Chapter 40Exhibition in LondonAUSSTELLUNG IN LONDON
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
When the work was in full swing, everything set in motion and ordered, I went with the whole of my pictures to London for two months, to mount an exhibition in the May “Season.” With endless trouble I at last found a fairly good room at the Newman art gallery of Oxford Street. Nameless exertions accompanied this exhibition too. At last it was ready and could be opened. But after all the expenses it was far too little visited. I gave lectures in it, and also went much to the house of the Berliner Tageblatt's correspondent, Otto Brandes, who was delighted with the exhibition. At last I brought it about that King Edward VII had a number of pictures by the protégée of his sister Victoria1 sent to him at Buckingham Palace. That settled the success. Now all the world wanted to see the pictures on which such distinction had been conferred. Everyone streamed there, the sales multiplied, piled up, and in the end, after all the agitations and worries, I could be very content. — All the same, I was exhibition-weary. It had all been bought far too dear.
But there was no lack of comic incidents here either. The owners of the art gallery had declared to me: “Leda and the Swan2 is impossible in London in public exhibition.” They preferred to take this picture into their office. Anyone who might then wish to see it could view it there in private, but it was, after all, no picture for young girls.
Word of the Leda had got about, and now the gentlemen had visits from young girls in the private office the whole day long!
That reminds me of another occurrence at the exhibition of my Circe3, years ago, in Dessau. The exhibitor thought the mother sow in the foreground offensive, and so proposed to build up an arrangement of flowers around it. It was all one to me. — But every evening, through four full weeks, the flowerpots in front of the underlined spot had been carefully pushed aside, to his indignation and my amusement!
Beside all the exhibition worries, though, I enjoyed London with all my strength. — And really I was delighted with the May picture of the city and the country. Could now almost understand what an Englishman once said to me in earlier days: “England is, after all, the most beautiful country in the world.” How picturesque were its rolling meadow-lands with the “styles,” the climbing-gates, the many giant trees and the cottages overgrown with blossoming rambler roses. Nowhere have I seen such lushly blooming “Crimsonramblers” and such poetic country gardens, with such saturated colours in their giant perennials and the deep-green hedge-walks; colours that always reminded me of the old glass pictures.
London too had its May dress on. At almost every window of fashionable London, flowers in bloom, mostly marguerites. And the collections and exhibitions! Besides, the Franco-British Exhibition4 had just been opened, and “the white city,” all the Indian buildings in it, conjured a little piece of India before my eyes at night. London pleased me extraordinarily. In the studio of Alma Tadema5 I came to know the most beautiful painter's workshop I have ever seen, in spite of Makart's studio, which I was once allowed to look into in earliest youth. — And then all the noble old houses of the “Georgian time” with their fine Adam chimney-pieces. Really, the London houses of 1750 are the most distinguished thing that can be conceived.
I had, after all, been in London before only in passing; longer on the Isle of Wight, which shows quite Sorrentine pictures. For the first time I now came to know London and England somewhat more thoroughly. A German craftsman who often had work to do for me in my exhibition told me horror stories of the English hatred of Germans, and of how he himself was persecuted, set upon and slandered.
And he held a great Anglo-German war, in which the English meant to annihilate us, to be inevitable. It was 1908, and I believed the man suffered from persecution mania. — Often now6 I have had to think of the little German craftsman in London.
How Kew gardens, Richmond, Hampton Court and Windsor delighted me. — For the rest, I made splendid excursions into the interior as well, as to Stratford on Avon, Shakespeare's cradle. In the old Normal school they still show the place where he is said to have sat as a boy, and in his bride Ann Hathaway's little cottage garden the same kinds of flowers bloom today as bloomed then.
In England one often still puts up at the old, unaltered “inns,” the age-old hostelries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Oxford in May is the most glorious thing that can be conceived; all the age-blackened Gothic halls in the young green of the English spring, the lawns strewn over with thousands of yellow and white tazettas and jonquils.
