Francesco Renaldi in Dacca

Francesco Renaldi was an English-born painter of Italian heritage about whose life little is known. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1776, aged twenty-one. For two years after 1781 Renaldi traveled in Italy, initially with Thomas Jones, the Welsh landscape painter and pupil of Richard Wilson.

Evidently on at least one occasion Jones exploited Renaldi’s name to pass himself off as an Irish catholic in order to gain access to the prior of a monastery at Caserta near Naples—which would normally have been inaccessible to him on sectarian grounds—but Renaldi seems to have accepted this with good grace, even affability. Years later, in 1798, he exhibited at the Royal Academy a workmanlike but affectionate group portrait of the Jones family, which is now in the collection of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff; it may contain the artist’s discreet but cheerful self-portrait.

Upon returning to London in 1783, Renaldi attempted without success to establish himself as a portrait painter at 2, Portugal Street, a modest house tucked behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on the Thames side. On November 3, Jones was pleasantly surprised to bump into Renaldi in Fleet Street, and the two dined together not long afterwards.

In 1785, perhaps frustrated by commercial sluggishness, even sensing the prospect of professional failure in a highly competitive metropolitan market for portraits, Renaldi applied to the East India Company for permission to travel to Bengal. He supplied the names and addresses of two guarantors—Mr. Job Hart Price of Aldershot House, and Robert Codd of the 59th Regiment of Foot. These sureties were obviously acceptable to the company, because the following February Renaldi was given formal approval to go. He sailed aboard the Hillsborough, and reached Calcutta in August 1786.

For ten years Renaldi lived in Calcutta, Lucknow (working, it is believed, for نواب آصف الدولہ Asaf ud-Daulah, the Nawab Wazir of Oudh), and in Dacca (now the capital city of Bangladesh). He was therefore one of only a relatively small number of European painters—among them William Hodges, Johan Zoffany, Tilly Kettle, and Ozias Humphry (all of whom are represented in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art)—who spent extended periods painting portraits of and for the nabobs (English, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish gentlemen of the East India Company whose tendency was to “go native”) and their more or less official Indian mistresses, or bibis. This painting is a fine example of the latter.

This portrait represents a young Muslim bibi reclining on an expensive carpet, propped up on a plump cushion in a corner of her small, private house, known as a bibi khana. She contemplates the elaborate jewel in her left hand, probably a pendant necklace. By her side there are a few other beautiful objects—the hookah; the paandaan, or silver tray with cruets containing a soporific preparation made from betel-leaf, and her casually discarded jutis, or slippers with the elaborately upturned toes.

The fine, layered formal costume consists of a fine peshwaz or kurta (a kind of loose shirt or tunic) with an inner layer made of gold brocade patterned with buti, a design of orange and green. Her peshwaz has a fine white gauze veil. The dupatta, meanwhile, a double-sided scarf or shawl, is made of fine, dusty rose muslin edged with silver-threaded gota, or ribbon. The jewelry is delicate and plentiful, and includes several necklaces, numerous bracelets, large earrings, a wide slender hooped nose-ring, rather heavy anklets, and gold rings on all of her toes, and on most of her fingers (some sporting substantial gemstones).

Judging from the angle of the shadows cast by the shutters on the left, this scene evidently takes place in the late afternoon, that hottest and most oppressive time of the equatorial day—the sun never sets much earlier than approximately 5.45 p.m. (in January) or later than about 7.00 (in August).

In the postcolonial context, one is tempted to interpret this bibi’s focused gaze towards that fine jewel as a sort of rumination upon her own standing as an item of great luxury, a rare commodity, installed for the nabob’s pleasure upon the periphery of Anglo-Indian society in the time of Warren Hastings.

However, it is worth noting that very often the relationship between nabob and bibi was lasting, respectful if not sincerely affectionate, and sometimes involved the eventual bequest of substantial property (i.e. from nabob to bibi). And despite their unofficial domestic status and the impossibility of marriage, bibis could nevertheless be quite comfortably accepted (on both sides of the racial divide) as being of “good family.” Indeed, some were even minor members of the princely houses. Unfortunately we know nothing at all about the identity of this particular bibi, nor indeed the nabob for whom Renaldi painted her portrait. According to an inscription, it was painted at Dacca in 1789.

