The opal

The opal exerted considerable fascination over consumers in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, yet it was also encumbered by a superstition as stupid as it was evidently recent. Perhaps this dual preoccupation was no accident. The idea of cursed gemstones pried from the forehead or eye socket of potent heathen idols and temple deities of the mysterious East was powerfully reinforced by the publication of Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel The Moonstone, and curses in general were rich fodder for the press. Certainly a sinister evil was presumed to hover over the Orloff diamond, which belonged to Catherine the Great, and also Queen Victoria’s Koh-i-noor, though conveniently the curse of that diamond was said to apply only to male wearers. There is also the strange case of the Hope diamond, whose putatively malevolent power was exploited without shame by late-Victorian and Edwardian jewelers actually to hook successive owners, culminating with the limping Ohio mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean. Such superstitions were plainly bogus, and dealers, con-men, and journalists, at least the brighter ones, certainly knew it. Revolting statements about gemstones in general such as the following passage from The Great Diamonds of the World (1882), by the London jeweler Edwin W. Streeter, were nakedly self-serving in the sense that they aroused a measure of excitement—causing the general public to recoil, the better to make space for the hard-nosed but strangely pliable rich, as yet unencumbered by income or inheritance tax: “A symbol of power, the diamond has been a talisman of not less influence in the East than the very gods whose temples it has adorned. It has been the factor in tragedies innumerable, supplying the motives of war and rapine, setting father against son, blurring the fair image of virtue, making life a curse where it had been a blessing, and adding new terrors to death...” But what about the opal? As H. Kershaw Walker put it in 1904, “Whence has originated the superstition, now so widely spread, that the opal is unlucky and the cause of misfortune to the wearer?”

By the ancients it was held to exercise the combined virtues of the amethyst, ruby, and emerald, becoming moreover the type of Hope, Innocence, and Purity. Certainly its impaired reputation is not of long standing. [John] Brand, in his [Observations on the popular] Antiquities [of Great Britain, 1777], having collected together a large number of popular superstitions and beliefs, makes no reference to the opal. Even the gems alluded to are credited with good and benevolent characters. Of the turquoise an early English compiler says, “The Turkeys doth move when there is any peril prepared to him that weareth it” [Edward Fenton, Secrete Wonders of Nature, 1569, p. 51]. And again, “Corall bound to the neck takes off turbulent dreams and allays the nightly fears of children” [Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature, 1658, p. 391]. Apparently the only reason for the disparagement which the beautiful opal has suffered in modern times is found in chapter xi. of Anne of Geierstein [or, The Maiden of the Mist (1829) by Sir Walter Scott], and it must be said that it is wholly insufficient and quite ridiculous. (“A Chapter on Opals,” The Nineteenth Century, 56:311, September 1904, pp. 497–8.)

The author of an unsigned article in Chambers’s Journal (7:346, August 16, 1890, p. 524)  already pointed to Anne of Geierstein as the fons et origo of the opal superstition:

Sir Walter Scott must to a certain extent be made responsible for the bad odour in which the opal has found itself of late years. In Anne of Geierstein he alludes to the belief that the Mexican opal loses its beauty when exposed to the action of water, and puts this down to supernatural agency. Hence arose the idea that to wear an opal is the royal road to all manner of ill-luck, and that as a love-token the stone shows the continuance or decline of the giver’s affections in proportion as its colours are bright or clouded. Whenever its hues suddenly changed, misfortune of some kind or another was believed to be close at hand.

According to The London Journal (“A Foolish Superstition,” 22:560, September 8, 1894, p. 189):

The superstition about opals—that they bring ill-luck—dies hard. In fact, although Queen Victoria has taken a firm stand against it, and proves her position by making presents of opal jewelry to her friends and relatives, there are many who think that it is increasing.

