Chess in Art Postscript: Now You See It, Now You

There's a lot of fantastic art on show in London at the moment; so, as ever, your intrepid chess-in-art blogger has been on the prowl for a nice chess pic or two. Topical, in more ways than one, is this little gouache, a recent work by your actual chess playing artist (and jazzer) Nette Robinson; you can snap up the original, or a print, on line, or at the London Chess Classic. 

© Nette Robinson

He bows his head as if to receive the crown. I like the off-centredness; not just the shift to the right and the crop, but the crooked inspection. At the risk of a lèse-majesté: it is typical of King Magnus's sometimes jejune bad-boy awkwardness (see also under G-Star Raw). It is not here but on the board that he displays his real-majesté, and his poise.   

As for chess-art in the galleries, the Royal Academy was where my quest kicked off, not though with high hopes for the art of Australia expo in its principal exhibition space, and I say that with the greatest respect for our faithful readers down under (who clock up a welcome 1% of our page-views). My fears were justified. From the chess-art point of view it was, if I may put it like this: as dry as a dead dingo's donger. If there had been any it must've gone walkabout.

But, strewth, mates, no point in getting as cross as a frog in a sock (another little beaut of a trope from Oz, though this time rather unfortunate in view of what's upstairs at the RA, and it won't endear our antipodean friends to our French readers). Thus, the RA's other exhibition is Daumier, a Vision of Paris. 

It is in the Sackler Wing, and this blog goes there next. Maybe there we'll have richer chess-art pickings; maybe even an old favourite from ejh's Chess in Art sequence of five years ago. 

Absolutely fatuous

I often say that when you're in your forties it becomes impossibly hard to tell the difference between satire and reality. This feeling is not eased by the similarity between

(a) the Edwards vs Paulson contest for the role of President of the English Chess Federation; and
(b) the Marge vs the Monorail episode of The Simpsons.

This is not because of any resemblance Roger Edwards bears to Marge Simpson.

Now I find it hard to know exactly what to say about Andrew Paulson. It is glaringly obvious what is wrong with his candidacy.

Why is it glaringly obvious?

It is glaringly obvious because people who never in their lives have played a competitive game of chess in England do not suddenly wake up one morning and decide that their lives should be dedicated to the transformation of the English Chess Federation. Do they?

Of course they don't. That much is glaringly obvious.

It's like turning up one day, in a country where you have never lived and of which you know nothing, and expecting to be made Prime Minister next day. It's ludicrous, isn't it?

So if you don't already view his candidacy with disbelief and scepticism, then I'm not sure how much more can be usefully said.

Whatever is happening here, it's not about somebody who suddenly had a vision for the transformation of the ECF. If you think it is, then I reckon Lyle Lanely could probably sell you a monorail.

So, what follows is largely for form's sake. We have a candidacy, so let's discuss who the candidate is and what he says. But really, it shouldn't be necessary. This is a crock. You surely know that already.

Mr Rosenbaum's Chess Picture. Part 7: Adonis

We have been rooting around in the nooks and crannies of Anthony Rosenbaum’s chess picture and, as we've gone along, we've noted its public appearances. Here is another one:

From Matthews British Chess (1948) 
Find out who everybody is here.

Now we turn to look at a man whose time has come, in this series anyway: Wordsworth Donisthorpe (1847-1914) - about whom, with the generous help of others, there is much to tell, which for the chessers of the period outside the first rank is perhaps unusual, but he was no shrinking violet and so left a heavy footprint in the historical record, of unusual breadth and depth to boot. He is sitting, and reading, in the bottom right-hand corner. 

A thoroughly researched account of his adventures by Stephen Herbert and Mo Hearn Industry, Liberty, and a Vision (1998) has brought much to light, and in particular does full justice to him as an inventor. It also mentions his chess. For other important chess data see Batgirl's helpful blog here, and there's a mention in Tim Harding's Victorian Chessers book.

With this episode, as with all of them, the usual caveats apply: all misrepresentation, misinterpretation and narrative overexcitability are the responsibility of the author.  

To begin with let's remind ourselves of how Rosenbaum painted him. Here's a man who ploughed his own furrow, and dressed for the part. Not, though, in cloth cap and clogs. He is Wordsworth Donisthorpe à la mode, a dedicated follower of fashion.  

Because I'm Wordsworth it.

He was nicknamed "Adonis" (according to Sergeant) and in Rosenbaum's painting we can see why. It plays to WD's borderline bumptiousness by putting him down-stage left (see the full-colour tableau in earlier episodes via this link), where prima donna-ish he affects disinterest in the proceedings. We can take it as read that, of all Rosenbaum’s mini-portraits, this one was done from life – Donisthorpe would, methinks, have settled for nothing less. Rosenbaum, by the way, is back row, second from right.