Recent scholarship has hardly begun to gauge the strands of influence flowing out of the studios of western artists in what were then called the “presidencies” of Bengal, Behar, and Oudh—and thence to the workshops of indigenous Indian court and other local painters who evidently admired, or at least for whatever reason sought to emulate them. However, we are beginning to see that western materials, techniques, and styles of representation stimulated widespread imitation among Bengalis, with rather mixed results.

By 1796 Francesco Renaldi was back in England. To the following year’s summer exhibition at the Royal Academy he sent paintings of two Industany ladies, and one Mogul lady—all three were presumably bibis, possibly including this one—and also listed his address as 69, Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, very close to what is now Oxford Circus. In 1798 he may have exhibited a portrait of his own family, about whom we know nothing.

Thereafter he vanishes from view, but completely.

MALO MALO MALO MALO

This morning I received a card from Hamish in which he reminisces about Sponge Austin’s Latin classes at school, in particular the memorable proverb “Malo malo malo malo” which translates rather neatly into English as “I would rather be / In an apple tree (locative) / Than a naughty boy / In adversity,” further evidence (if it were needed) of the sparkling brilliance, economy, and homonymic brinkmanship of Classical Latin, and, incidentally, the resourcefulness of Myfanwy Piper in raiding a Latin grammar that apparently once belonged to her spinster aunt, and then splicing the text into Miles’s song for Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw (1954). The original designs for that year’s premiere at La Fenice were created by her husband the artist John Piper.

A flashy development of the original is “Malo malo malo malo malo malo malo, quam dente vento occurrere,” which means approximately “I would rather meet with a bad apple, with a bad tooth, than a bad mast with [i.e. in] a bad wind.”

I haven’t located Miss Playll’s Latin grammar, nor any evidence of ancient provenance—nice try, Wikipedia, but it is certainly not from Cicero—so “Malo malo malo malo” and “Malo malo malo malo malo malo malo, etc.” may well have been the inventions of some schoolroom wag, or an undergraduate with time on his hands.

Robert Reid remembered “Malo malo malo malo” having being used as an exercise at Glasgow Grammar School (Old Glasgow and Its Environs: Historical and Topographical, Glasgow: D. Robertson, 1864, p. 284, actually an addendum reprinted from one of his articles in the Glasgow Herald), and it was certainly also known to Alfred Henderson (Latin Proverbs and Quotations, London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1869) as well as to the Hon. Hugh Rowley (Gamosagammon; or, Hints on Hymen, for the Use of Parties About to Connubialize, London: John Camden Hotten, 1870).

Incidentally, I am rather tickled by the especially turgid German rendering of “Malo malo malo malo,” namely “Ich möchte lieber in einem Apfelbaum sein als ein schlechter Mann im Unglück,” which proves that strict case structure of a language does not necessarily guarantee anything remotely like concision.

Anyhow, the news from South Gippsland is encouraging: Mungo’s broken arm is mending well and apparently does not interfere with “his saxomaphone practice.” Roy played in the Inverloch/Kongwak school soccer side last Friday week in the lightning premierships (“against glamour teams from Foster, Kurrumburra, Leongatha, and Mirboo North,” but evidently not from Poowong East or Fish Creek). He even won a thrilling penalty shootout “Grand Final.”

I already knew about Mungo’s arm. He informed me about his excellent progress in a meticulously ciphered message that came by email last week. Poozles, meanwhile, seems destined to emulate his father’s fine record of sustained accomplishment on the school playing fields of Victoria.

Nicko

The week before last my eldest brother Nick had a temporarily incapacitating stroke whilst hiking with his wife Lesley and a group of fellow travelers in the MacDonnell Ranges not too far distant from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

It came on quite suddenly, and within an hour or two Nick was completely paralyzed down the left side, and stranded near the summit of a high bluff. He had to be rescued by helicopter, and because there was only room for Nick’s stretcher on board, the pilot, and a nurse, poor Lesley had no option but to continue hiking with the rest of the group until she could be driven into Alice Springs from the camp site later that night. She must have been frantic with worry.

Nick himself was pretty alarmed, too, because I gather the emergency room at Alice Springs Regional Base Hospital is quite bracing, even at the best of times. He recalls seeing beyond the hem of the green curtain next to him a pair of feet dangling over the edge of a neighboring bed—wearing ankle chains. On the other side, a Territorian policeman was piecing together a statement from an Aboriginal woman with two broken arms.

It is a measure of how much, or how little, actually happens in Alice that this shot of Nick appeared a few days later on the front page of the local newspaper, the Centralian Advocate. Mum was not at all pleased: “Couldn’t they have found a better photograph?”

