The Messenger - June 2008 - Leo Xlll
By Maureen MacMahon - 01 June 2008
A Place Apart (138): In this series, Sr. Maureen MacMahon chooses some of her favourite works of art and invites you to look beyond the canvas to find a deeper meaning. This month’s painting comes to us by kind permission of the Gorry Gallery, Dublin. Harry Thaddeus Jones’ ‘Leo Xlll’
Few artists have been privileged to bring their brushes into the papal rooms of the Vatican. This honour was accorded to a Protestant, Cork-born artist, christened Harry Thaddeus Jones, not only once but twice. He was a young prodigy, who began his artistic career by attending the Cork School of Art at the age of ten. Subsequently he studied in London and Paris. Leaving Paris in 1882 he set out for Florence and spent some time there, painting in the galleries and teaching in his studio.
Two years later, we find him in London again, where the door was opened for him to become a society portrait painter, through a commission from the Duke of Teck. It was about this time, too, he wrote, that ‘I assumed my Christian name of Thaddeus as my surname’. He was not short of sitters. Dukes and Duchesses, politicians and celebrities and finally two Popes, Leo XIII and Pius X, sat for him.
He travelled extensively all his life. Among other places he visited Algeria, Egypt, Corsica and Hamburg. In 1901 he left London for Australia, starting in Melbourne and then on to Sydney. Finally he settled in the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, three years before his death in 1929, leaving a wife, and two sons.
To return to the portrait of Leo XIII pictured here. Mr. James Gorry, director of the Gorry Gallery on Molesworth Street in Dublin, acquired it recently. Mr. Gorry cleaned the painting. The massive frame was restored and the picture was exhibited in the gallery in March of this year. It is magnificent, both in size and subject.
The frame, hand-carved in Florence, is over twelve inches deep and of superb craftsmanship. The painting is luminous. Paint has been laid on in different strengths; some thick, some thin. The various textures are painted with masterly realism. In the small version you cannot experience fully the smoothness of the white silk of the soutane, the gold of the chain and cross, the crested ring, the quill, the curtain pulled over the knee of the Pope.
Pope Leo leans forward, his right hand on the arm of his chair, as if about to rise. This creates a compos-itional curve that centres the head on the canvas, concentrating our attention on the face. The face is alive with intelligence, benevolence and a little austerity - and it is also that of a scholar. ‘One must paint the mind and soul’ said Thaddeus. A difficutlt task made more difficut by the restlessness of the Pope. It would have been impossible except for the lightening draughtsmanship of the artist and the piano-playing of Franz Liszt! The pope was surprised at the youthfulness of Thaddeus. He was only twenty-six years of age.
Tall, slim and handsome Leo XIII lived an austere life and was a popular pope. He in turn respected people. Out of seventy-five encyclicals, the most famous one, ‘Rerum Novarum’ was a defence of the working masses and of the labouring poor. In it, he fiercely defends the right to private property and deplores unbridled secular capitalism. His ideal of a just social order has not yet been realized, but remains as the only society worth striving for.
He used his intellectual and diplomatic skills as well as his capacity for friendship to bring harmony between nations, between the Church and the modern world between science and religion. This was the Pope who held the hand of little Thérèse Martin when, at a public audience, she asked him to allow her to enter the Carmel at the age of fifteen. ‘Go... go,’ he said. The guards at once removed her.
‘In my father’s house there are many rooms’ (Jn.14:2). In this life there are many ways to serve God and give Him glory, whether one is a painter or a pope, a poor person or a rich one, young or old, priest, religious or lay. We are all God’s family. Let us live in harmony and strive to restore harmony everywhere. ‘Make me an instrument of your peace.’