Chess-wise he was strong, if not quite in the top flight. Initially he had been a "pawn and two" player, according to an appreciation in The Chess-Monthly of December 1890, but latterly "an amateur of the 1st class", and with Bird's (balding, seated behind the board top-left) commendation. In wider chess matters he was a full-blooded mover and shaker, taking a role in club governance (British Chess Club Vice-President, for example, in 1885), voicing opinions on proper national arrangements (e.g. a revitalised British Chess Association, of which he was a founding Council member the same year), and tournament administration (he was on the Management Committee of the 1883 London International). In the Saturday Review of 1893 he proposed a rule amendment to permit the king to be captured, thereby eliminating stalemate and as a by-product reducing the number of draws (see Batgirl). It has yet to catch on.    

By the time of the unveiling of Rosenbaum’s picture in 1880 Wordsworth (his mother claimed to be the great-niece of the poet) he had already made his mark. Back in 1876 he'd applied for a patent for an “apparatus for taking and exhibiting photographs”- moving ones - and in that year he'd published his first political tract  The Principle of Plutocracy which “ investigates the law of value…and the source of wealth”. This was after his studies at Cambridge where he got a First in spite of indulging his passion for billiards, at which he was “first for the cue” in 1868 - in that respect, the Adonis was a kind of Victorian Steve Davis.  

A kind of 20th Century Wordsworth Donisthorpe. 

WD was called to the Bar in 1875, and “never did anything since” as he put it. He belonged to the “leisured class”, was “a gentlemen of independent means”, and “…devoted his leisure to the solution of various social problems” as The Chess Monthly put it - though it might have said, more accurately, "attempted solution" as his brand of extreme Individualism also hasn't yet carried the day.     

His many talents include his wit and banter - even at the board apparently - which survives in his copious writing. A chess-related example would be his “poetical alphabet” which, said The Chess-Monthly of January 1895, "rightly or wrongly, is attributed to the gifted pen of the genial philosopher Wordsworth Donisthorpe" and for legal reasons was not formally acknowledged as by him, indeed one stanza was retracted for fear of litigation. The "poem" lampoons several of his fellow British Chess Club members, and the three who are in Rosenbaum’s picture are given below. Although you are a contemporary reader, and are not easy to shock, be warned: these extracts are really rather tame. 

On the green-baize skills of the editor of The Chess Monthly, at board two, left of Steinitz: 

"H stands for Hoffer. At chess he gives odds; / But to see him play billiards’ a sight for the gods ;"

On the classically educated, white-haired gent who stands behind the front board:

"W for Woodgate, a walking Thesaurus. / His English is grand – but his Greek tends to bore us ;"

And, as if to put up a smokescreen as to authorship, he writes this about himself:

"D stands for Donisthorpe ; some folks complain / That he oftener wins with his tongue than his brain ;" 

Well, he said it; although he did have genuine chess success, for example when he tied with the Rev MacDonnell (bearded, two left of Bird) in the 1897 London Tournament secondary competition for participants with qualifications in “Art, Science, or Literature”. Professor John Ruskin, vice-president of the BCA, was a patron of the tournament and a selection of his works made up the prize. The cerebral side of Donisthorpe might have been pleased to add the great man’s voluminous tomes to his library as he was a fan of sorts: in "The Claims of Labour" (1880) he concurs with Ruskin's denunciation, delivered "with force and ability", of the destruction of individual craft and skill by industrial machinery. Before we move on here is another example of WD's wit, manifest this time at the board. In this little bit of nonsense the coup de grâce cannot fail to make you smile.

Something else to raise a smile is this wonderful cartoon by Harry Furniss published in Punch in 1885:

   Click on to enlarge

All the usual suspects are there (see Appendix), including Donisthorpe cadging a light, perhaps even the cigar, from W. D. Duffy, over on the left-hand side.  The fellow seated in front of them, reading his own Chess column in The Field, is Leopold Hoffer. Sorry about the blurriness of this crop:  

Donisthorpe is described by G. A. MacDonnell in his commentary on the cartoon as "a pillar of fire...for he is a guide as well as support...of the Grand Chess Divan", and as for Hoffer, MacDonnell injudiciously applied the word "racy" to his writing. Hoffer may not have been amused as it was edited out later (see Appendix for detail).

As for his politics, you get the flavour of Donisthope’s "small state" (as we'd say today), "let-be" (as he said then) persuasion from this statement of aims of his Liberty and Property Defence League, of which he was the President:  

"[The League] opposes all attempts to introduce the State as a competitor or regulator into the various departments of social activity and industry which would otherwise be spontaneously and adequately conducted by private enterprise.” 

