From:
Susanna Avery‐Quash (ed.), Ayla Lepine (ed.), Isobel Muir (co‐editor), Fruits of the Spirit: Art from the Heart, digital edition (London: The National Gallery, 2022).

Susanna Avery‐Quash

Rembrandt was fascinated by the Book of Tobit, whose central characters include a stoical elderly couple.¹ He painted episodes from it on several occasions. Here, the blind and pious Tobit and his wife Anna await the return of their son Tobias, who has gone on a long journey to find money owed to Tobit, to ease their poverty.² Tobias will have many adventures before finally returning with the money and a fish whose entrails, as promised by the Archangel Raphael (who accompanied Tobias on his travels), will provide a cure for Tobit’s blindness. The happy ending is in the future; the moment captured in Rembrandt’s painting is a more uncertain present, when the couple can but wait patiently in the hope of a good outcome. With their chairs drawn close together, they abide in companionable silence. Light falls on their hands and illuminates their activities – as Anna spins to earn them an income, Tobit, with lowered head, clasps his hands in meditation or prayer. Despite their unresolved situation and decrepit surroundings – there is no glass in the window, the wooden shutter is broken and plaster peels from the walls – their living space is illuminated by a window on one side and warmth from a fire on the other, and tranquillity and serenity reign. The ivy clinging to the window evokes their faithful abiding with each other and with God, and taken as a whole, the scene may be read as a visual commentary on patience and its rewards, from both secular and religious points of view.

Rembrandt’s inclusion of so many details and so much shadow as well as his textured impasto technique encourage slow looking, inviting us to be attentive to the story. Look again at Tobit: Rembrandt has depicted with patient attention each wrinkle on his cheek, each hair of his greying beard, each brown mark on his aged hands: all signs of Tobit’s long life and, by implication, his experience and wisdom. Well may we ask why such a good man as Tobit has been blinded and tested by God.

Much of Christianity revolves around this dilemma regarding suffering: in some accounts, the testing of faith so that trust in God may grow is a way to cultivate acceptance that God’s love and compassion endure even in very dark circumstances.³ Another well‐known story in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran concerns ‘the patience of Job’, a devout prophet whose faith in God remained unshaken despite the numerous afflictions besetting him, his family and his estate, which were sent to test him.⁴ In the New Testament, Jesus is tested on many occasions; for instance, for forty days and nights in the wilderness, he is besieged by Satan, but patiently endures each test. Many passages in the Bible exhort Christians in trying circumstances to be Christ‐like in patience, fortified by the promise that their endurance will be rewarded. For instance, in Psalm 40, we read: ‘Be still before the Lord and wait patiently.’⁵ Given this emphasis on patience, it is unsurprising that Christianity includes long periods of reflection and expectation ahead of times of fulfilment and celebration, such as the four weeks of Advent before the birth of Christ celebrated on Christmas Day, or the forty days of Lent, mirroring Christ’s time in the wilderness, ahead of Easter Day’s celebration of Christ’s resurrection and ultimate triumph over death.

Both Jews and Christians are inspired by the prophet Micah, who suffered much and yet endured, proclaiming, ‘I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me.’⁶ Muslims believe that one of the supreme virtues is sabr, defined as having patience with steadfast belief in Allah, and that Allah is with those who are patient, especially those who suffer in any way. To practise patience, Muslims fast for thirty consecutive days during Ramadan. Other world religions likewise encourage patience as a way of growing closer to God and to one another.

Many philosophers, writers and poets, whether espousing a particular faith or not, have also explored what it means to be patient. For instance, the English poet John Milton wrote a paean to patience, ‘When I Consider How My Light Is Spent’ (first published in 1673). Beginning as a lament to Milton’s lost powers as a writer and diplomat through blindness, the poem changes tack mid‐way through with a bold counterpoint, introduced with the words ‘But patience’. Patience teaches him another perspective, he says, in which he may serve his Creator by just ‘being’, rather than by ‘doing’. He shares this revelation in the last line: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’⁷ This understanding of patience is one in which virtue is a proactive state of mind, encouraging a state of watchfulness and hope.

In today’s secular and ever faster‐paced society, with increasingly sophisticated digital technologies, including mobile phones and round‐the‐clock ‘click and collect’ facilities, the value of patience has been seriously challenged. However, a counter‐movement has been gaining strength. Biologists and botanists, among others, have long pointed to nature’s wisdom concerning the length of time it takes for life to establish itself and flourish – as when a seed slowly turns into a plant, which later produces a flower and finally a fruit.⁸ Since the mid‐1980s, a dedicated Slow Movement has emerged, which advocates a slowing down of life’s pace in all aspects for the general wellbeing of society.⁹ Slow Looking is one of its more recent offshoots, which advocates that spending time and being patient with works of art will yield lasting benefits for viewers.¹⁰