Simon rang me with the news. By a strange coincidence he and his wife Mary Ann had been on a separate but rather less strenuous hiking holiday in the vicinity, and were able to see Nick in hospital upon their return to Alice. Fortunately, we have learned to preface any and all such disclosures on the telephone with the umbrella statement, “Everything is going to be all right,” but even so it was a shock.

Nick is fourteen and a half years older than me; Simon twelve and a half, and Hamish nearly nine. Actually there has never been a time when all three of my brothers have not loomed overhead, either physically (at first) but, in a larger sense, psychically also, as fully-fledged, remarkably talented adults, as different from each other as, indeed, I am from all three—although these days I think we are gradually beginning to notice the slightly unexpected similarities: more than a few vestigial remnants of Peter.

Simon was married well before I left prep school; Nick before I left high school, and Hamish soon afterwards. My eldest niece, Lucy, was born shortly before my tenth birthday. So I had the benefit both of growing up as a kind of only child, my long-suffering parents’ one-boy second family, if you like, and also the excitement and stimulus of belonging to a big family of much older siblings and their indulgent girlfriends, not to mention exotic uncles and thrilling aunts, all of whose whose dinner-time and summer holiday conversations, to which I listened intently and with pride, provided fascination—and also much to emulate.

It cannot have been easy having a precocious baby brother under their adolescent feet, but when, aged 11, I came under the spell of Abba—or, as Mum referred to them, maddeningly, “the Abbas”—there was a moment of crisis. Nick’s dismay at this unwelcome development prompted him to give me an AC/DC album, a plucky but forlorn attempt to rescue me from what he regarded as an awful vacuum of taste. However, my loyalty to Frida, Benny, Björn, and Agnetha being by then total, I responded defiantly by pretending not to know who AC/DC were, not perhaps the first moment of difficulty in our fraternal relations, but thankfully a low point from which we have since recovered.

I suspect Dad was wholly oblivious to Abba, and on the same subject Simon has always remained silent, but writing from La Rochelle, where he was spending the European summer with a pneumatic Swedish girlfriend called Pia, Hamish provided page after page of positive, elegantly handwritten reinforcement. I still have the letter. This was, I suspect, a creative experiment in reverse psychology, but it failed dismally: By then I actually wanted to be Frida. (Straight into the bathroom mirror: “No more... carefree... laugh-ter / Silence... ever... af-ter / Walking through an empty hou-ouse, bum-bum, tears in my ey-es [bum, bum-bu-bum, bum-bum] / Here is where the story e-ends, bum-bum, this is goodby-ay-ay-aye...” with imaginary microphone, exquisitely crafted Swedish accent, and much sleepy-eye and pout-work. I was bloody good.)

For some years until recently Nick played the sexy bass in a daringly nihilistic ad hoc post-punk band called Compost (“We Stink”). They did numerous gigs at the St. Kilda Bowling Club, and the Esplanade Hotel in St. Kilda to general acclaim. The Espy loved them because they sold an awful lot of beer. I treasure their CD, but I confess I do not often play it.

Fortunately it has taken only a few days for Nicko to recover most of the functions of the left side of his body, but when I eventually spoke to him he sounded pretty shaken. I suspect their four children are still rather shocked also. I’m told that strokes of this kind can occur among people even fitter and healthier than Nick, and occasionally much younger also. As strokes go, his was the sort you would wish to have, in other words not involving any kind of cerebral haemorrhage.

He’s back in Melbourne now, and tells me he rather misses the Alice Springs Hospital—but not all that much. I had wondered about the wisdom of flying back to Melbourne, but he says nothing would have induced him to repeat the experience of traveling by train from Alice to Adelaide aboard the famous Ghan, and thence to Melbourne on the Overland. As he remarked with feeling overnight, when you need to fly, you fly. Thank goodness he is going to be all right.

