To The Lighthouse: Art

Lecture on To The Lighthouse: Art by Claudia Tobin, 13 February 2021

Blog by Lisa Hutchins

For Virginia Woolf, art and writing were linked by the closest of family relationships. From her elder sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she gained an intimate understanding of the experience of being a female painter, to complement her own experience of being a female writer. In this session for Literature Cambridge Dr Claudia Tobin, Senior Research Associate at Jesus College, Cambridge, demonstrated how art was a central concern for Woolf and her circle.

Roger Fry, a painter and art critic, was the foremost advocate for contemporary French painting in Britain and coined the term 'post-impressionism' in 1906. The Hogarth Press had published his monograph on Cézanne in 1920. Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were both influenced as artists by a ground-breaking exhibition Fry organised at the Grafton Gallery in 1910, entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists, that also featured works by Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Fry shocked the public and the art establishment with this radical presentation of European art but Claudia told us how painters regarded it as a moment of liberation, with Bell remembering it later as a 'revolution'.

Claudia likened Woolf's writing in To the Lighthouse to still-life painting and spoke about a picture by Cézanne, bought by John Maynard Keynes and introduced into the heart of the Bloomsbury circle. She told us that Still Life with Apples (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum) features the distorted perspective, the sense of arrested movement and instability, and the shifting and indeterminate background that is typical of his work. She spoke of Cézanne as the modern master of still-life painting and explained how his attention to everyday objects, often portrayed from many angles, was a forerunner of Cubism.

Claudia invited us to think about the following passage in terms of still-life painting and the aesthetic influences at work on the Bloomsbury circle:  

Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs Ramsay wondered, for Rose's arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune's banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold…

            (The Window, s. 17)

We saw how it incorporates many interesting themes: the materiality of everyday objects that plays such a central role in Woolf's writing; the stillness and silence to be found at the centre of an artwork; and the memento mori (referred to in Cézanne's contemporary images of skulls). Mrs Ramsay and two of her children are dead by the second section of the book and ‘a downpouring of immense darkness began’ as the Ramsey's once-joyful holiday home is abandoned and becomes derelict.

The struggles of the female artist are expressed directly in the novel through Lily Briscoe, a guest who is initially young and unsure of her place in the world. I have always found the scenes in To the Lighthouse where Woolf skewers the overbearing male characters to be some of the most resonant and bitingly funny in all her work. In the extract below, Woolf uses the unwanted presence of Mr Ramsay to show Lily's physical struggles as an artist as well as her struggles to be taken seriously:

She set her clean canvas firmly upon the easel, as a barrier, frail, but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr Ramsay and his exactingness […] Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything. She could not see the colour, she could not see the lines, even with his back turned to her.

(The Lighthouse, s. 2)

The need for solitude and private creative space away from an intrusive male gaze is a theme developed at greater and more serious length in Woolf's next work, A Room of One's Own, published by the Hogarth Press in 1929. Its importance is demonstrated by the difficult guest Charles Tansley and his suggestion that ‘women can't write, women can't paint’. Claudia argued that Lily has both internalised and battled against the idea, and still talks about the ‘awful trial’ of someone looking at a picture. Lily also faces attention from Mr Banks, whose intelligent questions interrogate her work from a position of interest. This, Claudia suggests, represents Woolf offering two viewpoints, aesthetic and scientific, as she looks for a language that can express visual experience.

By the novel's end we see Lily persevering with her creative work, her realisation that she must satisfy herself rather than some intended viewer freeing her to put the last, definitive stroke of paint on her canvas. She has finally completed the work that began as a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and her young son, now far more abstract. Woolf chooses that moment to end the novel, art and literature unified in the completed painting.  

I found Claudia's lecture to be the perfect complement to the session run by Literature Cambridge the previous week on the influence of music in the work of Katherine Mansfield. Both opened up the possibility of an entirely different way of appreciating the authors discussed, something that I expect to return to often as I read their work in the future.

Claudia Tobin will lecture at the Literature Cambridge Virginia Woolf Summer Course planned for July 2022, and this lecture on TTL and Art will be repeated live on 16 May. Lecture Bookings.

• The next events in the Virginia Woolf Season are Orlando (1928): Writing Vita, Writing Life with Katrina Jakubowicz, on Saturday 20 February at 6.00 pm UK time, and a live repeat of Trudi Tate’s lecture on Gardens in To the Lighthouse (1927), Sunday 21 February at 6.00 pm.

Link: Claudia discusses Bloomsbury and Stillness, BBC Radio 3, Art and Ideas.

• Images • Judith Bridgland, Godrevy Lighthouse. •Vanessa Bell, Still Life