Death in Rouen

Written By sophie buckman

Rouen’s centre is filled with these tumble-down half-timbered houses, recently coated in too-bright, too-clean paint. Seeing a Monoprix or Burger King crowned with those crooked beams can give the whole thing the look of a decaying theme park. Rouenland: be sure not to miss the Joan of Arc burning, every day at 3 and 7. I find this is often the case on the modern highstreets of ancient towns: past and present meeting in a brackish no-mans land. All very uncanny valley.  Sometimes I can train my historicising eye to censor a vaping teen here, electric scooter there. But sometimes it’s nice to live in the inbetween-times. Like today, in Rouen.

My hostel is on the outskirts of town, a nice enough place. The lady at reception doesn’t seem to mind my broken French, and the toilet doesn’t make me instantly cross myself. It even has a pleasant garden backing onto the train tracks and cycle paths. There’s a cat that seems to be eyeing the chickens in their coop. On second glance there only seems to be one chicken about. Is that allowed?

My room is meant for two, but thankfully I’m alone. I wouldn’t mind the company, except my room only has one large bed with a plasticky partition down the middle. You could end up spooning your bunkie if you rolled over with enough gusto. After waking up alone and uncompromised I get the tram into town, and after a brief stop at the mizzly market and a croissant shared with the finches, I head to the cathedral. I should say, I’m in Rouen mostly for a sentimental love of Madame Bovary. I want to kneel in the lady chapel in near-orgasmic bliss, I want to hear the rumble and squeak of the fateful carriage ride. And here I am, retracing Emma’s steps, just as Quixotic but a little less tortured. The ‘Cathédrale Primatiale Notre-Dame de l'Assomption de Rouen’ is magnificent, though I’m finding myself more taken with the exterior than the interior. The exterior is so busy, so replete with architectural features I’m too dumb to put a name to, that coming inside feels like shading your eyes from the sun.

I look for the lady-chapel where Emma Bovary prays for the strength of will to resist the urge to sleep with the dashing young Léon. It’s closed. Instead I spend most of my visit trying to find the alleged resting place of Empress Matilda, my longing for Flaubertian ecstasy displaced by the wrath of an Empress scorned. For those who haven’t heard of her, Matilda was the daughter and heir of Henry I, and should have inherited the English throne in 1135 if not for a coalition of slimy Normans who hate to see a girlboss win. I’m a Matilda fanatic, mentioning ‘King’ Stephen to me is like asking Lee Anderson about Just Stop Oil or Shamima Begum. I’ve been banned from the gift shop at the Tower of London for writing her name on those ‘Kings and Queens of England’ rulers. Every cast member of Horrible Histories has me blocked on twitter. But for all my busy marching, clacking up and down the flagstones like a hound tracking a scent, Matilda was nowhere to be seen. After some awful exchanges with the woman in the gift-shop (“Excusez-moi, ou je trouve l’Impératrice Matilda?” “Quoi, Madame? Qui?”) and a few further laps of the aisles I find her. Well, I find a very small plaque on a wall, which is inaccessible and too far away to properly read. Just a few metres behind me is a full gisant effigy to Matilda’s son, Richard the Lion Heart. It’s not even Richard under there, just his lion-heart. Typical.

Is that it? My blurry photo of Matilda’s plaque.

After eating my lunch hunched over in the rain, I made my way to the Musée des Beaux-Arts. It was a solid collection, you know, Carracci, Ingres, Sisley, the usual suspects. I loved a delicious little still-life of a herring luncheon by Jacob Foppens Van Es. But near it was this incredibly odd work, labelled ‘Flanders, Young Woman on her Deathbed, 1621, Oil on Canvas.’ I double take. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It glows; the handling of light and the detailed rendering of flesh and fabric are totally outstanding. The subject is a deathbed portrait, as confirmed by the text in the upper right: OBYT 28 IULA 1621 AETATIS SUAE 25 DUALIS HORIS POST OBITUM DEPICTA (Died 28 July 1621, her age 25, depicted two hours after death.) Deathbed portraits, sometimes known by the German word ‘totenbild,’ are an odd and understudied little genre, mostly found in the Netherlands with the tradition bleeding into Germany, England, and further afield. Like funerary monuments, found in civilisations the world-over since time immemorial, they commemorate the passing of a loved (or at least respected) community member. Where they differ from your typical funerary monument, is that they depict the departed not in life, as a posthumous portrait, but instead choose to memorialise The Dead.

Anon., Young Woman on her Deathbed, 1621. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.