The Mural

As far as I can tell nobody who witnessed President Bill Clinton’s coup de théâtre in Pyongyang last week has yet remarked upon that bizarre mural. Dear Leader seems to like it, because I recall having from time to time seen other unfortunate visitors lined up to be photographed in front of the same one. Combined with the appalling carpet—scrolling sprays of peony on a field of lime green; you really couldn’t make it up—and those creepy net curtains discreetly drawn over the windows of other sparsely furnished rooms (presumably to hide or at least soften the view), that mural certainly raises fascinating questions as to the larger purpose of totalitarian interior decorating. But who on earth painted it? Was the artist maybe recruited in Damascus and permitted to go home to the Assads after he finished the job, or was he set to work training an entire school of North Korean wave-bird-and-froth painters who await future deployment? Because quite clearly this is a work of some considerable technical accomplishment, even if the subject of estuarine breakers and a flock of undersized white sea birds viewed from a rocky bank or promontory (maybe) or some other high notionally downward-swooping, even airborne vantage point—at any rate vertiginous—creates just about the most disturbing visual effect that it is possible to achieve when converted into the floor-to-ceiling mural format. I wonder how this commission came about? Was it, perhaps, entrusted to Mrs. Kim, whoever she may be, or a terrified sub-committee of craven toadies? Perhaps the North Korean Communist Party observes a strict code of regulations in respect of decorating state facilities. Alternatively, was it bequeathed to the nation by Great Leader himself—who, as is not generally appreciated here in America, despite being dead, remains en poste as President of North Korea until the end of time? (Kim Jong-Il, his son, is merely Chairman of the National Defence Commission of North Korea, and General Secretary of the Workers’ Party. Incidentally, it is rumored that the current Kim’s favorite dish is donkey.) In the face of so many more worrying aspects of this wholly benighted regime I suppose these questions are trivial, but there must be somebody who knows the answers.

True Blue

We Australians have held onto the concept of “true blue” with such tenacity that it is now commonly applied to the national identity, or, more accurately, those who are, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “faithful, staunch and unwavering (in one’s faith, principles, etc.): sterling, genuine, real.”

However, “true blue” is a survival of our British heritage, and an ancient one. In its current sense the phrase probably descends from seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterians, “the Covenanters having adopted blue as their color in contradistinction to the royal red.” It seems that Covenanters wore blue scarves, and bunches of blue ribbons fastened to their bonnets, no doubt fortified retrospectively by gloomy divines, citing the precept of Mosaic law (Numbers 25: 38). Of one such person it was written in 1663 that “For his Religion it was fit To match his Learning and his Wit; ’Twas Presbyterian true Blew.” Certainly this is the sense in which Jonathan Swift applied the same phrase to the Whig opponents of Queen Anne’s first Tory ministry.

However, there are indications that some notional link between “blue” and “true” has existed at least since Chaucer, because in the “Squiere’s Tale” we read “And by hire bedde’s hed she made a mew, / And covered it with velouettes blew, / In signe of trouthe that is in woman sene,” and again in Court of Love, “Lo yonder folke (quod she) that knele in blew, / They were the colour ay and ever shal, / In signe they were and ever wil be true, / Withoutin change.” There is a slightly wobbly tradition, as persistent as it is misguided, that regards blue as the fastest dye, and this seems to have stemmed from the apparent immutability of the colors of the sky, and of the ocean.

Through the eighteenth century, as British two-party politics gradually solidified, the distinction “true blue” began to be claimed by both sides for its staunchest adherents. The True Blue Club was founded at Gloucester in 1790, to celebrate in perpetuity (with an annual dinner) an election victory won in the previous year by the narrowest possible majority of one vote. The Tory John Pitt was the “True Blue” candidate. Meanwhile, “buff-and-blue” or “blue-and-buff” were equally distinctive signature colors embraced by Charles James Fox and the Whigs.

You always know you have uncovered a deep vein of linguistic continuity when a vast array of cheerfully conflicting etymologies opens up among nineteenth-century antiquarians. That the question arose again and again in the pages of Notes and Queries without satisfactory resolution points to the happy coexistence of many sources, and not one only. Yet the variety is fascinating, and trickles all the way down to that nutty but lovable minor royal Princess Marie Louise, who thought “true blue” originated when the color of the ribbon of the Order of the Garter was altered from light to dark or royal blue at the time of the Hanoverian succession. According to Her Highness,

This change was considered advisable, as well as necessary, to show that if the exiled Stuarts conferred the Garter with the light-blue ribbon it was not the genuine order. Only dark-blue was judged correct, and from this came the expression, “true blue.”

The shrewdness of the later Stuarts is amply documented, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that, as a measure to guard against the creation of bogus knights companion of the Order of the Garter, a not particularly subtle change to the color of the ribbon from which they might suspend their Great and Lesser Georges is not by any means reliable, so one must assume therefore that the Hanoverians were comparatively slow on the uptake. On the other hand, Princess Marie Louise may have latched onto something, because we find in John Dryden’s “The Flower and the Leaf; or, The Lady in the Arbour, A Vision” the following couplet referring explicitly to Knights of the Garter: “…Unchang’d by fortune, to their sovereign true, / For which their manly legs are bound with blue…” (lines 550–551, Works, Vol. 11, p. 392). Sweet, really.

