Oil on Canvas came from a combination of two ideas. First, I wanted to explore the Museé D’Orsay’s picture collection in a bit more detail. We saw the Van Gogh collection in the Doctor Who story, Vincent, and I used one painting, Claude Monet’s Poppies, as a focal point in the Sarah Jane Adventures story Easter in Paris. Since the D’Orsay itself had featured heavily in that story I decided not to use the actual location. Instead I went for the mysterious art gallery in space with the paintings hanging in thin air, surrounded by sinister mist.
The
idea of such an ‘off the wall’ gallery comes from a scene
in Neil Gaiman’s classic book and TV mini-series, Neverwhere. In
that story, Door’s home is ‘conceptual’ with each part
of it appearing as a photograph of a room hanging in a white, featureless
setting. The idea of something like that which people could enter by touching
the image and being ‘sucked in’ was irresistible.
The Museé D’Orsay’s website provides beautifully detailed pages about all the pictures in their collection. The problem was choosing which ones to feature. I looked at them for quite a while before fixing on three that I thought I could get a story out of.
Albert André (1869-1954) Music Circa 1900 Oil on Canvas H. 63,5;
W. 99,5 cm Paris, Musée d'Orsay - Gift of Mme Jacqueline George-Besson,
daughter of the artist, 1991 ©ADAGP - RMN (Musée d'Orsay)
/ Hervé Lewandowski.
The critic Claude Roger-Marx successfully defined the charm of this painting by pointing out that "the communion established between the figures and the décor, an atmosphere of good grace and contented bourgeoisie, the warmth here and there shedding a golden light on the faces, the hangings, the carpets, the frames, all have an attraction that compares to the best paintings by Vuillard". Albert André was, moreover, a friend of Vuillard and an enthusiast of the Nabi aesthetic. In this respect, one can see here, in addition to the subject, the Nabi style of layout, particularly with the figures abruptly cut off in the foreground, a technique borrowed from Japanese prints. However, the freedom of brushwork also owes much to the influence of Impressionism.
The scene depicted is not precisely documented, but it certainly evokes the cultivated bourgeois circles of the turn of the century, whose aspirations were shaped by publications like La Revue Blanche.
This picture struck me as interesting because there is such a lot going on in it. The people playing music, those listening, the ones at the front who might be chatting among themselves. I imagined Amy plunged in among them, adapting to the peculiarity of the situation.
When she came to her turn to sing, I had a bit of a problem at first, trying to come up with a song that was around in Edwardian times, especially in France, that Amy Pond would know. But of course, she is Scottish. She would surely know Loch Lomond and The Skye Boat Song, standards of that sort.
Loch Lomond put me in mind of a rather nice combination sung by the rather nice John Barrowman. He combined Loch Lomond with Amazing Grace, a song most people assume is Scottish because it was a hit for the Royal Scottish Dragoon Guards featuring bagpipes in 1972. It was actually written by an English clergyman, John Newton, in 1779. John actually associates it with the American gospel tradition as a complement to his Scottish heritage represented by Loch Lomond.
Putting those two songs with the Skye Boat Song makes for something like a six minute long hell for anyone nervous about their own singing voice. It was the perfect test for Amy’s resolve.
Of course, she had to get out of the picture sooner or later, and the way to do that occurred to me when I looked closely at the painting. The walls of the music room in André’s painting are themselves covered in paintings. One of them is a reclining nude. The idea of it becoming The Doctor reclining with carefully placed silk to remind Amy she has to leave the cosy scene was just irresistible, especially after the opening scenes of Impossible Astronaut with The Doctor posing heroically for a painting by the daughter of Charles II.
For Rory, a very intriguing picture.
Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), The Pink
Dress, 1864, Oil on canvas, H. 147; W. 110 cm
© RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
Orginally from Montpellier, Bazille moved to Paris in 1862 to continue studying medicine. While attending the university, he used to visit Gleyre's studio where he met the young artists who later would form the Impressionist group. Bazille used to go with them to paint directly in the open air. He was particularly interested in representing landscapes and figures in natural light. This painting, created during the summer of 1864, is a beautiful, early example of this.
The figure in the painting is Thérèse des Hours, one of Bazille's cousins. The Bazille and des Hours families used to spend every summer on the magnificent estate of Méric, in Castelnau-le-Lez, a village near Montpellier. The house and its grounds were slightly higher up, overlooking the village. Bazille set Thérèse in a pose on the terrace at the far end of the garden.
She is wearing a simple dress with vertical pink and silver-grey stripes, and a black apron. She has her back turned to the viewer, and looks towards the village and its roofs covered in the orange coloured tiles typical of the Midi.
