Rest on the Flight into Egypt or The Repose of the Holy Family 31 x 39 cm. (Oil and Tempera) (1824-28)
This is one of those paintings although ostensibly set in the middle East is in fact painted with a Shoreham, Kent background; this is a technique common to a number of works of Palmer as well as , of course, Stanley Spencer many of whose paintings are set in Cookham, his home town. The Flight into Egypt is a subject that has been painted by literally hundreds of artists and this week I will see what Palmer makes of it. As always, I suggest you look on the internet for a better image of the painting.
The analysis will be split into sub-sections as follows: The biblical context, artistic influences and the analysis of the painting itself.
- a) The Biblical Context
The flight into Egypt and return occurs only in the gospel according to Matthew as part of the infancy narrative, Matthew, Chapter 2, verses 13 – 23. The infancy narratives themselves which occur in Luke as well as Matthew are contested, with many scholars regarding them as symbolic rather than literal history. There are a number of reasons for this scepticism but one difficulty is the comparison of the timing of the flight from Egypt in Matthew with the return to the house at Nazareth in Luke.[i]
As Vaughan suggests, while this narrative is probably apocryphal it is nonetheless important for the messages that it contains.[ii] First of all the writer of the Gospel has Joseph warned in a dream to travel to Egypt to avoid the possibility of Herod’s stated intention to murder babies aged below two years. (There is a tradition in the ancient world of God speaking to men through the medium of dreams.)[iii] There is also a tradition of Jews escaping to Egypt to avoid persecution and it would have been quite logical therefore for Joseph to take his family to one of the Jewish enclaves in an Egyptian city. The writer links this story to fulfilment of the passage in Hosea, Chapter 11, verse 1 ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son’. Whilst this has no reference to Jesus, it does emphasise the deliverance of God’s chosen people out of slavery in Egypt. It has a typological application where the writer of The Gospel of Matthew is making use of an Old Testament prophecy to comply with his narrative. Matthew, writing for Jews ‘knew that almost the only way to convince the Jews that Jesus was the Appointed One of God was to prove that he was the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy’.[iv] Regarding the intent of the passage, deliverance is the main theme – in another dream Joseph is advised by God not to travel back to Bethlehem where Herod’s equally ruthless successor, Archelaus now ruled, but to Nazareth in Galilee where Herod Antipas, a much more benign king reigned. This move to Nazareth established Jesus as a Nazarene, the detailed derivation of which can be found in Laymon’s single volume commentary on the Bible.[v]
Although the infancy narratives are no longer regarded by most scholars as historical truths, the question of interest in the context of Palmer is whether or not they were considered true in his day when research into the historical Jesus was only just beginning.[vi] The extent to which Palmer would have been aware of this research much of which was being undertaken in Germany is difficult to assess but he would probably have been aware of the work of such influential theologians such as William Paley writing on the way in which he viewed God as the designer creating Nature.[vii] The idea of God in Nature (the whole of the natural world) is a theme which seems to be prevalent in the early works of Palmer, only a few of which are directly linked to the biblical narrative. There were, of course, at this time those who would take a very conservative if not literal view of the truth of the Bible, an example being Renan who saw in the Bible an infallible authority which must be never to be seen to be in error, ‘for if the basis of the church’s dogma is detected to be thus insecure what can be said for the security of the superstructure itself?’[viii] This does not seem, though, to be the approach of Palmer, most of whose works employ the imagination in the representation – his works are certainly not literal illustrations of biblical passages.
So far as a non-biblical reference is concerned, Palmer, together with many of the other artists who have depicted this scene refer to the Qur’an suras 19-24 which describe the collection of dates from the palm tree ‘and if you shake the trunk of this palm tree it will drop fresh ripe dates in your lap. Therefore rejoice. Eat and drink.’[ix]
- b) Artistic Influences on Palmer’s Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt
This narrative of the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt has been selected as mentioned above for depiction by many artists, one of the earliest being Giotto di Bondone (c. 1300) with Sydney Nolan (1917-1992) and John Swanson (1938-) providing more recent images.[x] The artists have very different approaches to the prominence of landscape in paintings that are essentially family scenes or portraits, with perhaps Claude (1600-82), who may well have influenced Palmer, placing the emphasis very much on landscape, particularly so in his version of 1666.