That came from a League pamphlet (1888) "against teetotal tyranny" written by Isidor "Mephisto" Gunsberg, no less, opposing the Temperance movement’s “Local Option” proposal for community rights to ban the local sale of alcohol. It is a pretty dry read, and one suspects the hand of Donisthorpe in this attempt to froth it up: why stop at booze - he asks rhetorically - why not also ban “meat [as it is] very generally abused by Englishmen, causing a great national evil [of] indigestion, a far more serious evil, in our opinion, than intemperance”.

Chesser James Mason (in profile, middle row, first left of page break) also brought home the bacon thanks to WD's good offices (per Tim Harding) and, what with his “The Claims of Labour” finding a publisher in Samuel Tinsley & Co. a few years earlier, chess connections were evidently proving mutually advantageous, as we suspected in episode 3.

Gunsberg's 1888 pamphlet, & Donisthorpe's published by 
Tinsley (front row, right of waiter) in 1880.
(apologies for the BL watermark) 

Wordsworth wrote copiously, and lectured and debated far and wide. George Bernard Shaw heard him and commended his courage for venturing into the lions' den down at the Fabians, although GBS took issue with most everything Donsithorpe said, even aiming this low blow: that many League supporters had deserted WD (finding him rather strong meat, perhaps?) so as to set up their own "Individualist Clubs, which, by a curious freak of evolution, turned into chess clubs..."   

His thinking and interests evolved from political economy to encompass social philosophy and we find him as the President of the Legitimation League in the 1890s. It/he argued, in respect of  family life, that the status of illegitimacy visited on children born out of wedlock was a misconceived notion - as you might say - and was unacceptable. Not that he was advocating anything other than monogamy, married or otherwise: it was "the highest and best state of sexual relationship". Yet he was reluctant to condemn multiple partnering ("let-be!"). "Perhaps the epicure is right in approving oysters and chablis..."  - WD's lubricious trope for monogamy - but "...it may be that the coster really prefers whelks and porter, and it would be quixotic to reprove him for indulging his 'low' and 'beastly' appetite...". Chew on that.

"What's for luncheon?"
The Adonis around 1910. 

It was the challenge of capturing, and then projecting, a moving image that had occupied him (till the money ran out), and together with his cousin William Carr Crofts he built the Kinesigraph.  William's brother was Royal Academician Ernest Crofts who specialised in military subjects – Civil War scenes, battles versus the French, and the like. He gave us another painting of the Adonis strutting his stuff, this time modelling a gay Hussar. 

The Advance Guard.
Ernest Crofts RA (1847-1911)
Image from the Witts Library.
"Crofts grafi bel Kanbide men prelam" as Donisthorpe might have said. 

But it was with cousin William that (sometime in, or close to, 1890) Donisthorpe set up their Kinesigraph...

A recent reconstruction
 of Donisthorpe and Crofts' Kinesigraph of 1889/90. 

...in a vacant office at 1, Northumberland Avenue overlooking Trafalgar Square and recorded the passing traffic - then the benchmark test of a successful moving image. Remarkably the film survives – or at least ten frames of it does: and you can see it here (in the first three seconds of this clip, before the open-top bus arrives).   

Stephen Herbert conjectures that there may have been, in part, a hidden agenda in photographing this particular scene – traditionally the site, in the heart of London less than a mile from Parliament, where freedom of speech and expression is exercised en masse in demonstrations and assemblies. Donisthorpe might have intended to use it in his lectures to show the very place where ordinary decent citizens found that their right freely to walk the pavement, and go about their daily business, monstrously trampled by whelk-chomping trade unionists led by John Burns and other bolshie Scots. WD's collaborator, W. C. Crofts, had written a broadside against the "Socialism of the Street in England" in 1888. The reality was however (according to Mr Herbert) that projection proved even more problematic than the initial recording. Raising funds for further development, even with Sir George Newnes' assistance, proved too much of a challenge.

That's Sir George Newnes who made an appearance in episode 5. He was, for 20 years in total, the Liberal M.P., for Newmarket and, later, Swansea; chair of both the British and City of London Chess Clubs; "reportedly the best chess player in the House of Commons" (according to G. A. MacDonnell); and publisher, from 1881, of the popular weekly, jauntily titled "Tit-Bits", from which he made his fortune.

Tit-Bits in 1906, offering a cure for the abuse of meat.  

Just a couple of further examples of Donisthorpe's active mind always at work, demonstrating an unstinting zeal to smooth the inner rumblings of the body politic.  He devised a new language (Esperanto-style) based on Latin: "Uropa", for which he wrote an instructional exposition, the introduction to which betrays a little, rather atypical, self-doubt. 