Curiously, on three separate occasions, first G. J. De Wilde (1853), then W. Brailsford of Kensington (1887) and J. Ardagh of Dublin (1915), successively alerted readers of Notes and Queries to the existence of “a substantially built brick tomb, with table top of stone, in the well-preserved churchyard of Little Brickhill, in Buckinghamshire. On the side facing the chief entrance to the church are the following two inscriptions: ‘Here lyeth the body / of True Blue / Who departed this life / January ye 17th 1724-5, / ageed 57.’ and ‘Also ye body / of Eleanor ye wife / of True Blue / who departed this life / January ye 27 1722-3 / ageed 50’” (Brailsford). However, no further explanation of the identity of these intriguing persons emerged from a careful examination of the register of burials in the church vestry (a document which commenced, incidentally, in 1559).

Some thirty years after the death of Mr. and Mrs. True Blue, “a certain poor woman from Marston, Oxford, was unexpectedly delivered of a child, ‘which was sent by the sureties on the same day to the Foundling Hospital, under the mark of True Blew (sic)’” (Notes and Queries, 7th. series, Vol. 3, June 18, 1887, p. 503).

According to R. W. Hackwood, meanwhile, writing in September 1858, “Mr. B. Webster, in his address to the audience on the closing night of the old Adelphi Theatre [the previous June 2], in giving a sketch of the history of the theatre, spoke as follows:—‘How it became a theatre is equally singular. It was consequent upon True Blue in the year 1802, through a dye of that name having been invented by a Mr. Scott, or True Blue Scott as he was familiarly called, which gave such a delicious tint to the peculiarly delicious habiliments of the fair sex that a rapid fortune was the consequence.’” Evidently through the eighteenth century there was a trend toward employing the term true blue as a bona fide name for male persons.

Still more correspondents insisted (1) that “true blue” had always been the Tory color in Suffolk, and that an old lady who used to say “Whenever I die, I shall die ‘Church and King,’ ‘King and Church,’ wonderful!” and was duly buried in a coffin lined with “true blue”; (2) that “true blue” was the Whig color in Lincolnshire in the days of agitation preceding the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832), “and continued so long afterwards”; and (3) that “true blue” was even mentioned by Thomas Cranmer “(vol. ii, p. 394).”

Intriguingly, according to the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser on Friday, October 12, 1827, p. 4 (citing Brady’s Varieties of Literature and thence Ray’s Proverbs, 1737), “Coventry had formerly the reputation for dyeing blues; insomuch that true blue came to be a proverb, to signify one who was always the same, and like himself.” 

And in his early, weird political satire, The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1827), the future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli referred to England as “Vraibleusia.”

All of which suggests that if we Australians continue to lay particular claim to the expression “true blue,” and the qualities attaching to it—as, for example, in Peter Goldsworthy’s recent anthology True Blue? On Being Australian (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2008)—we had better be prepared to tolerate a little condescension, not to say snickering, in the lobby of the House of Commons, at the Athenaeum, and Lord’s Cricket Ground.

Serendipity

In the course of a rich and busy life there are coincidences that, upon measured reflection, aren’t really all that coincidental, such as coming face to face with someone you know on a busy street in the middle of an enormous foreign city—I think of the two separate occasions when I ran into David Jaffe, first near the Campo dei Fiori in Rome some time in 1986, and then again in New York City in 1995 (on Madison at 77th Street; we were both attempting to dodge the enormous cavalcade of Pope John Paul II). Not too surprising if you really think about it, because our shared interests inevitably attract us to the same kind of places. However, what happened yesterday is harder to account for. At a morning meeting with numerous colleagues around a large conference room table here at the British Art Center, a London-based scholar—whom I do not know very well—spread out at random quite a lot of his own photographs of examples of distinguished eighteenth-century English picture frames, and after a moment I realized to my astonishment that the photograph nearest to the spot where I was sitting was of a picture that I knew, and knew well. Our guest had photographed this particular painting on the wall at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide some years ago, long before we ever met, but I first saw the picture in wholly, even radically different surroundings in 2001—namely the modest home near Mount Barker, deep in the Adelaide Hills, of a ship’s captain and his wife, who soon afterwards donated it to the Gallery in memory of his parents. It is a fine, large maritime painting, as befits its provenance, signed and dated by Francis Swaine (1765), and carries the evocative title The Landing of the Sailor Prince at Spithead. At the time I guessed that the elegant, openwork frame was rather special, and in all probability “original,” meaning that the finished canvas had probably never been housed differently. But what caused my bosom to swell with pride yesterday was that our visitor, who evidently knows what he is talking about, included that Swaine among a handful of the most distinguished English frames that he has yet had the opportunity to photograph. If the photo had shuffled further up the conference-room table I might not have noticed it at all. Objects and images swim around us with ever accelerating speed, and in daunting numbers, so I cannot conceive of the odds against such a chance encounter taking place—unless, of course, our visitor choreographed it for my benefit. I very much doubt if he did.

