The biggest annual art show in the world opened a few weeks ago. It has been mounted in most of our homes and workplaces, and consists of small reproduction prints sent in by friends, clients and suppliers, signed not by the artists but by the senders themselves. Looked at like this, the phenomenon of the Christmas card would appear to present an opportunity to find out what types of design, and what artists, delight the eyes of the nation.
Henry Cole, inventor of the Christmas card, would be pleased. A Victorian public servant, publisher and writer, he became a leading light of the Great Exhibition, and then founding director of the South Kensington Museum, forerunner of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Some years before this, in 1843, Cole decided he was too busy to follow the practice of writing personal greetings to his friends, so he commissioned painter John Callcott Horsley to design a one-size-fits-all greetings card. It was printed in such a quantity that the surplus was put on sale at a shilling apiece.
The design was well suited to its time, 1843 was also the year of A Christmas Carol and Horsley’s work looks almost like a spin-off from Dickens’s story. Divided into three panels separated by ivy-wreathed posts, the central picture is Cole and his family around the Yuletide dinner table, raising a glass in a toast to the viewer, with the seasonal greeting written on a cloth draped below them. On each side, two wings show Christian works in progress: clothing the naked on the one hand, feeding the hungry on the other.
This altarpiece-like arrangement, with its biblical component, cleverly implies the sacred nature of the feast, although it did not particularly please religious fundamentalists at the time. Their protests against the presence of alcohol in Horsley’s family picture eventually caused Cole to withdraw the card from sale.
Yet it is appropriate that he should have instigated the Christmas card. He was a passionate advocate of the arts as a civilising force, and his lifelong pursuit was the cultural improvement of the masses through free public galleries and affordable reproduction. The relevance of his mission to the Christmas card market of today is obvious. At this time of year a person might make a decent comparative study of Madonna and Child iconography, 17th-century Dutch variations on winter skating, or the development of stained glass.
The best fine art cards are inevitably produced by the big art galleries. This year the palm goes to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge for a range based on their amazing current exhibition of illuminated manuscripts. But what about the routine charity cards that make up the bulk of the offering each year? A visit to the church-porch’s temporary card-shop reveals a slew of mediocre snowy landscapes, among which “La Neige à Louveciennes” (for the 1959 Group of Charities) by the English impressionist Alfred Sisley is an outstanding exception – a dazzling composition of whites by an artist cruelly overshadowed by Monet and Renoir.
In addition to this card, anyone would be delighted, or at least intrigued, to receive the almost surreal “Madonna of the Fruits of the Earth”, sold for the NSPCC, the National Society for Deaf Children and other charities. Painted in 1917 by Frank Cadogan Cowper, the last of the Pre-Raphaelites and a favourite artist of Evelyn Waugh, it shows the virgin seated with the new-born child on her knee and a wholly unorthodox deep scarlet cloak draped like a tent around her. The high chair-back, decorated in rich brocaded chinoiserie, looks wholly incongruous beside the white faced, very British sheep whose huge heads nuzzle the wattled fence separating her from the landscape beyond.
Another card of the same subject, but in a completely different register, is Dutchman Quentin Metsys’s great “Madonna Standing with Child and Angels”, a Courtauld Gallery painting from about 1505, which is also available as a card from the Medici Society. Apart from the delicacy of its design and the extraordinary blue of Mary’s gown, this is the most sensual display of just-unplaited thigh-length hair you are likely to see.
I have seen perhaps two dozen other good and interesting cards this year. But an overall view of the average Christmas mantelpiece cannot be said to have met Henry Cole’s target of universal art appreciation. The cards are for the most part shoddy designs, cliché-ridden and embarrassing to the imagination. When a fine art image is used, it is done with such contempt that, as often as not, the artist, the whereabouts of the original and its date are not divulged.
And even these borrowings from the likes of Giotto, Leonardo or Burne-Jones are in short supply compared with generic images by bad or boring artists. The dreary conclusion is that most of the cards we send and receive each year are pap – muzak for the eyes. We should be able to do better.