Helen Cobby

A young woman reads a book intently within the confines of an uncluttered home. Her polished appearance, from her carefully arranged ringlets to the slender pointy shoes extending from her pink dress, complete with a fashionable Empire waistline, initially holds our attention. She may have been here for some time: her feet are propped up on a stool, a cat nestles in her lap and a shawl hangs over the chair. With her attention determinedly fixed on the pages of her book, our own starts to wander. A little boy, who stands listlessly at her side, tugging at his ear, perhaps bids for us to take notice of him. Like the woman, he is smartly dressed; his brass buttons catch in the dim light. Behind, we see a luxurious carpet covering a table, its design and vermillion hues echoing the floor tiles, even as it interrupts the sense of depth and perspective. It keeps the two figures, and our gaze as the viewer, firmly in the foreground. Are we being warned not to dig too deep? The expansive dark background of this domestic interior, now laced with an endless maze of tiny surface cracks known as ‘craquelure’, protests there is nothing for us to see here. We cannot fully make out a little painting on the wall, which apparently depicts an adolescent girl setting a bird free but is positioned so high that it extends beyond the frame. Nor can we clearly distinguish the pattern on the blue‐and‐white Delftware vase displayed on an otherwise empty mantlepiece or windowsill, which frames a view … of nothing, to nowhere.

Layers and nuances abound in this small oil painting, The Reader, painted in about 1817 by the French artist Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837), when she was in her fifties, at the height of her career. At first glance it may appear a simple image of a mother and, we assume, son. Perhaps more will be revealed if we look attentively – patiently. This work, a recent addition to the Barber Institute’s collection, is the only painting attributed with certainty to Gérard in the United Kingdom.¹¹ Now largely overlooked, Gérard was one of the most accomplished artists of her time, with a financially successful career that spanned decades of change, turmoil and innovation during the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration of the monarchy. She had been a pupil of and assistant to her famous brother‐in‐law and master of Rococo painting, Jean‐Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). Her style and choice of subjects were also informed by seventeenth‐century Dutch paintings, especially the so‐called fijnschilders (‘fine painters’) such as Gabriel Metsu (1629–1667) and Ter Borch (1617–1681). Some of her exposure to such art came through works on paper; for instance, Fragonard bought 280 prints after Netherlandish painters and 69 drawings by Rembrandt (1606–1669) and his school at the sale of the collection of French painter François Boucher in 1771.¹² Gérard likely appreciated the quiet but weighty psychological power of Rembrandt, seen in his depiction of tender or vulnerable moments, old age and virtues, like faith and patience, as demonstrated in his painting of Anna and the Blind Tobit at the National Gallery.

Many seventeenth‐century Netherlandish paintings play with, and obfuscate, meaning. Genre scenes in particular convey allegorical or moral messages, albeit with ambiguity. The question is how much we should we read into such works. In Gérard’s case, what may be said about her numerous depictions of motherhood and reading women? Many of them seem to idealise relationships between mothers and female companions, suggesting the importance of female sociability and community for successful mothering within bourgeois domesticity.¹³ Here, however, motherhood is pared down to a mother and child together in their home. Contextualising this painting within Gérard’s oeuvre and wider debates in the society of her day, does this image reveal the ‘desperate loneliness’ of modernisation, or show a defiant alternative to the increasingly nuclear‐family model proffered during the period?¹⁴ Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the lack of visible female allies, perhaps this woman is subverting what patriarchy would deem to be her maternal duties: the constant care and entertainment of children. She may have even lost her patience, a virtue associated with and demanded of mothers, or she could be encouraging this quality in her son. By leaving space for such ambiguities, Gérard provides a lesson in both how valuable and difficult patience can be. Being patient can mean holding back. It may require self‐control (which is another Fruit of the Spirit), empathy and recognition of others as separate beings with their own complicated needs and desires.

The book cradled in the mother’s arms encourages further thought. This large volume, containing a tantalising glimpse of an illustration, could be an encyclopaedia, so perhaps she is studying. Or it may be a sentimental novel. The popularity of this genre in France, and indeed all over Europe, coincided with a surge in female readership. Such novels featured romantic plots that encouraged heightened emotional responses and moral judgements. Uncertainty and ambiguity are literary strategies, just as they are in Gérard’s painting. Perhaps the picture and the book it depicts work together as a complex and topical commentary on the multifaceted and contested figure of the ‘new’ bourgeois mother.

We are told that good things come to those who wait with patience. Will the boy be rewarded for his patience when his mother finishes reading? The woman may also find her own recompense, with the reconciliation of her identities: mother, consumer, face of fashion, romantic, scholar and reader. We may also feel the benefits of our own patience with this work of art, and reap the rewards of slow, close looking and suspended judgement. Gérard thus teaches us something about the abiding virtue of patience, through a painting apparently more concerned with the competing identities of the modern mother in post‐Revolutionary France.

Jane Nicol and Flora Kay

This text presents extracts from an informal conversation between Jane Nicol (Associate Professor Adult Nursing at the University of Birmingham, a Registered Nurse, and Nurse in Residence at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts as part of the pioneering programme ‘Barber Health’) and Flora Kay (Learning and Engagement Manager, Barber Institute) which took place at the Barber Institute in May 2022.

Notes