The portrait, by its very nature, is a memorial. It presents an approximate effigy, purports to make static those qualities and consciousnesses which make up a person. From a postcard on my desk is staring Eleanor of Toledo, masterfully painted with her son Giovanni by Bronzino, around 1545. This is a portrait de rigueur. Bronzino’s own prestige, Eleanor’s sumptuous gown, and the painting’s inimitable quality, all recognise her status. Its creation contributes to her establishment in the historical record. It promotes the might of her and Cosimo’s Florence. She is ideal mother and wife, beautiful, stalwart, unflinching, but with a hint of reproachful sadness.

Agnolo di Cosimo Tori detto Bronzino, Portrait of Eleonora di Toledo with her son Giovanni, c. 1545. Uffizi.

The portrait represents the moment where past and present meet. As soon as the brush is lifted from the canvas for the final time, subject becomes object, present becomes past. The metaphorical cling-film is pulled taut, the portrait, for its truths and untruths, is made static. Of course, this boundary is offered with the command to be transgressed, not by subject or artist, but by viewer. Bronzino brings together the functions and fictions of portraiture to present to us this automaton, this Eleanor.

Many funerary monuments, like Tutankhamun’s mask or the Fayum portraits, are simply portraits painted after the subject is dead, in that they depict the subject as if alive. All of the politicking and idealising of traditional portraiture remains the same. But depicting the subject as dead or dying? Why? Obviously plays up portraiture’s memento mori signalling, yada yada yada. Most monuments like the tomb of Richard the Lionheart, or all the Doges in Zanipolo (don’t get me started, I’ll give Ruskin a run for his money) depict the dead as they would depict the living, with similar virtue and composure. Most of these deathbed portraits are the same, depicting the dead if not indistinguishable from the living, certainly indistinguishable from the sleeping.

Anon., The Dordrecht Quadruplets, 1621. Dordrechts Museum. I should say this is an unusual deathbed portrait as serves largely to commemorates the novelty of quadruplets.

Take this odd little number, the so-called Dordrecht Quadruplets, also from 1621. The de Costerus quadruplets are lined up in order of length of life, with the three upright siblings having lived a few days, and Elisabet, in the white garment, only having lived an hour and a half. The three are depicted as alive and upright as swaddled babies can be, Elisabet is almost smiling, lulled in eternal sleep. Here's another deathbed portrait, this time of a certain Baron Floris van Pallandt II lying in state. His eyes are gently closed, hands are duly clasped. The drawn curtain is intimate but stately. Little has changed from this portrait of him alive, save perhaps the fashion and a few grey hairs. Why then, why then depict our Rouen dame so... corpselike? It’s her faraway look, grasping hand, and sickly pallor which set her apart. This is not death as eternal sleep, this is clawing, wheezing, gurgling death. This is Emma Bovary, realising too late that death isn’t like it is in the novels.

Max Clinger, Deathbed Portrait of Floris II, 1639. Museum Elisabeth Weeshuis. Photo: RKD.

But why? Look at the fine bedsheets, with a subtle but unmistakable family crest in the left-hand corner. I’ve not been able to trace this crowned pinecone, but like the quality of the work it is a testament to this woman having some level of status. Surely then the painting was commissioned by the family, but why would a noble family choose to memorialise their own like this? In Tomb Sculpture (1964), Erwin Panofsky conceives two types of funerary monuments, the ‘retrospective,’ emphasising biography, and the ‘prospective,’ pertaining to life beyond death. I can’t say that the Rouen painting seems to me to lean one way or the other. I can’t see it offering much narrative on the afterlife at all, rather it seems to negate it. Perhaps her glazed look and gaping mouth signals the very moment the body and spirit part ways. Perhaps even it pre-empts the debates around materialism and dualism which Descartes would drag up a few decades later.

Who am I to say. Looking at it, I’m further stirred by the quality and seeming modernity of the work. At first I thought it to be 19th century, something closer to the Death of Chatterton than the Dordrecht Quadruplets. The only hint as to its authorship is a sly suggestion on the museum’s website that it could be by Antwerp portrait painter and friend-of-Rubens Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651.) A very plausible proposal. Fatefully, 1621 also marked the year that a young whippersnapper and acquaintance of de Vos, a certain ‘Antoon van Dyck,’ would head to England, later to paint a remarkable deathbed portrait of his own, the delicate Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed (1633.)

Anthony van Dyck, Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, 1633. Dulwich Picture Gallery.

I’ve been left with more questions than answers here. Do let me know if you have any thoughts. But for now, I’ll put it to bed. I’ve got a Joan of Arc show to catch!

-Reilly

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