I am not quite sure that by making gifts of opals to other people, and not necessarily wearing them so much herself, the Queen’s stand was necessarily proven—but let us assume that in this respect Her Majesty acted with the usual mixture of common sense and determination. Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary certainly also managed to suppress any such misgivings about wearing large, often huge diamonds. In any event, Chambers’s point about the discernible change in hue is interesting because we have long known that opals do indeed respond to extreme and sometimes relatively slight fluctuations in temperature, but more recently they have also been found to be sensitive to light in much the same way that watercolors fade as a consequence of over-exposure. This was proven lately when an opal was removed from its setting, and the edge of the stone, long covered up by the silver setting, was found to be markedly more vivid in hue than the rest of the stone. Museums therefore now display opals as if they were works on paper. So if you wear one, be sure to stay out of the sun.

Diamond Jubilee

Watching The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee address to both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall the day before yesterday, I was struck by the extraordinary constitutional gulf that separates the present sovereign, in her stoical conscientiousness, from Queen Victoria, with whom she alone now shares the distinction of having reigned over the United Kingdom for more than sixty years. It was Queen Victoria, after all, who, towards the end of her life, facing the gloomy prospect of yet another (final) dose of Mr. Gladstone, confided to her daughter, the Empress Frederick: “These are trying moments, and it seems to me a defect in our much-famed constitution to have to part with an admirable gov[ernmen]t like L[or]d Salisbury’s for no question of any importance or any particular reason but merely on account of the number of votes.” To her credit, Queen Victoria did part with governments on these grounds, if only reluctantly, and one would be naïve to suppose that Queen Elizabeth II did not from time to time privately like some governments better than others—though we are never likely to learn which ones they were. Yet it is an awesome exercise of imagination to attempt to grasp the magnitude of the changes to her peoples and realms that have taken place during this remarkable reign, and to appreciate the calm resolution and strength with which, at the age of eighty-four, Her Majesty now publicly re-dedicates herself to their service.

The reputation of the Duchess of Kent

Until recently the incidence of haemophilia among descendants of Queen Victoria raised a most delicate medico-historical question. Queen Victoria was a carrier of the disease, but from which of her parents did she inherit it? Her father, the Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of King George III and Queen Charlotte. The duke was not a haemophiliac. So Victoria’s mother, a German princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, must have been a carrier. Yet there is no sign of any incidence of haemophilia among any of the Duchess of Kent’s proximate or even distant relations. Neither her father nor her grandfather were sufferers, and nor were any of her siblings, nor any of their non-British descendants, including the entire Belgian royal family, nor any known members of the duchess’s mother’s family of Reuss-Ebersdorf, nor indeed any known descendant of theirs. The duchess had another child by a previous marriage, and none of the descendants of Queen Victoria’s half-sister Princess Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg ever developed the disease.

Naturally the task of historical diagnosis is much harder at this distance, because certain early nineteenth-century infant deaths could have been the result of severe haemophiliac haemorrhaging. But one would expect to see the kind of cluster of obvious cases that occurred among the families of Queen Victoria’s daughters Princess Alice and Princess Beatrice, and of her youngest son Prince Leopold, who was himself a sufferer. This was never the case in any branch of the Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld or Reuss-Ebersdorf or Hohenlohe-Langenburg families. Up to the end of the nineteenth century it was the custom for at least one British cabinet minister to witness royal births and certify that any additions to the line of succession to the throne were legitimate. This was certainly the case when Princess Victoria was born at Kensington Palace at 4.15 a.m. on May 24, 1819, so we can safely assume that the Duchess of Kent really was the future queen’s mother. But she was almost certainly not a carrier of haemophilia. Therefore for a long time the only medical conclusions to be reached appeared to be either that (a) Queen Victoria’s haemophiliac gene was the result of a “de novo” or spontaneous mutation, of which the chance was thought to be very slight—or (b) Queen Victoria’s biological father was someone other than the Duke of Kent, presumably a man with so mild a case of haemophilia that he survived into adulthood and may never have been diagnosed at all.

