Saint Thomas Ken by Michel Lafleur (2017) 6" x 8", oils on toile
Thomas Ken (1637-1711), though a
somewhat obscure English ecclesiastic, is nonetheless a household name in certain
obscure American households, and one particularly well known to me: viz, my own. A saintly
character who became the Bishop of Bath and Wells, he was most notable for two
public acts of conscience. In the summer
of 1683 he refused the request of King Charles II’s advance man to give
temporary housing to the famous royal mistress, Eleanor (“Nell”) Gwyn, maintaining
that “a woman of ill repute ought not to be endured in the house of a
clergyman, and especially the king’s chaplain.” More famously he was one of the non-jurors: a few bishops who at the
time of the Glorious Revolution refused to take an oath of fealty to the new
king, William of Orange, on the grounds that the old monarch, James II
(abdicated or deposed, depending upon your ecclesiastical politics) was still
alive. When I was talking about the
inconveniences of resolutions and vows last week, I should have included oaths.
Both of Ken’s actions, and
especially the second, took cojones;
but his fame in the Fleming household is based on mere calendrical
accident. Ken’s is remembered in the
Anglican calendar on March 20. That is
the day Joan happened to be ordained to the priesthood, making him a kind of
spiritual patron for her.
That is the first part of the
“set up” for this essay. The second introduces
the “Haitian barbershop art” project of our formidable son Richard. He spends a good deal of time in Haiti, and
has taken a great interest in the Haitian art scene, being a regular at the
Ghetto Biennale. There is on the island
an amazing flourishing of “tonsorial
art”—that is, paintings (rather in the genre of British pub signs) identifying
and adorning barbershops and beauty salons, very numerous in Haiti’s service
economy. Richard has been trying to connect
some of the artists with potential American clients.
None of
this was at first in my mind as I slowly was developing an idea for the perfect
Christmas gift, the idea of a commissioned icon of Thomas Ken. I
knew that, if nothing else, such an image would be unique. Initial
investigation revealed problems. The
first was the problem of a model or prototype.
Ken’s extant iconography is meager.
There is a portrait in New College, Oxford; but aside from that there is
little more than the usual author’s portrait etchings in old books--a gloomy-faced
senior citizen wearing what look like ecclesiastical pajamas. The second is that there are not all that
many Anglican icon-makers. I did come
upon a very promising one, a woman in New England who does exquisite golden
pieces in neo-Byzantine style. She was
game to give it a go, but at a price I could not afford. Then I thought of the Haitian portraitists
with whom Richard is connected.
Richard
has been helping some of the Barbershop Painters to supplement their income by
doing commissioned portraits, based on photographs, in their distinctive
vernacular styles. You send an artist a
photo of Uncle Fred with a few general suggestions about size and so forth; the
artist does the rest.
The
word “icon” perhaps requires a little demystification. It is the Greek word for pictorial
representation as image (imago) was
the Latin word. It has come to mean
particularly a “religious picture”, though we also have “Civil Rights icons,”
computer icons, and other secular icons galore.
In Christian history icons/images have been used both in the decoration
of churches and for private devotion.
In popular thought they are particularly associated with the eastern
Orthodox churches, though in fact the surviving iconography deriving from Latin
(Roman Catholic) traditions is more extensive and more diverse. Religious pictures have been
controversial. There were major
movements of theological image-smashing (iconoclasm) in the East in the eighth
and ninth centuries and in the West in the sixteenth.
We
do not know the names of most of the creators of medieval religious art, and
the small works of Orthodox devotion we are most likely think of as “icons” may
seem characteristically anonymous. But
the name of the fifteenth-century Russian painter Andrei Rublev became widely
known through a famous Soviet film. We
think El Greco began as an “icon”-painter, and there are others. The creator of the world’s first known
commissioned icon of Saint Thomas Ken is named Michel Lafleur, and more of his
work (both tonsorial and portraiture) can be seen here.
The
process by which he created the icon was wonderfully medieval. In writing a doctoral dissertation on the
illustrated manuscripts of the Roman de
la Rose I discovered the extraordinary degree to which medieval painters regarded
themselves as technicians rather than expressive creators. A scribe needing an image of Lady Fortune
might write the simple instruction: “Draw a picture of a woman with a wheel
here” and get what he wanted. Above all,
the painters were expert copyists of approved models. Unfortunately, the only model I could provide
for M. Lafleur was a grim neo-classical line-etching. He did a wonderful job of “byzantinizing”
with golden hues; but he couldn’t do much about the weird cameo thing at the
bottom of the oval architectural frame.