"All are requested to read through the following chapters [that's all 28 of them - MS], without mental protest [his emphasis - MS] till the end is reached. Then, but not before, let them pour forth their pent-up fury over its apparent shortcomings and defects." 

Look again at that example of "Uropa" in the caption to the gay Hussar above, though it is not a phrase which, in translation, has the quotidian utility of  "What's for luncheon?". "Crofts grafi bel Kanbidem men Waterloo prelam" in Uropa-speak translates, so Donisthorpe assures us, as "Crofts paints a fine canvas representing the Battle of Waterloo". Uropa didn't catch on, either.

Nor, as a lubricant to free trade, did his proposed new system of weights and measures. Though actually that's only half right, as we (here in the UK) are moving, if only half-heartedly, towards a universal decimal base such as he advocated. Perhaps, for those times, Donisthorpe made a tactical mistake in proposing a system that was associated with things French, something his novel nomenclature based on cod Olde English didn't quite disguise. After "Jot" (that's a millimetre), he has "Quil" and "Hand", but then "Mete", which was a bit of a giveaway. In money matters our man did, however, catch the eye of H.G.Wells, who was minded to adopt WD's "Lion" as the principal denomination in the decimal currency of his Wellsian Utopia.  

Donisthorpe's final adventure was a kind of Eight Men in a Boat cruise around the Mediterranean with Newnes and sundry other chaps. It was written up as "Down The Stream of Civilization", and even has a literary reference chess game in the dialogue on the first page: "...looking up from the chess-board, on which he was struggling with a rather nasty attack..." ("Then give him some Beecham's", they cried?). Here he is (on our left), aka "Jus - a Literary Failure", waiting to splice the mainbrace with some fellow hearties. Newnes, "The Commodore", is on the far right, and it was he who published the yarn in 1898.

Wordsworth Donisthorpe. Larger than life. You couldn't make him up, and he is a natural for dramatisation on stage or screen. Stephen Herbert has done just that with a performance, music and film production at the Museum of Moving Image, and at the British Silents Festival in Nottingham. My own fantasy - recently alluded to in the blogosphere by a certain lady - is for a theatre piece in which Wordsworth, wit, chesser, politico, and undoubted charmer, meets the admirable Louise Matilda Fagan, and regards it as his masculine obligation to flirt (their age difference being just three years). We encountered her in episode 4, you will recall. She was a Fabian, and a more than decent player. Her father is in the bottom left-hand corner.

Admittedly Louise was abroad (Irish husband serving in India) for some of the time, but when in London visiting papa and her brother, and taking time off from campaigning for women's rights etc, don’t you think Wordsworth would have manoeuvred so as to engage her in a game? This would have been his pretext to impress her with his badinage and witty repartee, providing the dialogue for my projected comedy of manners. He would gambit a libertarian tease. She would rebuff him with suffragette ease. All in Donisthorpian rhyming couplets. 

So, Wordsworth Donisthorpe: what a character, who, in spite of his shortcomings (i.e. his politics IMHO), adds colour to the assembly of Rosenbaum's worthy gents. Possessed of "intellect and energy" - as Stephen Herbert puts it - who developed "a most powerful concept, that of reproducing filmed movement...which, when finally realised by others would revolutionise communications throughout the twentieth century." If we add to this his contibutions in those other fields of enquiry touched on above we see an exceptionally fertile brain at work, even if his efforts are now largely forgotten today.      

Next week, for the conclusion of this series, we meet Anthony Rosenbaum; the artist himself.                        

Acknowledgments etc

Published by the The Projection Box, but now out of print.

Read the full "poetical alphabet" in Winter's Chess Note 5662 and in A. M. Fox's reminiscences of the British Chess Club in BCM February 1941. 

Thanks again to Stephen Herbert and Mo Hearns. Their most recent research shows that WD had applied for a patent as early as 1868  when he was still  at Cambridge. See here.
And thanks, yet again, to Paul Timson and Richard James for their help; and also to Tim Harding's Eminent Victorian Chess Players (2012) for Donisthorpe related info.
G.B.Shaw (1889)  Mr Donisthorpe's Individualism 
H. G. Wells (1905)  A Modern Utopia  
Donisthorpe's many writings are easily Googled, and Batgirl lists them, too. He has an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

See all episodes, previous and subsequent, in this Rosenbaum series via our History Index. 

Appendix follows after the jump   

Mr. Rosenbaum's Chess Picture. Part 6: Close Up

In this episode of the series we are going to pick over the detail in Rosenbaum's picture, and have a look at it as a piece of art.

                ©National Portrait Gallery 
       Click to enlarge

But before we do, a quick mention of another spot of the picture in the chess press...

