire, now standing fearfully a safe distance away, seeing for the first time creatures whose colour, dress and demeanour must have seemed to them just as exotic as Gleeson's arriving chimeras do to me.

An excellent book, with lots of colour plates, by Renee Free, is  "James Gleeson - Images from the Shadows."

New Interviews With Old Masters

Paul Gauguin, former bank clerk, of Paris.

"The bank thing really stifled my creative impulses", says Paul, "but I had to persevere because my wife very inconsiderately produced five children and the whole lot of them needed their three squares a day."

When the bank decided to close half of its branches and retrench staff, it came as a relief to Paul, who could now with a clear conscience go on the dole and devote all his time to painting.

"At last I could stop shaving and wearing a tie, but I could not concentrate on my art while the house was full of nagging women and screaming kids, so I decided to go to Tahiti," says Paul.

 "I missed my family, but luckily I met some very kind and sympathetic people who gave me a lot of emotional support and allowed me to paint them topless."

Paul's new friends were a bit short on intellectual conversation, however, and he felt the need to exchange ideas with fellow-artists, so he went to Arles to join his friend Vincent at the aptly named "Studio of the South".

"We saw ourselves as two lost souls on the highway of life," says Paul with a whimsical smile, "we inspired each other.

Vincent painted sunflowers and I painted Vincent painting sunflowers."

Sadly, the idyll was not to last. Running out of sunflowers when the summer drew to an end, Vincent began to suffer sunflower withdrawal symptoms. Paul humoured his friend by helping him to search fruitlessly in the snow for sunflowers.

At first Vincent was able to keep the craving at bay by painting dead sunflowers, but inevitably tragedy struck.

Towards Christmas, Vincent's mind snapped: he tried in vain to get Paul to go out and hunt for sunflowers in the snow again, and eventually threw a glass of absinthe at him.

"Luckily most of it landed on my arm, so I could lick a fair bit off and it wasn't all wasted. But my shirt will never be the same: Brown Gouge could do nothing with those green stains. I am quite partial to green and often paint green women, so I was prepared to overlook this outburst. It would have been a different matter had he flung a Kirschberg Cherry Schnapps all over me, mind you!"

The next day, Vincent accosted Paul in the street, waving a straight razor and yelling: "I'm going to cut your ear off, you blasted Frog!". He shouted this in Dutch, but Paul got the gist and came out of the blocks like Cathy Freeman on a good day.

Vincent was unable to catch the more agile Frenchman, who was very fit from chasing frolicsome green ladies up and down the beach in Tahiti. Unable to get at Paul, in his fury and frustration Vincent hacked his own ear off and threw it at Paul, once again hitting him on the arm, where it stuck gorily to his sleeve, spoiling yet another good shirt.

"This time I didn't bother with Brown Gouge, I soaked the shirt in cold water Omo and the blood came right out. But I was finished with Vincent: no more Mr Nice Guy, he could jolly well go out and hunt for his own sunflowers from now on. I thought I would go and check Melbourne out, having heard a lot about the Heidelberg School, The W.A.S. and Kylie Minogue."

Sadly, after only a short stay, Paul has become disenchanted with Melbourne: "The women are not green enough", he says sneeringly, "and in any case they are strangely reluctant to let me paint them topless. Only this morning, when I showed the check-out chick at Coles my mahl stick and asked her politely to remove her shirt, she called Security. I was lucky to get away with only the few bruises ... these Australians are philistines!"

Paul is off to settle in the Marquesas Islands, where he hopes the inhabitants will be more simpatico with his artistic ideals. He has also heard a rumour that Miss Minogue likes to go there on her hols.

We will miss him at our little soirèès, but we wish him well in his future career. Bon Voyage, Paul, and may your palette never dry out!

More Books About Colours Reviewed

I enjoyed Michel Pastoreau's book "Blue" so much, that I fossicked in the library's catalogue to see what else they had, and I found three other books on colour that are equally absorbing:

A Perfect Red
by Amy Butler Greenfield

The story of the quest for the perfect color red is an adventure into world history. For those who knew its secrets, red was a source of wealth and power from ancient times onward — especially cochineal, the source of nature's most potent red dye.

For centuries after the conquistador Hernán Cortés spotted cochineal in an Aztec marketplace and sent it on the high seas back to his Spanish king, this luminous luxury was a source of war and intrigue. Deployed strategically in the Spanish holy war against Protestant Europe, Spain’s cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune, and English, French, and Dutch pirates were determined to have a piece of the action.

But in Europe, few fully understood the nature of cochineal. Was it plant or animal? Could it be stolen from Mexico and transplanted to their colonies? These questions confounded clever minds for centuries, but Spain’s rivals were determined to learn the answers.

With a cast of extravagant characters — monarchs, buccaneers, artists, scientists, spies, even poets — the mad race to crack the cochineal enigma and break Spain's monopoly lasted three hundred years. Encompassing the history of natural philosophy and science, of art and textiles, of engineering and empire, A Perfect Red is a tale every bit as flamboyant as the color itself.

www.amybutlergreenfield.com

Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World
by Simon Garfield

Mauve is the story of a man who accidentally invented a color, and in the process transformed the world around him. Before 1856, the color in our lives — the reds, blues, and blacks and clothing, paint, print — came from insects or mollusks, roots or leaves, and dyeing was painstaking and expensive. But in 1856 eighteen-year-old English chemist William Perkin accidentally discovered a way to mass-produce color in a factory.

Working on a treatment for malaria in his London home laboratory, Perkin found mauve by chance. His experiments failed to result in artificial quinine as he had hoped, but produced instead a dark oily sludge that happened to turn silk a beautiful light purple. Mauve became the most desirable shade in the fashion houses of Paris and London, and quickly led to crimsons, violets, blues, and greens, earning its inventor a fortune. But its importance extends far beyond ballgowns.

Before mauve, chemistry was largely a theoretical science. Perkin's discovery sparked new interest in industrial applications of chemistry research, which later brought about the development of explosives, perfume, photography, modern medicine, and today's plastics industry.

Perkin is honored with the odd plaque and bust in colleges and chemistry clubs, but is otherwise a forgotten man. With great wit, scientific savvy, and historical scope, Simon Garfield delivers a fascinating tale of how this accidental genius set in motion an extraordinary scientific leap.

http://www.powells.com/

The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric
by Michel Pastoureau

Michel Pastoureau's lively study of stripes offers a unique and engaging perspective on the evolution of fashion, taste, and visual codes in Western culture.

"The Devils Cloth" begins with a medieval scandal. When the first Carmelites arrived in France from the Holy Land, the religious order required its members to wear striped habits, prompting turmoil and denunciations in the West that lasted fifty years until the order was forced to accept a quiet, solid color.

The medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from a foreground disturbing. Thus, striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order -jugglers and prostitutes, for example -and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often depicted wearing stripes.

The West has long continued to dress its slaves and servants, its crewmen and convicts in stripes. But in the last two centuries, stripes have also taken on new, positive meanings, connoting freedom, youth, playfulness, and pleasure: witness the revolutionary stripes on the French and United States flags.

In a wide-ranging discussion that touches on zebras, awnings, and pajamas, augmented by illustrative plates, the author shows us how stripes have become chic, and even, in the case of bankers' pin stripes, a symbol of taste and status. However, make the stripes too wide, and you have a gangster's suit - the devils cloth indeed!

Kirkus Reviews