Notes
Painted in 1898.
Provenance:
Private collection, London;
Bonhams London Greek Sale, 11 June 2002, lot 22;
Private collection, Athens.
Exhibited:
Athens, National Gallery and Alexander Soutzos Museum, Georgios Jakobides-Retrospective, 14 November 2005-30 January 2006;
Smyrna, Exhibition of the Panionian Association, 1902 (possibly).
Literature:
The Collection of Alpha Bank, Painting-Engraving-Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Benaki Museum, Athens 2005, p. 30 (illustrated).
Olga Mentzafou-Polyzou, Georgios Jakobides-Retrospective, National Gallery, Athens 2005, p. 189 (illustrated).
A museum-quality jewel of superior pictorial quality by one of the most sensitive and perceptive painters to ever delve into childhood's psyche. Unsurpassed draughtsman, insightful psychologist and keen observer of human nature, Jakobides, this great late 19th-early 20th century Greek artist and leading exponent of the Munich School, established his reputation as the quintessential painter of young children - kindermaler. Friedrich Pecht, a distinguished chronicler of the Munich School, along with many other esteemed art critics of his age, had noted as early as the 1880s that Jakobides had already gained recognition in the Bavarian world, especially due to his childhood scenes.υ1
The warmth of family scenes and the playful antics of childhood informed the art of Jakobides almost from the outset of his career. Towards the end of the 1880s a new figure appears in his work: the mother who tenderly cares for her baby. It is a time during which the painter himself experienced the happiness of parenthood and family life, following the birth of his son Michi. This blessed event charged his painting with newly discovered emotions. The young child held by a caring mother and the intimate, tender moments between them become the epiphany of his artistic vision, continuing an age-long tradition from antiquity's clay nurse figurines and the Mother and Child depictions on Byzantine icons to the Madonnas of western art and Picasso's motherhood paintings, capturing the archetypal and unconditional bonding between mother and offspringυ2 and raising it above personal experience to a level of universality.
In Jakobides' childhood images, both figures and objects adhere to a well thought out and robust design which clearly delineates volumes and forms in combination with descriptive colour. Light plays a crucial role in building up form and capturing the child's firm-fleshed body, as well as in creating an atmosphere that accentuates the scene's symbolic content. Equally important is the role of descriptive detail, while emphasis is given to facial expression, gesture and body language.υ3
The opinion of the great Greek writer Pavlos Nirvanas on Jakobides' childhood scenes is worth mentioning: "The miracle of childhood is not something that anybody can capture on canvas. A child, with its still flexible, almost unformed bone structure, undefined and fleeting form and mercurial fluidity is hardly a shape per se. It is liquid, nebulous, a play of light both inner and outer, an entity both imaginary and animate. And within this agile and ever - changing miracle there is a soul that plays and moves and transforms under the enviable glimmerings of light on a watery surface. The painters who have managed to capture this miracle 'in flight' and fix it on a flat surface as we do with butterflies careful not to disturb a single scale from their colourful wings, are but few. One of them is Jakobides."υ4
An exquisite example of Jakobides' finest work, The first music lesson gracefully combines the signature iconographical elements and stylistic traits of his mature output: the mother-and-child composition (as in Maternal affection, 1889), the interior of a Bavarian home with the typical clay wood stove surrounded by a wooden structure (as in Children fighting) that supports a semi-transparent garment (as in Out of tune, 1896), the neutral, monochromatic background rooted in ancient Greek relief sculpture and Byzantine icon painting that accentuates the action in the foreground (as in Maternal affection, 1889, The favourite, 1890, First steps, 1892, and Cold bath, 1898), the sketchy and rather faint depiction of isolated decorative elements such as the wall clock (also evident in Out of tune, 1896, and Children's orchestra, 1900) and, of course, the masterful rendition of the child's expression and facial characteristics (as in Greedy, 1884, Combing out, 1889, The favourite, 1890 and Baby's bath, 1899.) For Jakobides, childhood hardly ever represents an idealized world. The artist has been recognized as a leading child painter precisely because he manages to look beyond 'beautified' sentimental stereotypes and capture a wide variety of emotionally charged expressions with great psychological insight.
Jakobides' mastery is also at work in the shallow, flat and one-dimensional space that creates a sense of objects floating in space in a way akin to Cézanne's visionary perspective and handling of pictorial space. These are the closing years of the 19th century and the Greek master, though acknowledged as a leading academic painter, has certainly been exposed to new currents and avant-garde trends. Moreover, his inquisitive nature is manifest in the sketchy, abbreviated, almost impressionistic rendition of the mother's apron that dominates the lower foreground. Here, Jakobides is not interested in demonstrating technical ability and descriptive detail. His evident intention is to create a neutral, unadorned, almost monochromatic backdrop that will underscore and highlight the tender limbs of the aspiring musician. Relying on his keen ability to observe and record body language - in this case the child's contorting toes - Jakobides eloquently conveys a characteristic instance of childhood impatience.
Without resorting to intense gesticulations, as in the various versions of the Greedy or the Bad grandson, the artist focuses on the expressive potential of the child's toes, capturing on canvas the essence of childhood's restless energy and adding a winsome quality that contradicts the overall dark setting.