From R.D.Keene. Chess: An Illustrated History (1990)
pub Phaidon

...which is a reproduction of a photo, now on display at Simpson's (or it was the last time I looked), of the original painting, which itself had been on show there over 130 years before.

In earlier posts we noticed some of the references that the artist had wittily insinuated into the composition, particularly on the back wall. It was the only one that Rosenbaum had at his disposal, and he took full advantage of it.

To recap a bit, there are the barely discernable roundels honouring chess heroes whose deaths antedate the picture. They were listed, slightly inaccurately, by The Chess-Monthly, but notice that the most recently demised, Evans (in 1872) and Staunton (in 1874), are added at the extremes left and right respectively, as if to convey that they had, subsequent to the others, just been installed. Then there are the two images - "paintings" note, as if to accord them special celebrity - of Paul Morphy (not yet dead), with a chess set, and Adolf Anderssen (died 1879), with a trophy: nice details within the details.

Lower down there are the “placards with the conventional club notices and comical inscriptions” as The Chess Monthly put it. They are more or less legible when you are up close to the painting. Going from left to right there is a notice referring to the City of London Chess Club; then something very faint and barely noticeable followed by a group of three on green baize (all unclear); next to Gumpel we find Mephisto as discussed in episode 3; then a notice for St. George's CC; finally, just behind Rosenbaum, there is an In Memoriam requiem for the ill-fated West End Chess Club with a faint illustration, possibly of two characters seated at a chess board.   

The clock, top dead centre in front of the mirror, tells us the time of day: it is a most civilised five o’clock in the afternoon - that’s real time, in the real world, where and when the factory whistle signals the end of the shift or, as is more likely in polite company, the bell tinkles and tea, or something stronger, is served. Compare this with the other clock, the one at the front on the table by the ongoing chess game...

...which says, not five o’clock, but three; an anomaly that resolves when we remember that these gents, intent on their game, are in a chess world, not the real world and, as all chessers know, chess time flies at its own tempo. This clock marks the hour of the telegraphic transmission of the move, the one that the footman is now presenting to the Master of Ceremonies. Here in the Universal Chess Club it is not tea-time, it is move-time and the chess clock will tick-tock at its own pace till the last move is made, and the game is done.

Now transported to the front table you can inspect the other paraphernalia that Rosenbaum has put there. Speaking art-wise you could call this arrangement a pretty competent still life, though purists may prefer to see the entire front page of The Field (in which Hoffer was running a chess column). The other paper could be showing a chess problem (or a crossword, if non-chessers would prefer). We know about position on the board from episode 3, but what about that trophy? Looks familiar?   

Yes, it was recently seen stealing the show from Streatham and Brixton Chess Club member Andrew Stone after Middlesex’s victory in the Inter-Counties Championship (that's right: Streatham isn't in Middlesex). It is the same Löwenthal Cup (purchased from a surplus in his Testimonial Fund, and after various changes of hands bought by the BCF in, or shortly after, 1922) as sits on the table at the front of Mr Rosenbaum’s chess painting.  Here is the trophy in all its gilded magnificence.

Pic thanks to Steve Mann
 at Yorkshire Chess History 

Löwenthal himself is in Rosenbaum's painting (between Bird and MacDonnell), even though he died in 1876 (Anomaly Alert! How then could he appear along with a cup purchased after his death?).  The empty chairs are odd, when so many of the gents are made to stand, but maybe Rosenbaum was leaving room for a few more so as to get his tally nearer to a round 50 or, running with the Gunsberg gag, Mr R has reserved him a seat for when he returns from Mephisto duties.

Over to the right is the nicely-painted and well-stocked drinks tray (mentioned by The Chess-Monthly, see episode 2) which has also caught Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s attention (he's in the light suit, and we will come back to him in another post, promise). 

You'll recall, from episode 1, that The Chess Monthly spoke about Rosenbaum's difficulties of getting his subject matter...i.e. "of getting the necessary sittings, the photographs, or even sight of the originals he wished to paint " [my emphasis-MS]...implying that he relied on the copying of photographs, or illustrations in the press, to get the job done. To catch him at it - copying borrowed portraits - just look at this: from a picture-weekly of the time...

From the Daily Graphic December 29 1875
(via Chess Archeology )

  ...and here you will recognise some familiar Rosenbaum faces. He has used the seated figures of MacDonnell, Löwenthal and Bird (left) around his Board 1; and Horwitz and Murton (sitting right) at Board 2. Standing are Messrs. Gastineau and Rabbeth - unnamed (as are Lowenthal and Murton) by the Daily Graphic -  but recognisable from Rosenbaum. 

