Stephen McGinty: Blimey, would you Adam and Eve it, they’re our masterpieces too

Spending some quality time with great artistic works is simple, and something we should do more often

ON A cold autumnal day, when the trees are frail and bare and the ground sodden with mulch, Pollok Park may not resemble Eden to everyone’s eye, but it is, nonetheless, home to Adam and Eve. The first celebrity couple inhabit the 18th century grandeur of Pollok House and hang out in what was once the smoking room. We meet on a quiet weekday morning, where the only sound is the heavy steel tick of the seconds hand of an antique grandfather clock. The heavy wooden shutters are closed against the low winter sun.

Emerging through a veil of tempera, the egg-based paint popular in the early 19th century, Adam has a long oval face, a wig of tight dark brown curls, and pale red cherubic lips. Above his head are the branches of an oak tree, three acorns hanging precariously, behind him travel a parade of wild animals, a lion padding beside a white horse, while a rabbit picks up the rear. While his right hand points up towards heaven, his sinister left cradles a serpent with the pleading eyes of a puppy.

On the other side of the fireplace, above a black wooden chest and a green china bowl decorated with humming birds, is Eve in all her naked glory, her golden hair like writhing seahorses and above her hover three birds, one swooning backwards, all singing in ecstasy. The name of the artist, though instantly recognisable by his distinctive style, is etched above Adam, near the bark of the tree “Fresco by Will Blake, 1810”.

It was watching footage of the huge queues outside the National Gallery in London to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that prompted me to pay a visit to my collection of William Blakes, kindly bequeathed to me (and, sadly, every other citizen of Glasgow) by Mrs Anne Maxwell Macdonald, the daughter of Sir John Stirling Maxwell, in 1966. For the last few years, I had been meaning to pay a return visit and thought the intimacy provided by Pollok House, would be in stark contrast to the scrum down south.

Sure enough, just after ten yesterday morning I was alone in the Cedar Room, where in 1931, Sir John Stirling Maxwell held the first meeting which would lead to the formation of the National Trust For Scotland. It is a small, cosy room and the absence of red ropes allows you to get within inches of William Blake’s five paintings which the family picked up on 29 June, 1853, 25 years after the painter’s death, at the Fosters Sale Room in London, for £18. Above the fireplace hangs his painting of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, while on the side wall is a portrait of Jesus entering Jerusalem and a smaller painting of The Entombment.

Why does art have the power to evoke emotions in us? For one there is an intimacy with art that cannot be replicated in any other artistic form. A novel is written, then thousands of copies printed so that each reader can possess their own. A film is created by the work of many hands, prints made and then screened around the world at the same time until eventually it is stored as a DVD on our shelf or hard-drive. Even a theatrical production is different every night, with no two audiences enjoying the same play. Yet a painting exists as a single item. When you stand back and look, you are enjoying the same exclusive view as the artist once had at his easel. It is if you are looking through Martin Scorsese’s viewfinder on the set of Goodfellas or, for a second, sitting with Shakespeare as he wipes ink off the last manuscript page of Hamlet. A fine painting is a little square portal to the past. It is as if the air in the room has been cut out and a new world in faded oil is just within reach, which is why I find the urge to reach out and touch a great work almost unconquerable. Almost, but not quite: no-one wishes to be huckled out of the National Gallery in handcuffs.

So, when face-to-face with a masterpiece, what is it that responds in us? We are all hard-wired to respond to beauty, which is symmetry. A baby will smile at a pretty face and bawl at those who are disfigured. Yet we arrive at each painting with our own baggage of experiences, prejudices, hopes and desires. I’ve often thought that paintings can act as mirrors reflecting back what we perceive in ourselves or which we perceive to be lacking in ourselves. Earlier this autumn, before the RSNO’s concert at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, I sat before Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross, in quiet awe, alone but for a lifetime of Catholicism on my shoulder.

In the cases of figurative art, our emotional response is at least understandable, but it is in the realms of abstract art, into whose murky pools I have only dipped a single socked toe, that I find the greatest mystery and reward. Why do the broad bands of red and white and black in Mark Rothko’s work fill me with an existential dread? Intellectually, I can deconstruct the image into its harmless constituent parts, but it still doesn’t stop me wishing to check my pulse to ensure I’m still alive and not in an ante-chamber of purgatory.

A decade ago I went to an exhibition by Frank Auerbach, the German expressionist, and by the time I reached the second room I was giddy with dread and desperate to shout out: “It’s only globules of oil on a piece of canvas” and yet, in my heart, I knew it was so much more.

Now, I don’t, at any point, have the desire to come over like Diane Keaton’s character in Manhattan when she praises a piece for its “negative capability”. In fact, I realise that I’m actually posing questions to which I don’t yet know the answer. What I do know is that whenever I have been moved by a painting it has been in an intimate one-on-one setting, just me and Jesus Christ or Eve or William Blake. And while those with their golden tickets to view Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpieces are certain to emerge from the scrum giddy with excitement – no-one likes to queue for hours and emerge apathetic – the rest of us could take this opportunity to spend quality time with the great works that are waiting only a short drive or train ride away in our galleries and National Trust buildings.

The reason I am so drawn to Blake’s painting of Adam and Eve is that it is the portrait of a long and deep marriage, that of William Blake and Catherine Boucher, who were together for 45 years. Blake believed in equality in a marriage and educated his young bride, who had signed their marriage certificate with an X, while she, in turn, supported him at every stage of long, difficult and far from successful career.

Weak and bedridden, on the day Blake died, he said to his wife as she tended to him: “Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait for you have ever been an angel to me.” Then, after a putting down his pencils and singing a hymn, he died at 6pm on 12 August, 1827. The sketch was lost, but an earlier portrait of his wife remains and it is this that hangs in a small, quiet shuttered room in Glasgow, just waiting for you.