The Singing Butler

Subtract, figure by figure. The servants cannot go: without them a couple dancing on a beach is a mood, and with them it is a scene of people who are served, which is the picture’s one structure; the two umbrellas, held out in a wind, are the act of service made visible. The couple cannot go. The beach and the weather can be argued for: a ballroom dance moved to the open shore under a threatening sky is the conceit, and the wet sand that doubles the figures holds them to the ground. What yields is nearly everything else. Sky, sea and sand are permitted by the conceit rather than compelled by it; the symmetry of maid and butler is a formula; the figures could be moved, turned or exchanged with little loss.

Score: 6.8 / 10

Something can be stated, and it is the work’s best claim. A romance is staged on the edge of the world, and two people in uniform stand in the weather so that it may be: pleasure here is kept up by labour, and the labour is placed at the edges, upright, unthanked, holding the cover. That holds outside 1992 and is visible in the image itself, not only brought to it. But the canvas does not seem to know it. The servants are drawn as part of the glamour, props of the fantasy, not persons whose share is in question; the picture invites the viewer to want the couple’s place, not to see what it costs. The title makes the service sweeter still. What dominates is a mood, and mood ranks below meaning.

Score: 6.3 / 10

There is a lift, and it is real for a great many viewers: the couple dancing alone on an empty shore, under a sky that threatens and does not break, is romance carried past the point of sense into the weather. The grey light, the low horizon and the expanse of wet sand give the dancers a smallness and a privacy close to transport, and the wind gives the stillness an instant. That is the height, and it is one height in one register: wistful, cinematic, sweet. It does not recur within the picture, since every part serves the same effect at the same pitch, and it does not deepen on looking. The sky is weather, not grandeur, and nothing approaches awe. Elevation of the kind a popular song gives, achieved and narrow.

Score: 6.6 / 10

Mostly evoked. The dance on the shore, at the edge between land and sea, summons the oldest staging of love as a world apart; the storm sky summons love against the elements; the couple seen from behind are any couple. The idiom evokes a newer myth, the screen romance of the 1930s to 1950s: evening dress, servants, a private beach, the memory of a life most viewers never had. One structure is built: the canopy held over two figures by attendants, the umbrella and the baldachin carried over a king or a bride, here carried over lovers on sand. That is load-bearing, and it is why the image reads as a ceremony and not a stroll. But it is not developed, the couple have no faces that say who they are, and the myth that dominates is a film’s.

Score: 6.6 / 10

The inheritance is easy to name: the commercial illustration and fashion plate of the 1930s to 1950s, the film still, Hopper’s American realism at second hand, and the long British line of narrative genre painting. The departure from it is small. What the picture turns from is not a tradition but a contemporary art world: in Britain in 1992, painted narrative glamour of this kind stood outside every institution that mattered, and the canvas was painted as though that world did not exist. That is a stance, the stance of a self-taught outsider. But the turn and the stake are scored in the work, and the work wagers on the most proven path there is, an image the public already loved in other forms. A deviation that risked nothing formally is an accent.

Score: 5.6 / 10

Substitute another form and ask what goes. Painting holds the dance still at one instant, so that the wind never finishes and the rain never comes; the long horizontal holds the four figures on one band against an empty field, which gives them their isolation. Those are real gains of the form. But the picture’s knowledge moves into other forms almost without loss, and its own history is the evidence: it lives chiefly as a print, a card and a poster, and loses little in any of them, since its force is in the arrangement and the idea rather than in the paint. As a film still or a magazine illustration it would say nearly the same thing. The medium is the container more than the instrument, held above the floor by the stillness of a dance against a moving sky.

Score: 6.4 / 10

Evidence over promise, at about thirty-four years. What return has produced is mostly discussion about the picture rather than discovery in it: the gulf between public taste and critical esteem, the market for its reproductions, whether it is kitsch and whether that matters. Those questions concern the work’s place, and they repeat. In the image the open questions are few: who the couple are, why a beach, what the servants think, why the butler is said to sing. They are left open by blankness more than by depth; the figures are not characterised enough to sustain a reading, and the picture, once seen, gives the same thing back. An enormous public has returned to it, which is real evidence of the yield of a favourite image and is credited a little. The well is shallow.

Score: 5.8 / 10

Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of British and Scottish painting of the 1990s and the market for popular art. Intrinsic force is slight: the canvas reorganises no possibility of painting, its means and idiom were all in hand by mid-century, and it is a strong instance of a manner, not a new one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as an image and narrow in practice. As a print it reached a very wide public, and it became a standing case in the British argument over popular taste and critical judgment. But it redirected little: no line of painters is known to start from it, and its influence is felt in decorative prints rather than in the art it entered.

Score: 6.1 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about thirty-four years. Form: whole; the canvas is the canvas painted, and nothing of its meaning is known to be lost. Presence: unusual in kind. The image has been continuously present in reproduction for three decades, as a print, a card and a poster, and has stayed in view through the arguments over its standing; fame and sales are presence, not proof, and earn at most a tenth. Fabric: an oil of 1992 with no known history of damage. This is the highest of the twelve. It is held a tenth below the foot of what its span allows for a surface fixed to a fashion: the image’s hold rests on a taste for retro glamour and on a print market whose favourites change, and the canvas has not yet shown it can stand when that taste passes.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Read to the same anchors as every medium, and judged from reproduction, so held more loosely. Credited: a clear, legible design that reads at any size, a real skill and the source of its success as a print; a smooth, controlled handling of the figures’ dark clothes against the pale ground; the wet sand that takes the figures’ reflections, the best painted passage, which ties them to the beach; a grey sky laid in broad tones that carries the mood. Charged: the drawing of the figures is stiff, and they sit on the ground more like cut-outs placed on a backdrop than bodies in one light and one wind; the wind that moves the maid and the sky barely touches the dancers; the faces are summary. The making is competent and not load-bearing in the way paint is at the high marks.

Score: 6.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the butler at the right edge, upright, in uniform, holding the umbrella out, and the woman at the centre, turned in the man’s arms. One law governs them: everything on the beach serves a single staged romance and is ranked by its nearness to the couple, servants at the edges, the empty shore and the weather around them, the sky a backdrop to the dance. The idiom holds throughout, one period of costume, one tonal key, one temperature of feeling, and nothing breaks it. Two faults are charged. The weather is not one law, since the wind that moves the maid and the clouds does not visibly move the couple, who seem to stand in another air; and the range is narrow, one beach, one instant, one register. Held at the floor.

Score: 7.0 / 10

The orders held: love and the couple; class and service, in the two servants and the evening dress, the one order the composition integrates; nature as weather, sea and shore; music by the title only, a song the picture cannot sound; and a remembered era of glamour, as costume rather than as history. They are held in one arrangement, the canopy over the dancers, and that is real integration over a small field. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Bottomless Well beside it, is what is absent: no consciousness the picture gives access to, since the couple turn from us and the servants are blank; no family; no labour beyond the holding of an umbrella; no state, no history and no sacred order. It is a cabinet scene of one moment between four people. The figure describes the form.

Score: 5.8 / 10