WHERE GOREY GOT HIS TALENT
(Another teaser for _Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey_ (pre-order now at https://books.google.com/books?id=hx6...).
“My great-grandmother,” Edward Gorey told Alexander Theroux in Theroux’s memoir of their friendship, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, “is the single person, I guess, from whom I inherited my talent. Or”—here, he inserts one of his trademark sighs of melodramatic despair—“whatever you want to call it.”
When poor health forced her husband to retire from his law practice, Helen Amelia St. John Garvey (1834-1907)—from whom Edward St. John Gorey got his middle name—kept food on the table by designing Christmas cards for the Chicago publishing house A.C. McClurg & Co. She had shown evidence of artistic talent early on: the 1849 Transactions of the N.Y. State Agricultural Society mention an award given to “Miss Helen A. St. John, 13 years old,” of Fabius, in Onondaga county, for a “painting in India ink,” which the judges deemed “very fine.”
It was, presumably, just such a “small botanical study” that hung near the desk where Gorey worked at his cousins’ summer house in Barnstable, Cape Cod. In a 1968 letter to the writer Peter F. Neumeyer, with whom he was working on a series of series of children’s books, Gorey wrote,
"I am deriving sustenance of a sort from looking at the sort of thing I could never manage at all, a small botanical study of morning glories, individual blooms, buds, leaves, tendrils in watercolours done by my great-grandmother, which hangs on the wall beside my desk. ... She supported an invalid husband and their child] for I have no idea how long by painting mottoes and greeting cards."
Most of Helen Amelia St. John Garvey’s watercolors--some of which still hang in the big Barnstable house--are “botanical studies” of the sort Gorey mentions, delicately wrought close-ups of flowers and vines characterized, yes, by Victorian sentimentality but also by a scrupulous attention to naturalistic accuracy and a subtle, expressive way with color. Imagine Beatrix Potter—the Beatrix Potter who rendered mosses, lichens, and fungi with a scientific eye—with a shakier grasp on draftsmanship. Helen Amelia’s anatomy is a littly iffy—the Dutch girl in wooden shoes and traditional cap is either slouching or suffering from scoliosis—and her landscapes are indifferently handled: the waders dotting the shoreline in a dashed-off beach scene are little more than stick figures; the perspective in her Wordsworthian ruin is all askew.
But her “mottoes,” some of which decorate the Georgia home of Gorey’s cousin Joyce LaMar (née Joyce Garvey, daughter of Gorey’s aunt on his mother’s side, Ruth Cranston Garvey), are something else altogether: Victorian design at its most delirious, a promiscuous jumble of unrelated typefaces and capricious capitalizations, with flowers and ferns entwining the uppercase letters.
In one, the hand-painted phrase “He giveth His beloved Sleep” (Psalm 127:2) floats against a white background. Gilded and richly ornamented with dots and curlicues, the gothic capital “H”’s look like escapees from an illuminated medieval manuscript; violets and peonies clamber up them, like creepers writhing around the pillar-stumps of some tumbledown castle. The “S” in “Sleep” is a topiary “S,” made out of snow-white blossoms and electric-blue leaves; “giveth” and “beloved” are fashioned from branches coaxed into letter shapes, sprigs tufting their tops.
If we’re looking for premonitions of the Goreyesque in Helen Amelia’s gift-card art, we can make them out, if we squint hard enough, in her spiderweb-fine line, her muted palette, maybe even in a pair of disquieting—oh, all right, very slightly disquieting—landscapes: country fields, desolate in the slanting twilight, empty but for some anthropomorphic haystacks (or mounds of cornhusks or whatever they are) marching toward us in a vaguely menacing way.
But the most obvious point of contact between Helen Amelia’s watercolors and Gorey’s work is her elaborate script: one of the distinctive characteristics of Gorey’s art, established during his time as a book-jacket designer and illustrator at Anchor Books in the 1950s, is his hand-lettered typography, from book titles to the text in his little books.
“My great-grandmother,” Edward Gorey told Alexander Theroux in Theroux’s memoir of their friendship, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, “is the single person, I guess, from whom I inherited my talent. Or”—here, he inserts one of his trademark sighs of melodramatic despair—“whatever you want to call it.”
When poor health forced her husband to retire from his law practice, Helen Amelia St. John Garvey (1834-1907)—from whom Edward St. John Gorey got his middle name—kept food on the table by designing Christmas cards for the Chicago publishing house A.C. McClurg & Co. She had shown evidence of artistic talent early on: the 1849 Transactions of the N.Y. State Agricultural Society mention an award given to “Miss Helen A. St. John, 13 years old,” of Fabius, in Onondaga county, for a “painting in India ink,” which the judges deemed “very fine.”
It was, presumably, just such a “small botanical study” that hung near the desk where Gorey worked at his cousins’ summer house in Barnstable, Cape Cod. In a 1968 letter to the writer Peter F. Neumeyer, with whom he was working on a series of series of children’s books, Gorey wrote,
"I am deriving sustenance of a sort from looking at the sort of thing I could never manage at all, a small botanical study of morning glories, individual blooms, buds, leaves, tendrils in watercolours done by my great-grandmother, which hangs on the wall beside my desk. ... She supported an invalid husband and their child] for I have no idea how long by painting mottoes and greeting cards."
Most of Helen Amelia St. John Garvey’s watercolors--some of which still hang in the big Barnstable house--are “botanical studies” of the sort Gorey mentions, delicately wrought close-ups of flowers and vines characterized, yes, by Victorian sentimentality but also by a scrupulous attention to naturalistic accuracy and a subtle, expressive way with color. Imagine Beatrix Potter—the Beatrix Potter who rendered mosses, lichens, and fungi with a scientific eye—with a shakier grasp on draftsmanship. Helen Amelia’s anatomy is a littly iffy—the Dutch girl in wooden shoes and traditional cap is either slouching or suffering from scoliosis—and her landscapes are indifferently handled: the waders dotting the shoreline in a dashed-off beach scene are little more than stick figures; the perspective in her Wordsworthian ruin is all askew.
But her “mottoes,” some of which decorate the Georgia home of Gorey’s cousin Joyce LaMar (née Joyce Garvey, daughter of Gorey’s aunt on his mother’s side, Ruth Cranston Garvey), are something else altogether: Victorian design at its most delirious, a promiscuous jumble of unrelated typefaces and capricious capitalizations, with flowers and ferns entwining the uppercase letters.
In one, the hand-painted phrase “He giveth His beloved Sleep” (Psalm 127:2) floats against a white background. Gilded and richly ornamented with dots and curlicues, the gothic capital “H”’s look like escapees from an illuminated medieval manuscript; violets and peonies clamber up them, like creepers writhing around the pillar-stumps of some tumbledown castle. The “S” in “Sleep” is a topiary “S,” made out of snow-white blossoms and electric-blue leaves; “giveth” and “beloved” are fashioned from branches coaxed into letter shapes, sprigs tufting their tops.
If we’re looking for premonitions of the Goreyesque in Helen Amelia’s gift-card art, we can make them out, if we squint hard enough, in her spiderweb-fine line, her muted palette, maybe even in a pair of disquieting—oh, all right, very slightly disquieting—landscapes: country fields, desolate in the slanting twilight, empty but for some anthropomorphic haystacks (or mounds of cornhusks or whatever they are) marching toward us in a vaguely menacing way.
But the most obvious point of contact between Helen Amelia’s watercolors and Gorey’s work is her elaborate script: one of the distinctive characteristics of Gorey’s art, established during his time as a book-jacket designer and illustrator at Anchor Books in the 1950s, is his hand-lettered typography, from book titles to the text in his little books.
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