It all depends on whether Queen Victoria carried haemophilia A or B. Hitherto it was presumed that Queen Victoria carried haemophilia A, and it is apparently true, or was once thought to be true, that spontaneous mutations are far rarer in that event than in cases of haemophilia B. But new information is to hand. The task of positively identifying the mortal remains of members of the family of Tsar Nicholas II was lately accomplished in Russia, partly thanks to the willingness of the present Duke of Edinburgh to donate genetic material—the Duke’s mother’s mother’s mother (Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Alice) was also the mother of the Tsarina, and so his mitochondrial DNA provided a reliable benchmark. An unexpected consequence of this grisly task, however, was to gain an opportunity to study genetic material from the remains of the Tsar’s haemophiliac son and heir, and the results of that analysis were lately published in Science by a team led by Evgeny I. Rogaev. Inter alia, they conclude that the form of haemophilia that descended from Queen Victoria was haemophilia B, not A, and “was likely caused by a point mutation in F9, a gene on the X chromosome that encodes blood coagulation factor IX,” that is to say Queen Victoria’s own X chromosome. This may well have been the one and only spontaneous thing that ever happened to Queen Victoria, and it is a happy consequence of these findings that any lingering doubt about this aspect of the honour of Her Majesty’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, may now safely be dispelled.

Love and Death

Madam Deputy Chairman, Director, ladies and gentlemen:

Thank you very much for your warm welcome. Usually at these events the job of the exhibition curator is to be seen, and not heard. The pictures are up, the last labels have been fixed to the wall, and longed-for drinks are not far off. And, at the opening party, somebody else has the job of doing the honours. One secretly hopes that person will indulge in unrestrained encomiums or, failing that, will at least entrance the guests, get them to send all their friends along to see the exhibition and, of course, buy a copy of the catalogue for the ridiculously low, never-to-be-repeated price of $45. Instead, you are giving me a glimpse of life on the other side of the podium. I am very glad to be here.

Let me begin by thanking the Director, Doug Hall, and all the staff of the Queensland Art Gallery for the splendid job you have done in hanging these enormous, cumbersome, beautiful, heavy oil paintings; for supporting the idea of the exhibition from its inception in 1997, and for being generous lenders of four indispensable works. The firm commitment of Brisbane to Love and Death was one of the constant factors that allowed us to go ahead and put it on, and we at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide are very grateful for that.

The other constant factor was John Schaeffer, who, I am glad to say, is with us tonight. Mr. Schaeffer provided much-needed sponsorship of the catalogue, and lent no fewer than fifteen stupendous pictures for this exhibition, many of them famous works like Lord Leighton’s The Syracusan Bride leading wild animals in procession to the Temple of Diana and G. F. Watts’s Endymion. I thank him for enduring a year of monkish simplicity, surrounded by what must be acres of bare wall.

Victorian plumbing, Victorian morals and prudishness, Victorian attitudes about this and that… The word Victorian is, for us, still laden with negative associations. Yet, as we embark upon the twenty-first century, the culture of nineteenth-century Britain becomes, I think, ever more surprising and complex – much like the mythic figure of Queen Victoria herself. Here she is, towards the end of her life, confiding to her diary about the gloomy prospect of yet another dose of Mr Gladstone:

These are trying moments, and it seems to me a defect in our much-famed constitution to have to part with an admirable government like Lord Salisbury’s for no question of any importance or any particular reason but merely on account of the number of votes.

Despite this hawkish outlook which, fortunately for her, every one of the Queen’s prime ministers was somehow able to conceal from the general public, it was, in fact, during her reign that British political, legal and social institutions gradually evolved towards what we recognise as one distinct prototype of the modern democratic state. Certainly it was by 1901 an exact template for the brand new Commonwealth of Australia.

It is worth remembering that here, today, we are surrounded by the living relics of Victorian England – the name of this state, for example, the parliamentary institutions that make our laws, the courts in which we seek justice, the universities that feed our professions, the philanthropic organisations that dispense charity, not to mention the games of cricket and Rugby – played rather differently these days – the railways, the postal system, the labour movement, eggs and bacon, crumpets, afternoon tea, driving on the left-hand side of the road, and pyjamas. Wherever we look, it seems, the Victorians are with us.

And notwithstanding the sleek modern lines of this beautiful building, the ghosts of Victorian art museum curators dwell here too, and in all the other public art museums of Australia and New Zealand. For our collections of nineteenth-century British art were mostly assembled prior to Federation, as distinguished examples of the work of living artists. It is a measure of how well those choices were made that an exhibition such as this may be mounted, as it were, locally. At previous venues this has especially intrigued visitors from Britain and North America, and I hope you will find that the same is true in Brisbane.