The contribution of the feet to the mood of the painting is so significant that a separate work, Child's feet at the collection of Alpha Bank, a small oil showing only a pair of lower limbs identical in terms of draftsmanship, brushwork, palette and general artistic quality with the ones depicted in The first music lesson, has been signed by the artist as if it were a complete composition. This clearly demonstrates, as Dr. O. Mentzafou notes, that even a fragmentary rendition can be valued for its purely pictorial qualities.υ5
Jakobides' experimentation with a rather dark colour scheme for the mother's clothing is not accidental; in combination with her composed expression, it serves to further emphasize the young child's natural vivacity and playful disposition. Let's not forget that this is a first music lesson and not child's play, as in most of his works of this period. This subtle juxtaposition of the seriousness of learning and the instinctive tendency towards play is finely balanced on the blowing horn's very curvature. Simultaneously expressing 'desire' and 'discipline', this archetypal wind instrument sets the whole composition in a circular motion, endlessly revolving around the horn's bell at the painting's very center and creating an abiding compositional unity of great aesthetic merit and artistic value. Thus, we have a pretty good idea regarding a larger version exhibited at the 1898 Zappeion Hall Art Exhibition and known only through a blurred and hardly decipherable photograph of the artist in his studio.
According to Professor C. Christou, in the 1890s Jakobides produced some of his finest worksυ6 and towards the end of the decade he was highly esteemed and recognised by both the Greek state and the German public. In 1896 the former Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis visited his studio and enchanted by his paintings he invited him to return to Greece to teach the younger generation; in 1897 the artist opened an art school in Munich which was attended by many Greek painters who described their apprenticeship a real mystic experience; in 1898 - the year in which The first music lesson was painted - he participated in the Zappeion Hall Art Exhibition and was awarded the bronze medal at the Barcelona Fine Art Exhibition, while the mayor of Munich asked him to contribute a work for the city's golden book.
The first music lesson immediately brings to mind the artist's monumental Children's orchestra, painted a couple of years later at the dawn of the new century. In both works we share the excitement we felt in our childhood while playing with simple objects, listening to new sounds or making music. Notice the longing and impatience of the two infant protagonists to embrace the magic of music, interestingly represented in both paintings by a simple wind instrument. The clay vessel used for the child's feeding and the hat and scarf casually left on the wooden bench are appealing complementary details, while the clock on the wall and the open window may have been intended to suggest the transience of childhood's carefree time. Jakobides knew, perhaps better than any other Greek artist, how to convey a sense of immediacy and catch the fugitive charm and unfettered expressivity of childhood, which had been a topos in literature and the visual arts since ancient times.
Furthermore, in both paintings, the naturalistic rendering of children's bodies is matched by their well-groomed appearance, reflecting the artist's intension to position childhood within a specific and often rigidly delineated social and cultural environment. However, as noted by Athens University Professor of Sociology D. Makrynioti, "Jakobides provides the children with a certain outlet, a link between socialisation and contact with nature: he intentionally leaves some body parts uncovered, especially the children's feet. The fact that the well cared-for children's attire literally ends up in naked feet, reverts the child to its natural state simultaneously offering it a means to resist the social convention of clothing and proclaim its freedom."υ7
In our lot, Jakobides produced, with meticulous observation, wealth of detail, subtle light and shadow effects, delicate tonalities and tender minuteness of touch, a masterful rendition of the child's expression and facial characteristics, endowing the picture with a sense of genuineness and lively presence. His greatness, however, is reflected in his ability to observe and record not just an expression but the slightest change in expression, one that has not yet become but is on the verge of becoming apparent. The child is so eager to blow the horn that it is most certain that if the mother doesn't let go, it will break into tears in the next few seconds. This moment is crucial for any genre master, for even more challenging than childhood's expressivity is it's notorious emotional fickleness, the rapid alternation between laughter and weeping. This fleeting moment of time, this moment of transition from one expression to another, held with beauty and intensity, is made timeless by Jakobides.
υ1. H.G. Ludwig, Georgios Jakobides and the Artistic Scene in Munich [in Greek] in Georgios Jakobides Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery-A. Soutzos Museum, Athens 2005, p. 37.
υ2. See Mentzafou-Polyzou, Jakobides [in Greek], Adam publ., Athens 1999, pp. 112-114.
υ3. A. Kouria, 'The Painter of Children', Kathimerini daily, Epta Imeres, 27.2.2000, p. 17.
υ4. P. Nirvanas, 'The Painter of Children' [in Greek], Pinakothiki journal, 12 (1912-13), 100-101. See also A. Kouria, The Child in Modern Greek Art (1833-1922) [in Greek], Dodoni publ., Athens - Yannina 1985, p. 58.
υ5. Mentzafou-Polyzou, p. 138.
υ6. C. Christou, 'Georgios Jakobides' [in Greek] in Greek Painters, vol. 1, From the 19th Century to the 20th, Melissa publ., Athens 1974, p. 238.
υ7. D. Makrynioti, 'Looking for Children in the Work of Georgios Jakobides' [in Greek] in Georgios Jakobides Retrospective, pp. 53-54.