The Joy of Crockford's Clerical Directory II

For sheer hard work and productivity, Victorian Church of England clergymen put the rest of us to shame. Here, for example, is the entry in my well-thumbed 1908 edition of Crockford’s Clerical Directory for the Reverend Professor W. W. Skeat (above), of 2, Salisbury-villas, Cambridge. It is unlikely that this tremendous output could have been maintained without a modest domestic staff and freedom from any commitment other than very occasionally to Mrs. Skeat (Bertha) and their six children, of whom Professor Skeat’s eldest son and namesake spent six years in the civil service of Selangor (Malaya), before contracting malaria—then joining the staff of the British Museum, where he remained for thirty years. Incidentally, Skeat père makes no mention here of his close collaboration with J. A. H. Murray on the original Oxford English Dictionary:

SKEAT, Walter William, 2, Salisbury-villas, Cambridge.—Fell. of Ch. Coll. Cam. B.A. (14th Wrang.) 1858; 1st cl. Theol. Exam. 1859, M.A. 1861, D.Litt. 1886, Incorp. M.A. at Ex. Coll. Ox. 1875. Hon. LL.D. (Univ. of Edin.) 1884. Hon. D. Litt. (T.C.D.) 1892. Ph.D. (Univ. of Halle) 1894. D.C.L. (Ox.) 1896; D.C.L. (Dur.) 1899. F. Br. Acad. D[eacon] 1860 Ely, P[riest] 1861 Nor. M. Antiq. S. of Cam; M. Coun. of Philolog. S. of Cam; Pres. of Philog. S. of Lon; Elrington and Bosworth Prof. of Anglo-Saxon, Cam. 1878. C. of E. Dereham 1861–62; Godalming 1863; Math. Lect. of Ch. Coll. Cam. 1863–71; Engl. Lect. 1867–83. Author and Editor, Songs and Ballads of Uhland, translated from the German, 1864; Lancelot of the Laik, 1865; Parallel Extracts from MSS. of Piers Plowman, 1866; Romans of Partenay, or the Tale of Melusine, 1866; A Tale of Ludlow Castle, a Poem, 1866; Piers the Plowman, vol. i. 1867; Piers the Plowmans Crede, 1867; The Romance of William of Palerne, or William and the Werwolf, with an in-edited fragment of Alexander, 1867; Havelok the Dane, 1868; A Moeso-Gothic Glossary, 1868; Piers the Plowman, vol. ii. 1869; Piers the Plowman, School ed. 1869; The Bruce, by Master John Barbour, part i. 1870; Joseph of Arimathie, or the Holy Grail, 1871; Chatterton’s Poems, 2 vols. 1871; The Gospel of St. Mark in Anglo-Saxon, from MSS. 1871; Specimens of English (1394–1579), 1871; Specimens of English (1298–1393), 1872; Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabie, 1871; Piers the Plowman, vol. iii. 1873; Questions for Examination in English Literature, 1873; Seven Reprinted Glossaries, 1873; The Bruce, part ii. 1874; The Gospel of St. Luke in Anglo-Saxon, 1876; Chaucer’s Prioresses Tale, &c. 1874; Seven Reprinted Glossaries, 1874; Ray’s Glossary Reprinted, 1874; The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1875; Shakespeare’s Plutarch, 1875; Five Glossaries, 1876; Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, &c. 1877; The Bruce, part iii. 1877; Piers the Ploughman, vol. iv. part i. 1877, part ii. 1884; The Gospel of St. John in Anglo-Saxon, 1878; Alexander and Dindimus, 1878; Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, parts i. and ii. 1879, part iii. 1880, part iv. 1881, 3rd ed. 1898; The King’s Quair, 1884; Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, part i. 1881, part ii. 1885, part iii. 1800, part iv. 1900; A Concise Etymological Dictionary, 1882, 3rd ed. 1886, new ed. 1901; The Gospel of St. Mark in Gothic, 1883; Fitzherbert’s Husbandry, E. Dial. S. 1883; The Tale of Gamelyn, 1884; Piers the Plowman, Student’s ed. 2 vols. 1886; Principles of English Etymology, 1887; The Gospel of St. Matthew in Anglo-Saxon, 1887; Concise Dictionary of Middle English, 1888; Chaucer’s Minor Poems, 1888; Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, 1889; Encycl. Bri. Art, Langland; Chaucer’s Prologue, 1890; Principles of English Etymology, 2nd series, 1890; Primer of English Etymology, 1892; Twelve Facsimiles of Old English MSS. 1892; The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6 vols. 1894; 1 vol. 1894; A Student’s Pastime, 1896; Nine Specimens of English Dialects, 1895; Pegge’s Derbicisms, 1896; Chaucerian and other Pieces, 1897; The Chaucer Canon, 1900; Notes on English Etymology, 1901; Lay of Havelock, 1902; Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (modernised) 1904; Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, and others (modernised) 1904; Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and others (modernised) 1904; Piers the Plowman (modernised) 1905; A Primer of English and Classical Philology, 1905; Pierse the Ploughman’s Crede (new ed.) 1906; The Proverbs of Alfred, 1907.