Occasionally I am asked why we chose to borrow the rather bracing title of Love and Death from G. F. Watts’s great symbolical picture of 1877. In the present era of corporate dollars, it did not appear to give our sponsorship staff much of a leg-up. “Qantas brings you Love and Death” was a distinctly unpromising tag. Yet it seemed to me a particularly striking characteristic of the Victorian imagination that whenever the sombre theme of death crops up – as it does an awful lot in poetry, prose, painting and sculpture – it is very frequently realised with quite astonishing aesthetic power, and accompanied by an erotic charge of startling frankness. At the same time, where there is love, death and the prospect of posthumous reunion, it seems, are never far away.

Queen Victoria herself was keenly interested in the subject of death, for eminently understandable reasons: she was not only predeceased by her much-lamented husband Prince Albert, but by three of her nine sons and daughters, three of their spouses, and nine of her many grandchildren. As well, the Queen gave a great deal of morbid consideration over many years to the question of what, apart from her own body, should be put in her coffin when, in due course, she died on 22 January 1901.

According to carefully drafted instructions that were entrusted to her doctor, Sir James Reid, members of the household spent most of that night creeping around Osborne on tip-toes gathering from cupboards and chests of drawers a mountainous cargo of souvenirs of the Queen’s life: plaster casts of hands, lockets, rings, bracelets, gold chains, shawls, handkerchiefs, photographs of beloved pets, servants, children and grandchildren, Prince Albert’s dressing-gown, a cloak of his embroidered by Princess Alice, and many other mementoes and keepsakes – all carefully folded and hidden among bags of charcoal beneath a quilted cushion on the floor of the coffin. In her hand was placed a small photograph of her Scottish servant John Brown, discreetly wrapped in white tissue paper and tactfully hidden from members of the royal family by a spray of flowers. On the whole, it strikes me as not a bad way to go – surrounded by fragments of love memory.

Obviously this exhibition is not about what Queen Victoria took with her to the grave – although, come to think of it, that might be a very interesting show to mount if only you could retrieve the loans. Love and Death is all about the quest for pure beauty; the effort of successive generations of British artists to escape the gravitational field of the Royal Academy of Arts and strike out on their own; the exploration of new kinds of subject matter, to say nothing of the Victorians’ fascination with events and stories of the remote past. I hope you will enjoy seeing it quite as much as I enjoyed arranging it.

Before I conclude, may I take this opportunity of alerting you to something that I had to leave out of the exhibition catalogue, but which seems to me too good to abandon entirely. In the 1880s and 1890s the Victorians had an insatiable appetite for the color yellow. James McNeill Whistler’s “yellow breakfasts,” in which goldfish, buttercups and bowls of nasturtiums were prominent among the decorations, became smart and were widely imitated. The Pre-Raphaelites had liked yellow, and sunflowers and daffodils and all sorts of other yellow flowers had since then been all the rage. The most desirable novels had yellow paper covers and were called “yellowbacks” long before the term paperback was thought of, while one of the most adventurous journals of the 1890s was entitled The Yellow Book. One writer summed up this English craze for yellow: “Let us dream of this:” he wrote, “A maid with yellow hair, clad in a yellow gown, seated in a yellow room, at the window a yellow sunset, in the grate a yellow fire, at her side a yellow lamplight, on her knee a Yellow Book.”

When the Modernists looked over their shoulder at the vanishing world of Victorian England, all they could see was darkness, dreariness, hypocrisy and decay. For them yellow was the color of anxiety. Think of Gauguin. Think of Kirchner and Schiele. Today, I think, we are far better able to see the art of last decades of the nineteenth century as the Victorians frequently chose to see it themselves – as a dazzling aesthetic experience, and an efflorescence of sunny yellow.

Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to declare this exhibition, Love and Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria, well and truly open!

Speech at the opening of Love and Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Wednesday, May 29, 2002. The full-color catalogue is still available through the Art Gallery of South Australia bookshop in Adelaide http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/content-bookshop.html