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Sir John Soane was a melancholy soul. Not content with a skull as a memento mori, he acquired the stone sarcophagus of pharaoh Seti I, which gapes like the mouth to the Underworld in the shadow-filled basement of his museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Two hundred years on, at his country house at Ealing, his fellow spirit, the painter Alison Watt, stares at the world with the kind of bleak thoughts he savoured.
Watt’s exhibition starts with a painting of a broken plaster cast of a classical child’s head. Like all her still lifes, it is done with precision and craft. It is also totally eerie. The white plaster child’s eyes are blank, devoid of pupils. There is a blue-shadowed hole, where the hollow head has been broken off from its body, opening a lane to the land of the dead. Uneasy? Good, then the ghost story can begin.
Meticulous but unsettling paintings of folded white linen follow. Watt depicts their sharp creases, enigmatic dimples and empty overhangs with precise, patient attention. Yet her pristine sheets and tablecloths look unerringly spectral in Soane’s spooky old place. She doesn’t do anything flashy, just sticks to the facts, with one exception – you can’t tell exactly what surfaces the linens rest on. They exist in a pale limbo yet still, disturbingly, cast shadows. Every manicured cloth made me think of my winding sheet.
Wait, here are some nice pink flowers! The first of these four floral still lifes is perfect, with creamily exact pink petals casting cool shadows on a nondescript surface. But in the next painting they are yellowing, then in the next serious decay has taken over. In the final picture the flowers are just about surviving, like us all.
Of course, it is not exactly original to put intimations of decay and entropy into a still life – 17th-century paintings do it religiously. But Watt does more than just emulate painters of the past. Watching a flower rot or staring at a sheet of linen until it seems alive was a more common pursuit for artists in a world without technological distraction. It means something different and positively strange to look this hard at things nowadays.
And Watt really does look hard. A painting of a blue and white porcelain cup and saucer captures not just every detail of its antique pattern, but the sheen and depth of the glaze in a little wonder of observation. Has Watt never heard of a cameraphone? Doesn’t she know you can have it “see” something for you in an instant? Plainly she prefers to actually look. And look.
This rigorously empirical method raises paradoxically metaphysical questions. A large depiction of a sheet pinned up to a wall sways in the light. It’s just white cloth. Is that all there is? Or does something inhabit it? In fact this hanging cloth echoes a haunting, or haunted, masterpiece of religious art. In Francisco de Zurbarán’s c1660 painting The Sudarium of St Veronica, a white sheet is similarly slung up and on it is the blood-brown, miraculously preserved imprint of Christ’s face.
No face appears on Watt’s white cloth. Nothing. It is a religious painting without a God. She watches for so long, but nothing happens.
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The show climaxes in a darkened space where three “portraits” are brightly illuminated. These are not paintings from life but studies from death. Watt has done three still lifes, from different vantage points, of a death mask that survives in Soane’s collection. He bought it, a wall text tells us, thinking it was the death mask of a naval mutineer called Richard Parker. We are not told why he wanted such a grisly memento of a sailor hanged from a ship’s yardarm in 1797, or why the seller who conned him didn’t just sell it for what it was. For what Soane bought was the death mask of someone far more famous, Oliver Cromwell.
Watt ironically gives the dead lord protector the same triple portrait treatment that Anthony van Dyck lavished on Charles I, whose death warrant Cromwell procured and signed. Unearthly light falls on the dead face, deep shadows overhang its eyes. Is there a ghost here, she seems to ask as she paints the death mask from different angles. No. Not even that. Just a great nothingness.
It might be too sad a thought even for Soane.