In an interesting essay, essentially on the subject of ecology, Kate Rigby argues that not only was the painting of landscape (nature) providing an antidote to the ‘“modern constitution” inaugurated by Bacon and Descartes which severed the human from the non-human and determined their relationship in terms of mastery and possession, but also led to a rebirth of nature through the deployment of poetic imagination’.[xi] Neil Everden argues that even before Bacon there was this change in the attitude towards nature which began with Leonardo who regarded ‘the artist as “Lord and Creator”, a person who is able to constitute an ideal world and from whom ‘abstraction’ and ‘vision’ collaborate intimately.’[xii] As Everden continues
The artist presents an ideal world that can be taken in by the viewer in ‘a single glance’ through a ‘proportioned harmony’. Leonardo gives the viewer a whole landscape as a visual object. As E.H.Gombrich notes, Leonardo’s landscapes are conceptual, owing less to the painter’s eye than to the imagination. Leonardo directs his viewer’s eye to the beauty of his abstraction, and away from a world ‘contaminated’ through empathy.[xiii]
This is very much in accord with Palmer’s own view. ‘Sometimes landscape is seen as a vision, and then it seems as fine as art. But this is seldom, and bits of nature are generally improved by being received into the soul.’[xiv] For Palmer, the new vision he sought might open the door to some hoped-for synthesis of earthly nature with the continuing worship of God. This longing or nostalgia, perhaps best articulated by the Welsh word hiraeth, for an idealised countryside, is expressed by Palmer in the form of an earthly Kingdom of Heaven. Transcendence is at work in the mind of Palmer as he tries to express the Kingdom in terms of an idealised, imagined countryside which contains the lush pastures of Kent with the palm trees of the Middle East.
Apart from the influence of the Bible and the Qur’an, Palmer was certainly influenced by the artists Blake and Claude both of whom had produced works on this subject of the visit of the Holy Family to Egypt. Claude’s influence in general is highlighted by Lister and of course the influence of Blake is very well known, as is that of his contemporaries known as ‘The Ancients’.[xv] The influential nature of the engravings of Bonasone is also mentioned by Lister.[xvi] One of the ‘Ancients’, Calvert could almost have been echoing Palmer when he wrote ‘Earth spiritualised, not Heaven naturalised…I feel a yearning to see the glades and nooks receding like vistas into the gardens of Heaven’[xvii].
- c) Analysis of the painting
Palmer’s painting gives almost more prominence to the landscape than to the family, but his landscape is clearly not that of the Middle East, but of Kent, probably the area around his cottage, but with the addition of a large palm tree. The work was begun in 1824 and was for Palmer experimental; it was only completed after further experimentation and advice from the Blakes which resulted in In a Shoreham Garden (1829). ‘Quite suddenly, Palmer found he was able to complete his oil and tempera painting of the Holy Family (laid aside in 1824) with an ideal background which he found about a Shoreham paddock.’[xviii] Harrison quotes evidence of Palmer’s despair in 1825 – ‘I have laid by the Family in much distress, anxiety and fear: which had plunged me into despair but for God’s mercy … but rather, distress (being blessed) was to me a great arousement; quickly goading me to deep humbleness, eager, restless inquiry, and diligent work.’[xix]
The landscape is imaginary, very much in accordance with the words of Leonardo mentioned above. There is a cave in the middle distance on the left which possibly suggests an allusion to the legend of the Holy Family resting overnight in a cave. A spider weaves a dense web over the entrance to the cave and when Herod’s men go past looking for the Family, they ignore this cave because of the web covering the entrance suggesting that no one could have entered recently. The use of a dark cave is an established pictorial iconography which occurs frequently in the works of Palmer. The presence of a palm tree is a reference to the Qur’an suras 19-24, the tree being a source of food for the journey.
Many artists have based their works closely on the literal biblical narrative, whereas others have tended to paint their interpretation of the narrative using their imagination and skills of exegesis. Palmer is to be counted among this latter group where the work as a whole, although based on a biblical story, has been constructed out of Palmer’s imagination, where the English countryside has been conflated with Palestinian or Egyptian scenery.