Now for a bit of retrograde analysis. With a bit of cutting and pasting from the Rosenbaum portraits here is my reconstruction of  The Graphic image above:

Pretty close, apart from some small spacing issues and the orientation of Gastineau to make him peer at us rather than the board. Clearly Rosenbaum copied The Graphic or, perhaps more likely, had access to the same material as did the magazine. There may well be more of Rosenbaum's sources in the popular graphic or illustrated press (chess or otherwise), but I haven't stumbled on them yet. That would have to include the source for Henry Bird above, because if you put the Rosenbaum and Daily Graphic images side by side (as below) you can see that Mr R must have used some other original; in fact he has flattered Mr B a touch, given him a haircut, and maybe knocked a few years off him. He has also tried to scale the head more harmoniously to the body - not completely successfully -  because The Graphic image looks unnaturally contrived (perhaps with a head "pasted" on to the wrong shoulders).    

Let’s now go back to the five o’clock clock, or more precisely the mantelpiece upon which it sits. This detail opens the door to the wider view. It has an important role in the organisation of the painting as it is the horizon line for its governing perspective scheme, as you can see from the diagram below. All the receding parallels on view, from the three chess boards for example, meet there. In the conventions of perspective they are supposed to meet at "infinity".    

This high horizon line conveys the impression of a high view point for the spectator (you and me). But because the mantelpiece is so close, and not at the "infinity" point somewhere north of Watford, we get the impression of a sloping floor; or of tiers (as around an intimate tea-dance salon, or a modern-day football stadium). It looks like one of those school photos with rank of uniformed pupils piled one on top of another. But, in the one clear stretch of floor that we can see (running up to Bird and friends on board one) it is flat and continuous.

If Rosenbaum's intention was to help us see all the portraits clearly, even in the back row, we'd have to say that he pretty much pulled it off, even if he has, willy nilly, distorted the perspective. Compare it to the painting below where, with pukka perspective, the floor is obviously level and every one stands on it...

George Elgar Hicks
Dividend Day at the Bank of England (1859)
Bank of England Collection

... but you can't make out the faces at the back, even though, very cleverly, Hicks has enabled us to glimpse all 30-odd of his characters. Incidentally, it's likely that Dividend Day would have been known to, and admired by, the investment-savvy gents of the Universal Chess Club as it was in the RA Summer Exhibition of 1859. Some of them might even have witnessed such a scene first-hand when down at the Bank collecting their own wind-falls.

So, we are at a high vantage point vis a vis Rosenbaum's gents; and we are looking down on that game at the front. But we see the figures, in all the rows including the first, as if we are at the same eye level - and that creates problems for the look of his composition. This inconsistency arises because, Rosenbaum was either painting in portraits posed from real life, or (as we have seen above, and this is crucial to his method, and his achievement) "pasting in" copies of images from photographs and the press; and of course these would all have been originated at eye level before they were added to the full tableau. Given the technical difficulties of the task Rosenbaum set himself we can forgive that the relative sizes of the sitting and the standing figures also sometimes get out of kilter (e.g the group around Donisthorpe).

For the record let's mention one other intriguing aspect. How big was the picture, and could it have been trimmed at some time in its life? At its unveiling The Chess Monthly said it was "6ft. by 4ft. including frame". Today the NPG says it is "32 in. x 60 in." - which is 5ft. by 2ft. 8 in. excluding frame. Which means that, when unveiled in 1880, the frame could have been a generous 6 inches all around: not impossible, but rather ostentatious. R.N.Coles, when he saw it in 1980, expressed surprise that the picture, by then more modestly framed (if at all), wasn't bigger. Perhaps, though, he mistakenly had in mind The Field's dimensions as being the canvas size.

But could it have been reduced by a foot or so? At the bottom Donisthorpe is cut off at the ankle; and along the top we lose the edges of the Morphy and Anderssen picture frames. Could there have been some scissoring along the way?

A couple of feet less than expected?

Well, the NPG's own condition report (in its Archive) doesn't mention it. Maybe if they ever unscrew it from the wall at Bodelwyddan Castle they will have a look again. Possibly Hoffer et al exaggerated the dimensions for effect. Given the size of his ambition, Rosenbaum may simply have miscalculated what he could get in and then ran out of space, denying us the opportunity to admire Donisthorpe's taste in shoes.  

It is, though, a monumental feat of organisation and planning, fraught with compositional challenges, at the mercy of the subject matter that came to hand, and vulnerable to unforeseen eventualities - such as the premature demise of a personnage already placed in position: Löwenthal for instance. Once you know he had already passed on it is difficult to expunge the thought that his cadaver remains upright only because of the discreet connivance of Mr Gastineau behind.

