Chicago, the best village with grand tall buildings.
Yes, I once said that and I still think it holds true.
The Art Institute of Chicago has quite an interesting collection. What caught my eye the other afternoon was a Pre-Raphaelite, well one of three that Rossetti did and the original I believe was in the Tate, London
Beata Beatrix 1871/72
Art Institute Web Site
A founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was both a poet and a painter. In this picture, he portrayed the dying Beatrice from Dante Alighieri’s Vita nuova, a medieval tale of idealized love and loss that had personal meaning for Rossetti, who had lost his wife, the artist Elizabeth Siddal, in 1862. He began the first version of the work, now in the Tate Gallery, London
In life one should value chance encounters.
Earlier one June we spent some time with our friends in Dorchester
In a chance encounter with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Josceline Dimbleby asked him bluntly if she could go and see the portrait he had of her great-aunt, Amy Gaskell.
“Ah, that wonderful dark picture,” Andrew said. “Yes, please come……Well, I think she looks rather like you......”
“Did you know that she died young?” Josceline asked Andrew.
“Of a broken heart.”
She told Andrew that she would try to find out more. This led her to start researching into the life of Amy, her mother May and the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and the result was the book A Profound Secret.
I looked at the book cover and thought the portrait reminded me of the Picasso I used for my Anorexia Blog.
Amy Gaskell by Edward Burne-Jones
Leighton House Museum 2004/Andrew Lloyd Webber
It is said that as a young man Picasso admired the pre-Raphaelites and Edward Burne-Jones so much that in 1900 he would have gone to London rather than Paris had he had the fare.
It was a fascinating book, like good family biographies are, as long as you accept that it is not going to be as organised as fiction. A good writer helps and Josceline Dimbleby is a well established food and travel writer.
For a psychiatrist, it is especially interesting as he is allowed glimpses into the various personalities, their psychiatric problems and the resulting family dynamics, without the interference of the usual psychiatric labelling or coding. Unfortunately self medicating with alcohol, opium and other fancy substances was rife in that era and the result could often be tragic.
Indeed Josceline thought at one point in the book that Amy might have suffered from Anorexia although it was not a known condition at the time. She left it till the end of the book to let us into the final secret. You will have to find out for yourself.
Without the effect of drugs that would double the bodyweight, we have in the end one of the most beautiful portraits of the Pre-Raphaelites. Burne-Jones’ life is of course another psychiatric book: his mother died when he was six days old and many felt that all his life he was searching for the perfect mother he so missed. It is indeed ironical that the art world has been much enriched by what was essentially untreated bereavement.
Psychiatry may need to look again at what we have been doing, as we do not seem to have found another Burne-Jones.
Reference: "There had been a considerable vogue in Barcelona
........"Picasso assured me, when he was staying in London in 1950, that for him his [1900] trip to Paris London England
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