What you will

 

Just before Christmas, I was out delivering community newsletters. People were beginning to put up lights outside their houses, and inside I could see trees being decorated and people wrapping presents. Now we're at Twelfth Night, and those same houses are looking bare, with just the occasional deflated Santa clinging to a chimney pot. 

 As usual, I haven't made any New Year resolutions. I used to when I was a child: be kinder to my little brother; do my homework on time; pick up my clothes off the floor before bedtime; then later it was the usual things like losing weight, getting fit, cutting down on the tea and biscuits. I never lasted much beyond February, so now I just don't bother. Nor do I engage with Dry January, Veganuary or any other such nonsense. I prefer to decide for myself when things need a shake-up. 

The other thing is that it's so hard to predict what the coming week will bring, never mind the next year. Looking back I see I posted this on 1 January 2020: 

'I don't know if you've noticed, but a new year has started today. Honestly, to look at FaceAche you'd think it had never happened before. I'm SO fed up of people telling me how great 2020 is going to be. I hope they're right and I shall do my damnedest to make it so, but let's wait and see, shall we?'

 Need I say more?

The title of this blog is, of course, the subtitle of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night from which this quote comes:  'Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.'

I'll just leave that with you.

'Death the Bride'

I've just spent rather too long following a trail started by a visit to the Alfred East Art Gallery in Kettering last weekend.

I had an old schoolfriend staying with me and I set about showing her the sights, which naturally included a trip to said gallery. There was an exhibition of the works of Thomas Cooper Gotch - Gotch is a big name locally - who was born in Kettering on 10 December 1854. He spent many years travelling and working abroad, but he and his wife Caroline Burland Yates, herself an art student, and his daughter were active members of the Newlyn colony in Cornwall. His first paintings were of natural, pastoral settings, but he went on to immerse himself in the romantic style of the Pre-Raphaelites, for which he is best known. His works have been exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal College of Art, the Paris Salon - and Kettering. He died in 1931.

Anyway, we were drawn to the work 'Death the Bride', which is part of the Alfred East collection. It is oil on canvas and is about 5ft x 4ft. There was only one other person in the gallery and he, too, was entranced by this picture. I bought a postcard from the gift shop and resolved to find out more. The title of the  painting comes from Shakespeare (naturally). It is from Measure for Measure, Act III, scene I, line 86, where Claudio says:

'If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in my arms.'

Floral symbolism abounds in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and poppies were used to represent the notion of death or eternal sleep. Gotch uses poppies here to show death personified as a beautiful, morbid bride ready to embrace the viewer for eternity. I wonder why the poppies in her hair are white: a symbol of purity, perhaps?

So that's how to turn an idle afternoon out into a research exercise!