Let me begin with an indefinable desire for love’s fulfilment in Bonnard’s The Open Window. The setting for the girl’s new “burning, yearning fire” seems to me subtly and delicately to embody her fragmentary dreaming:
“Pillowed by one soft hand, she dreams
Of flying over billowing trees to follow
The dazzling golden gleams,
Loosed arrows
Of desire…”
How different is Fragonard’s knowing beauty in The Swing, who teases and tantalises her would-be young lover, as, under the very nose of her unseeing husband, an “assignation”is tacitly arranged:
“Ah, to be young and fancy-free and bold,
To sip the sweetest honey before the hot blood runs cold!
But he knows nothing of what’s been agreed
Before his very eyes. He holds the ropes –
His wealth bought her and she is his possession,
He lets her play, keeping her on tight lead,
Obedient to her duty and his hopes
Of an heir to continue the succession…”
Gossaert in his An Elderly Couple admires the gentle “equanimity” of this life-long, loving partnership and their “calm, clear-eyed acceptance” of age:
“Her white headdress reflects her radiance
And withered skin around her neck belies
The joyous light of loving that she feels.
In both, there is a moving dignity,
Precious as youth’s passionate intensity…”
In his Man Grafting a Tree Millet reflects on the love that lights the family unit, as the man with his craft fashions a variety of fruit tree: as he surveys the “new life” he has created and which he will “nurture”,
Next: Death in paintings and poems“His child, his loving wife
Have come to see, in homage to his skill,
In wonder that just here, there will
For all their future
Come forth a strange new variation
Of the fruit tree; his Godlike creation
Sprung from the blessed trinity
Of child, man, woman,
And from love’s immensity.”