Overall, you have to admire Rosenbaum's vision, and perseverance to see it through, and you could say that Rosenbaum's 50-up was in the grand manner of action-packed Victorian crowd-scene painting such as  Frith's Railway Station of 1862 which has 60-ish and a dog, and another Hicks: The General Post Office - 1 minute to 6 with 40-ish (and another dog) of 1860. Like Frith and Hicks, AR attempted to imbue his tableau with incident and interplay, however downbeat and low-key a chess séance would be. Hicks incidentally earned £1700 per annum at the height of his career, which puts into context Rosenbaum's £200 for the several years' on-off labour over his chess painting.

Perhaps (wild hypothesis warning) Rosenbaum was hoping also to get his magnum opus selected for the RA Summer Exhibition, to catch the eye of the art-viewing (and purchasing) public and thus to make his artistic reputation. Perhaps he was persuaded by his chess chums to let them buy it instead, so as to keep it in the family. Perhaps, also, they could see what he couldn't: that it would be savaged by the art critics of the day.

The NGA Archive contains an expert's comment a hundred years or so later: that Rosenbaum's chess picture  is of worth as an historical document rather than as a work of art. Perhaps we should settle for that, and value it for giving us a unique record of the chess characters of the time, even if Rosenbaum's own self-portrait (leaving aside all the others) should not to be taken at face value - as we will see when look at the man himself in the last episode.

What a painting!

Next week another character takes the limelight; someone who would have basked in it.

Two episodes more to go. See all episodes in the series via our History Index

Streatham Strolls In The Country Continued

We started this Streatham Stroll In The Country last week (there were three Strolls before that: 1, 2 and 3). Now it is Streatham Strolls In The Country Continued.

We are still on the train from Victoria, heading south to a destination further down the post. To pass the time en route we have been discussing the chessic inclinations of the four subjects picked on by Lytton Strachey for his radical biographical suite Eminent Victorians (which Tim Harding elaborated on as the title for his “Eminent Victorian Chess Players”) in the hope that we might find some Eminent Victorians Who Also Played A Bit Of Chess.

We’d better get on with it as we’ll arriving shortly, and will then be off on a country ramble.

We've dealt with one of Strachey’s victims: Cardinal Manning. The Cardinal elicited a “he schemed like a chess player” jibe from his passed-over critics in the Catholic Church, but there was no evidence that he actually played. Maybe we’ll have more luck with the others: General Gordon of Khartoum, Florence Nightingale, and Dr Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby school, with whom we will start today.

The Doctor produced copious correspondence, and copious though it may be only two chess references does it yield. The first is in a letter of February 1824, four years before Arnold's fateful appointment as Headmaster of the prestigious public school Rugby. He says:

"..My pupils all come up into the drawing-room a little before tea, and stay for some time, some reading, others talking, playing chess or backgammon, looking at pictures, &c. – a great improvement if it lasts;…"

So here he is, at the age of 32, supervising some pupil down-time in an obscure minor public school, and it seems improbable, wouldn't you agree, that someone of Dr Arnold’s driven conscientiousness would put himself in a position where he would be unable correct his pupils’ halting efforts at the board, and (ahem) beat them should the need arise. But nevertheless, if Dr. Arnold was able to play, we’ve not caught him actually pushing a pawn.

Six years later the challenge of running Rugby fires him up, and in this letter his Messianic world view frames his vision:

"..the work here is more and more engrossing continually; but I like it better and better; it has all the interest of a great game of chess with living creatures for pawns and pieces, and your adversary, in plain English, the Devil; truly he plays a very tough game, and is very hard to beat, if I ever do beat him. It is quite surprising to see the wickedness of young boys; or would be surprising if I had had not had my own school experience and a good deal since to enlighten me. "

This is the Chess Metaphor writ large and served up with a helping of fire and brimstone. It is chess as morality play: Black versus White; Good against Evil; Dr. Arnold and the Devil contesting the souls of boys. But could he actually play? Alas, again the evidence is but slim and circumstantial.

And Gordon of Khartoum? In brief, there was no sign (from my quick inspection) in his own writings that the General found the time, or had the inclination, to chess, what with his religious fugues, scribbling frenzies, and brandy 'n soda befuddlements. But what about Wilfrid Scawen Blunt who wrote a memoir in 1911, Gordon at Khartoum ? Maybe he could help.

Blunt was a poet (a minor talent, it is said) and a writer, with the means at his disposal to indulge his interests in the fine arts, travel, anti-imperialist politics (for Egyptian autonomy and Irish independence), thorough-bred horses, and (energetic chap) the ladies. His idealism drove his activism – he enjoyed a brief spell in gaol for his Irish adventures - just like his 20th Century namesake Anthony Blunt (also a connoisseur of the arts, and a spy) who, according to his biographer, was related to Wilfrid.