The Joy of Crockford's Clerical Directory

Among diversions there is none more harmless than scanning from time to time that vast repository of Imperial and Church of England arcana, the 1908 edition of Crockford’s Clerical Directory. At this date, the British Empire—and indeed the entire globe, not necessarily the red bits only—were dotted with Anglican prelates who, according to the accepted convention, adopted for the time being the name of their see instead of their surname, thus yielding a froth of signatures from a vanished age, for instance: + Kenneth Argyll and the Isles, + Alfred Uganda, + Reginald Calcutta, + Edward Guiana, + Edward Falkland Islands, + Ernest Riverina, + Geoffrey Shantung, + Montagu New Guinea, + Wilmot Zululand, + Jervois Saskatchewan, + Hugh Osaka, + William Barbados, + William Gibraltar, + William Lebombo, + Edmund Mashonaland, + John Niagara, + John Zanzibar and East Africa, + Arthur Rangoon, + Churchill New Zealand, + Foss Chota Nagpur, + Isaac Yukon, + Herbert Mid China, + Herbert Western Equatorial Africa, + Henry South Japan, + Enos Jamaica, + Llewellyn Newfoundland, + George Jerusalem, + Arthur Corea [sic, although for reasons that are elusive Lambeth Palace clung to the old spelling long after the Foreign Office mandarins abandoned it], + Samuel Rupert’s Land, + George Singapore, Labuan, and Sarawak, and + Clarendon Nova Scotia, all of whom were certainly genuine, as was the unequalled + Horace Fuh-Kien. For those who stubbornly refuse to believe this last, here is His Lordship’s full entry:

FUH-KIEN, Right Rev. Horace MacCartie Eyre PRICE, Lord Bishop in, Foochow, Fuh-Kien, China.—Trin. Coll. Cam. B.A. (3rd cl. Cl. Trip.) 1885, M.A. 1889. d[eacon] 1886 Lon. for Col. p[riest] 1888 Sier. L. Cons. Ld Bp in Fuh-Kien in Westm. Abbey, 2nd Feb. 1906, by Abp of Cant; Bps of Lon; B. and W.; Ely; Glouc; Booh; St. Alb; Wakef; Moos; and Vic.; Bps Suffr. of Kensington and Dorking, and Bps Ingham and Montgomery. (Jurisdiction: The Province of Fuh-Kien, S. China. Area 38,500 sq. miles; Est. Pop. 22 millions; Ch. Pop. 13,694.) C.M.S. Miss, and Vice-Prin. Fourah Bay Coll. Sier. Leo. 1886–89 ; C. of Wingfield, Stiff. 1889–90; Prin. Of C.M.S. Boys’ Sch. Osaka, 1890–97; Acting Sec. C.M.S. Osaka, 1897–98; Prin. of C.M.S. Div. Sch. Osaka, 1900–03; Sec. C.M.S. Osaka, 1899–1904; C.M.S. Miss. Osaka, 1890–1906; Exam. Chap, to Bp of Osaka 1899–1906. Sec. C.M.S. Central Japan, 1904–06; Archd. of Osaka 1901–06.

