In my student days, we’d cross the Firth of Forth to see the Duke of Sutherland’s Titians. From the road, the red iron rail bridge would loom beside us, a jaunty upright marvel before sodden Edinburgh and the ruins of Diana and Actaeon.
Actaeon comes in with his dog and the light. Dropping his bow, he looks alarmed by this grotto of nudes. Diana, her bathing over, sits being towelled off by one follower, and helped to cover up by another. Like Diana, Actaeon only wanted a break from hunting on a summer’s midday; and “it is no crime to lose your way in a dark wood.”1
Little is fixed or faithful here. Cantilevering herself off a tilting water feature, the nymph closest to Actaeon pulls at a makeshift curtain. The glass vase on the edge of the fountain must soon fall; and even before this, Diana will punish Actaeon for what he’s seen.
With a splash of water to the face, Actaeon is made a stag, to be mauled by his own loyal dogs.
But when he saw his face and horns reflected in a stream, he tried to call out, “Wretched me!” Yet no voice came. He groaned—that was his voice. Tears drenched a face not his. His former mind alone remained.2
Ovid tells us that Actaeon’s intrusion was both a mistake and bound to happen. Titian seems to ask with his own poesia: what if some of Diana’s nymphs take little notice of Actaeon, and if he doesn’t really ogle her at all? What if chaste Diana is protected by a ridiculous toy dog?
Unaware of its miniature size and that it has no role in the myth, Diana’s lapdog menaces Actaeon’s collared hound over the stream. Like this yapping spaniel, Actaeon in his new form is unable to say what he’s seen, or who he is.
He flees through places where he’d often chased! He flees from his own pets! He yearned to shout, “I am Actaeon—recognize your master!” The longed-for words won’t come. Barks fill the air.
Diana and Actaeon and its own companion, Diana and Callisto, were finished as the summer of 1559 came to a close. Meant to be hung near each other, the light changes between them, but we are in the same dark woods, and the dogs too look familiar.
One, still wearing its old red collar, appears to submit to the water. Across the stream, Callisto struggles to keep clothed as Diana points out her new, pregnant shape.
From within the jumble of nymphs attending Diana, a black-and-white pointer turns itself away. Quite unlike the dogs “going on with their doggy life” in Bruegel, this hound seems to have learned a lesson about gods and men. By Actaeon’s side until the very end, it wants out of yet another bathing scene.
As for us, we take in Callisto’s body like a god. She will be exiled by Diana, give birth to the child of her rape by Jupiter, and become transformed.
How many times she was pursued on cliffs by barking dogs—the huntress fled in fear of hunters! Often she spied beasts and hid, forgetting what she was. Although a bear, she cowered at the sight of bears on mountains.
What if, in a fit of whimsy, Titian’s Diana and Callisto turns into Félix Vallotton’s Bathing on a Summer Evening? We can think of it as hanging together with Diana and Actaeon in the rooms of Philip II of Spain, rather than above the bathtub of Lucien Muhlfeld in Paris, or – as it is now – across two rivers from me in Zurich.
Rays of sun beat down on this field cut through by a dirt path and pool of bricks. Actaeon isn’t likely to get lost in this shadeless valley where shadowless women are drying off, to-ing and fro-ing, and wading in their reflections. One of them descends the stairs into the water, her arms crossed as if for baptism. Like the woman bending over with her back turned (and the bottom of a baboon, in Jules Renard’s view), she may only get a splash. Some of these bathers have left their shifts on, as Callisto would have liked to, and does even when she gets to bathe alone in Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654).
A Lausannois who became French, Vallotton (1865–1925) cried at the sight of Ingres’ Turkish Bath (1862). Bathing on a Summer Evening provoked laughter instead (“it will tickle you silly”), and Vallotton himself was teased. Having sat for a (very clothed) portrait, Gertrude Stein writes of his process, “...it was like pulling down a curtain as slow moving as one of his Swiss glaciers. Slowly he pulled the curtain down and by the time he was at the bottom of the canvas, there you were.”3
Slow, perhaps, but prolific, Vallotton painted his share of bathers, whether bobbing in the sea at Étretat or standing in a zinc tub at home. Fellow Nabis Bonnard and Vuillard called him the “foreign prophet” (le nabi étranger), though he chose to set the story of Susanna and the Elders in a Paris café, rather than an Old Testament garden with bath. The rosy cloth hanging as a curtain in Diana and Actaeon turns up here as upholstery.
Nearing 70 when he painted Diana and Actaeon, Titian made changes as he went, adjusting colour, having a nymph look one way and then another. Vallotton, a green 27, stuck closely to his own preliminary oil sketch of Bathing on a Summer Evening, and didn’t mix his colours. He would not have seen Diana and Actaeon, then kept in Bridgewater House in London, at least not in the flesh. Yet fatal mistakes were of great interest to him. In his novel The Murderous Life (La vie meurtrière), the narrator is witness to a series of accidental deaths, some as grisly and tragic as Actaeon’s.
Still, Vallotton’s sights were set elsewhere. He was a (small-time) collector of ukiyo-e prints and a devotee of Holbein. From Maurice Denis we know that, on a visit to Berlin, Vallotton made a copy of Cranach’s The Fountain of Youth (1546). This myth is simple: go in old and infirm, come out young and ready to mingle.
Vallotton’s Bathing on a Summer Evening makes no such promises. A middle-aged Venus stands in the foreground. Hair and makeup done, she’s brought a toy with her into the pool. Like Actaeon first seeing the reflection of his changed face, her inky pekingese stares down at itself taking shape in the water. We don’t have Ovid to tell us what happens next. But given Vallotton’s accidents, in print and prints, one does worry about the fate of this washcloth of a pet.
An exhibition of dog portraits is on at the Wallace Collection in London until 15 October. None of these paintings is in that show; but it does include Lucian Freud’s Pluto (1988) and Pluto’s Grave (2003). Freud loved the Titians in Scotland, explaining in 2001: “I like the way the more you look at them, the more dogs you seem to find.”
Dear Beatrice, I've spent the morning revisiting this site for the third time.
It takes me an age as I follow up the various side tracks offered.
I love the variety and detail of the paintings. Wonderful bathing scenes that stay in my mind. Vallotton's work is new to me. Thanks so much for the work you put into light breaks. Seeing the paintings and reading your comments is enriching to me. All good wishes to you and Greg,
Joan
I applaud your assemblage here, Beatrice: there is a wonderful lushness and intimacy produced by this mass of female flesh. Then quite apart from the dogs, the unraveling of the mysterious and confusing Titians has entirely dispelled my earlier attitudes – you’ve made them intriguing and lively, and full of added meaning. By drawing our attention to the dogs themselves, in their various attitudes, we see these pictures differently too. JR