Bazille frames the middle ground with trees in order to emphasise the contrast between the far distance and the foreground. This was a technique much used by the painters of the Barbizon school, Théodore Rousseau, for example. Here, these trees, in the shadow as is Thérèse's face, accentuate the raw light of the Midi which outlines and defines the contours.
In a preparatory drawing, Thérèse is facing the viewer, in a position typical of the traditional portrait. It is interesting to note that the painter finally chose to show his model from the back, thus creating in his painting an atmosphere of calm fulfilment and empathy.
This is a fascinating picture for a writer. Imagining what Thérèse looks like from the front was a big start to this storyline. The idea that she has been captured for eternity only from the back, is so tempting. Putting Rory into this scene, of course, is a little cruel. He is devoted to Amy, but when he meets Thérèse he forgets about her for a time.
I was sad to learn that Frédéric Bazille died very young, as a soldier in the French army during the Franco-Prussian war. What happened to Thérèse I couldn’t find out. Hopefully she had a nice life, married to a decent man and remembered her cousin Frédéric fondly.
Albert Bartholomé (1848-1928) In the Greenhouse, Circa 1881, Oil
on canvas, H. 233; W. 142 cm, © RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé
Lewandowski
Presented at the Salon of the Société des Artistes français in 1881, this portrait belongs to a style of painting inspired by Classicism, whilst also embracing Realist techniques and Impressionist innovations.The painting is a frontal view of a young woman coming through the French windows into a shaded interior. The studied pose and the carefully selected clothes are in the tradition of ceremonial portraits. However, the chiaroscuro effect and bright colours applied with strong brushstrokes are very much an Impressionist technique, in the style of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) for example. Then the realism and attention to detail recall the significant role of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) in the Salons of the second half of the 1870s.
These various contributing factors reflect the intellectual and artistic circles Bartholomé and his wife moved in. A number of very diverse artists and writers frequented their salon. The society portrait painter Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), the American painter Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), the Naturalist writer and critic Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926) and the Symbolist novelist Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) were all guests there, among many others. This was a happy time in the painter's life, brought to an end on the death of his wife in 1887.
This picture struck me very strongly because the woman really does look
slightly startled, as if she had walked into the greenhouse and seen a
madman in tweed jacket and a bow tie there.
The Doctor had to get away, of course. He had to find his friends and grab them from their paintings. I originally thought of him walking out of the greenhouse into the garden and then out into the French countryside, but I couldn’t find out exactly where the picture was painted. Instead, I decided to make it all a bit more fantastic. The Doctor needs a painting to escape through, so he paints a picture of the TARDIS using bits and pieces from the pile of art debris in the corner of the greenhouse, an old canvas, worn brushes, dried paint, old linseed oil, broken easel, and then dive into it. It was a fun idea and exactly what The Doctor would do, I think.
Pierre Bonnard (1867- 1947), A Bourgeois Afternoon or The Terrasse family,
1900, Oil on canvas, H. 139; W. 212 cm, © ADAGP, Paris - RMN (Musée
d'Orsay) / Thierry Le Mage
"This stunning Bourgeois Afternoon is where Bonnard really started to find himself", wrote Thadée Natanson, in 1951, in Le Bonnard que je propose. Did the chief editor of the Revue blanche foresee, in this painting, the future blossoming of the painter as he came out of his Nabi period? In fact, this work was produced at a turning point in the artist's career when he abandoned his earlier leanings towards Japanese Art and Art Nouveau.
The scene portrays the family of the composer Claude Terrasse, the artist's brother in law, at Le Clos, their house in the village of Grand Lemps (Isère), on a sunny afternoon. Although an unusually large format for Bonnard's works at this time, the painting follows in the tradition of the large group portrait of which Degas' Bellelli family (Musée d'Orsay) is one of the most remarkable examples.
Bonnard borrowed his composition of the figures from other Impressionists, but their influence stops there. This collection of characters, in fixed poses, sometimes approaching caricature, is reminiscent of a primitive fresco. There is also the naïve inspiration of a Douanier Rousseau, or of Seurat in La Grande Jatte.
During his Nabi period the artist was fond of decorative compositions and comic distortions. Moreover, humour is one of the dominant qualities of this group portrait, mischievously entitled The Bourgeois Afternoon.
This painting anticipates his later works where large windows open out on to the countryside of Vernon or Le Cannet. It has an astonishingly modern resonance about it, and prefigures certain paintings by Balthus (1908-2001).
The fourth painting to be featured was a last minute addition. I needed to demonstrate what would happen to people who became trapped in the art. There IS an indistinct figure in the window of the house in this picture which could easily fit the idea The Doctor explained to his friends.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwhere
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting.html
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting/commentaire_id/the-pink-dress
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting/commentaire_id/music
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting/commentaire_id/in-the-greenhouse
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