Despite that dismal third at Trinity, the conspicuous absence of any publication, the school-mastering rut, and the slightly flamboyant point about the vast size and population of His Lordship’s flock, contrasting so sharply with the number of pews currently occupied in and around the cathedral and metropolitical church at Foochow, one senses here an overarching air of disappointment.

By 1908 + Field Flowers Melbourne, a childless widower—Mrs. Goe died in 1901—had for seven years been living in comfortable retirement at Wimbledon, while the Church of England was obliged to wait for several decades until a suitable berth was was created for + Roderic Gambia and the Rio Pongas.

The Peach

Last night I had a curious dream about Uncle John, which took in the ghost of a recollection he once shared with me in Adelaide. Uncle John was an inveterate window-shopper. Some time in the mid-1970s, at the height of the oil crisis and in the pit of England’s cold-war malaise, he was immensely tickled by a summer display mounted behind one of the windows of Fortnum and Mason, presumably on the Piccadilly side. The window was exquisitely framed with brocade draperies held in place by silk rope, and bordered with a fringe of tassles. The commodious compartment within was lined, carpeted, and enclosed with panels of biscuit-colored suède. In the center, from an elaborate base rose a marbled half-column supporting, at eye level, a large, plump cushion of red velvet, on which someone had placed… a peach. To some extent this crazy contrivance says all that need be said about Fortnum’s, but, as I now remember remarking to Uncle John at the time, wasn’t there also a glimmer of wit and interpretative sunshine in evidence on that far-off, inevitably dull summer’s day in Piccadilly, at least in the mind of at least one, probably more of Fortnum’s apparently wistful London window-dressers? For, among all the fruits of the world, is there anything lovelier or more seductive than a perfectly ripe peach? Some may argue for the simplicity of the orange, the intensity of the cherry, or the fragrance of the strawberry, but for the sheer magnitude of sensual experience, heightened by the long period between seasons, what competes with the peach? Really? Leaving aside the invidious choices to be made between hesperidia, cucurbitaceae, and drupes—I am a drupe man—and, thence, between apricots, nectarines, mangoes, plums, and peaches, I find there is simply no adequate counter-argument. To me the peach is the queen, the Koh-i-noor, the Cotopaxi, the Angkor Wat, the Bach unaccompanied cello suites of fruit. In the dream, my brother Nick gave me a peach, and, led by Uncle John, the assembled staff of the Alice Springs Regional Base Hospital broke into loud and hearty applause.

Curatorial language problems

Not wishing for a moment in any way to diminish the fine work of the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre for Ceramic Studies at the British Museum—because their new galleries are truly breathtaking—I have noticed another bothersome instance of sloppy curatorial language that is beginning to crop up rather more often than it should, along the lines of that irritating “would have been” formulation I mentioned a little while ago.

In connection with an item of Ru ware of the Northern Song dynasty, for instance, which many connoisseurs regard as one of the absolute pinnacles of Chinese ceramic art, the author of the pertinent catalogue entry states that certain qualities of shape and decoration “make it incredibly rare even within this exceptional group.”

Rarity is a strange bird, and difficult to quantify without getting bogged, but in this, as in several other stray cases of “incredibly this” and “incredibly that,” the semantic point is that, in whichever context, the object in question is exceedingly rare, and the point of saying so is therefore to make it amply clear that this fact is, or ought to be, entirely credible.

Indeed, there are occasions when “incredible rarity” may justify careful investigation lest this very quality give rise to anxieties about the authenticity of the object so described. It is among the most useful alarm bells in the mind of the curator that fakes and forgeries may from time to time strike us as being simply too good to be true. And among the commonest reasons why forgers get busy in the first place is to take full advantage of the excitement arising from the “discovery” of an object of superabundant rarity. In the circumstances widespread credulity is their greatest asset, and our greatest hazard—especially when we allow the discrete questions of quality (on one hand) and rarity (on the other) to get thoroughly mixed up.

As far as I am aware there is no question of this sort hanging over the exquisite oval Henan brush washer (above), with its pale green, exquisitely “crackled” glaze, characteristic of Ru ware, and while those delicately incised fish motifs in the clay underneath make it indeed an object of great rarity, the expression “incredibly rare” will not do, any more than in prose we may invoke “hens’ teeth,” or any other form of hyperbole. Incredible does not even function as a viable contranym, although nowadays there are plenty of people who seem to feel that it does.