And the banks of the Thames up to Maidenhead, the flower-decked houseboats, the glowing garlands of roses everywhere.
A few times, too, I was invited for the weekend (from Saturday to Monday, by an English family I had once met on my Swiss journey with Stilzchen Monbart). Enchanting days I spent there, and came to know properly the English comfort of a country seat. More luxuriant white roses in bloom than there I never saw.
I had put up at a boarding house, a guinea (twenty-one shillings) the week. Best society, elegant surroundings, but dreadful food. The genuinely English cooking pleased me least of anything. — I also undertook a “trip” to the seaside town of Brighton. — One day Lady Alexander visited me, a lady with whom I had made friends on the Irrawaddy in Burma. That was a joy!
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑his sister Victoria — Victoria, Princess Royal — the Empress Frederick, her great patron of the Berlin years, dead since 1901. The protégée-ship is posthumous currency, and it worked: the King had the pictures brought to Buckingham Palace. A royal command viewing is the kind of event that leaves records: the Court Circular of May–July 1908, the palace's own registers, and the London papers that would have made exactly the fuss she describes ("now all the world wanted to see the pictures"). None of the standard Preuschen literature mentions a London exhibition at all, but the German press of the day did: at the end of July 1908 papers reported that her large show at the Norman Gallery had closed "after great success" (Leipziger Tageblatt, 29 July 1908) and that King Edward had had pictures brought to Buckingham Palace (Berliner Tageblatt, 30 July 1908). Most of those reports copy a single notice, so the palace episode is in print but has no independent witness in the record we hold, which keeps it the most checkable single claim in the memoir.
- ↑Leda and the Swan — Almost certainly »Santa Vita«, the "great, last, Symbolist picture" of chapter 34 — the Leda with the black swan, on show since January 1905 and again at the Indian Preuschen Exhibition — here on its travels, and banished to the back office by London propriety. The office exile adds a station to the picture's history: painted by the end of 1904, shown at the Köllnischer Fischmarkt in 1905 and again in 1907, judged unfit for public London in 1908, and bound for America in the 1910 tour list together with its diptych partner, the Circe of the very next paragraph. Neither picture is traced today. The gallery owners' compromise — private viewings in the bureau — promptly produced the joke the next sentence delivers.
- ↑Circe — The Leda's diptych partner from chapter 34, and a new station for its history: an exhibition in Dessau, "years ago," with the sow in the foreground confirming the subject — Circe among the men she has transformed. The Circe and the Leda of Santa Vita were programmed as a pair and travel as one: both appear in the 1910 American tour list. The Dessau showing is otherwise unrecorded — a date would have to come from the Dessau press or exhibition records, sometime before 1907. The anecdote itself is the London joke in a minor key: propriety builds the screen, and the public quietly moves it aside every evening for four weeks.
- ↑Franco-British Exhibition — Opened 14 May 1908 at Shepherd's Bush — the white-stuccoed, orientalizing pavilion city that gave the White City district its name, and a date that pins her London season precisely. (Franco-British Exhibition)
- ↑Alma Tadema — Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), painter of marble-and-sunlight antiquity; his studio house in Grove End Road, with its silvered dome, was one of the sights of artistic London. The aside drops a biographical datum: in "earliest youth" she was shown Hans Makart's Vienna studio, the most theatrical artist's den of the age. (Lawrence Alma-Tadema)
- ↑Often now — The writing present again: "now" is the middle of the very war the craftsman prophesied — one more entry in the ledger that dates the memoir's composition to the war years. It joins the fallen d'Humières of chapter 33, the burned Bergen of chapter 36 and the meat prices of chapter 38. And the craftsman was less mad than she thought even in 1908: that was precisely the year of England's great invasion scare — Wells's The War in the Air was serialized that spring, the Anglo-German naval race was front-page matter, and "An Englishman's Home" reached the stage months later. Her London May was spent inside the anxiety without noticing it; the memoir notices for her, ten years too late.