Blunt, W. (1840-1922), his memoir, and Blunt, A. (1907-1983)

In order to stop British meddling in Egypt, Blunt W. lobbied the sinister sounding “Fourth Party” (the Tories' very own enemy within), one of whom was Lord Randolph Churchill MP, father of Winston, chess player and habitué of Simpson’s. Blunt wrote:

"…I met him to discuss the situation at some rooms in the Strand where a chess tournament was going on. Chess was one of his few hobbies and he asked me to meet him there…”

Well! Simpson’s as a den of intrigue and machination: very House of Cards, and apart from its demise as a "chess resort" it seems that nothing much has changed.

Sadly this takes us no further forward in the matter of General Gordon and chess, but it has lead us to Lord Randolph Churchill MP (1849 - 1895) who indeed did play; and in fact a quite a bit more than a bit: he was sometime vice-president of the British Chess Association.

Here is a link to a casual game he lost to Steinitz. So, instead of General Gordon, Lord Randolph Churchill MP will do very well as an Eminent Victorian Who Really Could Play Chess.

And talking of MPs, let’s turn to the final EV, Miss Florence Nightingale. Strachey relates how she dragged the blustering British military establishment out of the Stone Age to provide decent care and treatment for its wounded and battle-scarred soldiers - in her later years from the redoubt of a darkened room. She never married, though she wasn't without her suitors; and that included a proposal of marriage when she was 20, in 1840, from Marmaduke Wyvill (1815-1896), later to become both an MP (in 1847) and, according to Staunton, "one of the finest players in England". He was runner up to Anderssen in the 1851 London Tournament, and had a pawn formation named after him (pawns on c3, c4 and d4 or 5, and no b pawn - by coincidence it turns up in the Steinitz-Churchill game linked above). Altogether remarkable.

If at 20 Florence had accepted him, and knew the moves, we might have got what we were looking for. As it was she declined, went into nursing, and the rest is history. And that, I'm afraid to say, is the closest we can get any of the four EVs to a proper chess player.

Right. We’ve arrived. Here we are in Lewes. No time to hang about. It’s a three to four mile stroll following The Saturday Walkers Club Walk # 24: Lewes to Saltdean, and this is the route.

When we get to Rodmell we'll visit Monk’s House which Leonard and Virginia Woolf, two leading lights in the tangled Bloomsbury Group, used as their country retreat from 1911 to 1969.

And of course Lytton Strachey, a fully paid-up Bloomsberry, often came to stay. Rodmell is now owned by the National Trust, and it has a delightful garden looking out over the South Downs.

In the garden there is a summer house where Leonard installed a writing desk.

The National Trust uses it to display old photographs of eminent visitors taken at the time. Let's take a look.Yes, that's a picture showing Lytton Strachey playing chess - with his sister Marjorie in 1931:

And so we come, at last, to a conclusion: although there is next to no hard evidence that any of Lytton Strachey’s four eminent Victorians played chess, he could himself; and so it is he who merits the claim of Eminent Victorian Who Could Also Play A Bit Of Chess. Well, Eminent Edwardian anyway.

Let's give him a proper place in chess history and go back and add him to Streatham Strolls 2, because Lytton Strachey, biographer and critic, was born, on March 1st 1880, in Stowell House, 46, Clapham Common South Side (still standing in 1947, but now gone).

Next time: Streatham Strolls East.

Acknowledgements and sources

Details of Tim Harding's EVCP and Strachey's EV are in earlier Strolls.

Flo Nightingale from here; Cardinal Manning from here; General Gordon from here; Dr Arnold from here.

Dr. Arnold Correspondence is downloadable here.
Wilfrid Blunt from here; his Gordon at Khartoum (1911) is online here; Anthony Blunt from here; See Miranda Carter Anthony Blunt, His Lives, MacMillan (2001) for the "Blunts are related" point; Randolph Churchill pic is from Wikipedia. There is more on his chess here. O.C.Müller also reminisces, in BCM of 1932, about Churchill and other politicos in Simpson's Divan.

The proposal story is given by Mark Bostridge in Florence Nightingale The Woman and Her Legend ( (Penguin Group 2008). Wyvil (and her other romantic interests) is in a display at the Florence Nightingale Museum (with thanks to Natalie Cohen, Collections Assistant, for her help). I picked the story up initially from here.

See Kmoch on the Wyvill formation. 'Wyvill is the finest' is given by Keene and Coles in their 1975 book on Staunton, but not referenced.

Monks House is from Rodmell village; the garden is from here ; summer house from here; Lytton and Marjorie playing chess from here.

Streatham Strolls 1

Streatham Strolls 2
Streatham Strolls 3

Streatham Strolls in the Country