So far as the interpretation of the work is concerned, there is consistency with the biblical theme of deliverance. Palmer is almost wrapping the Holy Family in the embrace of the landscape – God’s creation, and God’s providence in supporting the family with food (the palm tree) and shelter (the cave and the cottage with its warmth). It would seem that this interpretation comes very close to meeting Schelling’s ideal that art should be an emanation of the absolute (God). Regarding the Holy Family itself, both parents are concentrating although in a rather dream like way, upon Jesus, with the donkey quietly grazing beside them. The whole scene suggests a relaxed, restful security – security provided by God. Without too great a stretch of the imagination, one could suggest an ecological interpretation, along the lines of the interpretation of the Covenant with Noah – if mankind looks after the natural world to the best of its ability then God will never again flood mankind out of existence. Whilst this may be an interpretation that could be placed on the work in the twenty first century, this would not have been an approach that Palmer would have recognised. His own view of the land was a very conservative one, concerned with the preservation of what he saw as a way of life in the countryside that should not change – faith in an unchanging landscape and faith in God. This is what he endeavoured to express in his art.
This work certainly points towards the Transcendent. First, although the countryside is based on Shoreham, it has been extended by the addition of distant mountains inviting the viewer to look into the far distance, thus meeting the ‘great distance’ criterion of Rudolf Otto. Secondly, although the light/dark contrast is not so marked as in for example Palmer’s Sepia series, there is a significant contrast between the bright clothing – especially the cloth upon which Jesus is lying – and the darkness of the valley below-thus meeting the second of Otto’s criteria. In addition to meeting these two criteria, a sense of mystery and the supernatural has been invoked by the extraordinary juxtaposition of the Shoreham landscape and the features of the Middle East – the palm tree and the distant mountain.
[i] For further details see for example the website:http://www.oxfordbiblicalstudies.com/article/opr/t94/e939
[ii] Vaughan, W, writing in Samuel Palmer 1805-1881 by William Vaughan, Elizabeth E. Barker and Colin Harrison published by the British Museum Press to accompany the exhibition of Palmer Works held in 1995 and 1996 in the British Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). This book was published in London 1995 and the reference is to be found on page 106.
[iii] For a more detailed exposition see Barclay, William The Gospel of Matthew Edinburgh Saint Andrew Press 1991 p. 33.
[iv] Barclay, W. The Gospel of Matthew Edinburgh Saint Andrew Press 1991 p. 36.
[v] Laymon, Charles E. The Interpreter’s One Volume Commentary on the Bible Nashville Abingdon Press 1992 p. 612a.
[vi] The quest for the historical Jesus could be said to have begun in earnest in 1778 with the publication of works by G.E. Lessing. The quest has continued since that time with a major study produced by Schweitzer in 1906 and currently with works published by Ludemann.
[vii] Paley, William Natural Theology London 1802.
[viii] Rearden, B.M.G. Religion in the Age of Romanticism Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985 (Transferred to digital printing 1999 – this edition 2010) On Ernest Renan p. 253.
[ix] Qur’an (Koran) Translated by Dawood, N.J. Harmondsworth Penguin Books first published 1956 (4th revised version, reprinted 1981) p. 33.
[x] www.textweek.com/art/flight_into_egypt.html
[xi] Rigby, K. Topographies of the Sacred – The poetics of place in European Romanticism Charlottesville 2004 p. 4 and p. 23.
[xii] Everden, N. The Social Creation of Nature Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 1992 p. 64.
[xiii] Ibid. p. 66.
[xiv] Moore, J.M. The Green Fuse – Pastoral Vision in English Art Woodbridge (Suffolk) Antique Collectors’ Club 2007 p. 30 (Moore quoting Palmer).
[xv] Lister, R. Samuel Palmer and his etchings London Faber and Faber 1969 p. 30.
[xvi] Ibid. p. 30.
[xvii] Lister quoting Calvert, Ibid. p. 29.
[xviii] Moore, J.M. The Green Fuse p. 55.
[xix] Harrison, C. Samuel Palmer Oxford Ashmolean Museum (Ashmolean Handbooks) 1997 (reprinted 2010) p. 12.
Brislington Community News 