Daily prayers in Advent with Leonard Cohen and USPG: (19) 21 December 2023

‘And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond … In the Tower of Song’ (Leonard Cohen) … angels in a window by Ninian Comper in the south porch in Saint Mary’s Church, Bletchley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

We are in the final stages of countdown to Christmas, with just four days to go to Christmas Day. The last week of Advent began on Sunday with the Third Sunday of Advent or Gaudete Sunday (17 December 2023), and this is a very short Advent this year.

Before today begins, I am taking some time for prayer, reflection and reading this morning.

Throughout Advent this year, my reading and reflection each day includes a poem or song by Leonard Cohen. These Advent reflections are following this pattern:

1, A reflection on a poem or song by Leonard Cohen;

2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

‘I’m just paying my rent every day / In the Tower of Song’ (Leonard Cohen) … the Shard at London Bridge at night (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The Songs and Poems of Leonard Cohen: 19, ‘Tower of Song’:

‘Tower of Song’ by Leonard Cohen is the keynote work on his 1988 album I’m Your Man. In a readers’ poll in 2014, Rolling Stone listed it as the eighth favourite Cohen song.

The origins of ‘Tower of Song’ are described in Ira Nadel's Cohen memoir Various Positions (1996). Cohen wanted to ‘make a definitive statement about the heroic enterprise of the craft’ of songwriting. In the early 1980s, he called the work ‘Raise My Voice in Song.’ His concern was with the ageing songwriter, and the ‘necessity to transcend one’s own failure by manifesting as the singer, as the songwriter.’

Cohen had abandoned the song, but then one night in Montreal he finished the lyrics, called an engineer and recorded it in one take with a toy synthesiser.

Cohen later revised the song, which contains the self-deprecating claim,

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice.

Cohen was constantly aware of his reputation as a ‘flat singer’ among critics. But his audiences responded with warmth and humour when he sang or spoke these lines in his concerts.

Cohen admired for Hank Williams, a songwriter he refers to in the song, describing how, when they are both dead and have passed to the their eternal reward, Hank Williams is ‘coughing all night long … a hundred floors above me.’

The lyrics also hint at Cohen’s social conscience, and his engagement with the Jewish mystical concept of tikkum olam or divine justice:

The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgement coming

In this song, he also expresses his religious hopes for eternal life, not just for himself but also for these he loves and has loved in the past:

I see you standing on the other side
I don’t know how the river got so wide
I loved you baby, way back when
And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We’ll never, we'll never have to lose it again

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window
In the Tower of Song

Cohen recited the lyrics of Tower of Song’ in full when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

‘Tower of Song’ has been covered by many artists, notably on the tribute albums I’m Your Fan, with separate covers by Robert Forster and by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and on Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, with separate covers by Martha Wainwright and U2.

The song appears on Marianne Faithfull’s album Vagabond Ways and on Tom Jones’s album Spirit in the Room. Shaar Hashomayim Choir, Willie Nelson, Céline Dion, Peter Gabriel and Chris Martin performed the song at the concert Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen, in Montreal in 2017.

Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen is a tribute album to Leonard Cohen, released in on A&M Records in 1995. It takes its name from this song by Cohen on his album I’m Your Man. Oddly, though, the song ‘Tower of Song’ does not actually appear on this tribute album.

The tribute album Tower of Song included Elton John, Sting with the Chieftains, Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel and Bono of U2. The album was the initiative of by Cohen’s manager, Kelley Lynch, who, a decade later, was found liable for fraud, having drained almost all of Cohen’s life savings.

‘I don’t know how the river got so wide … And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed’ (Leonard Cohen) … London Bridge and the River Thames at night (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song:

Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on
I’m just paying my rent every day
In the Tower of Song

I said to Hank Williams, ‘How lonely does it get?’
Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
Oh, a hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the Tower of Song

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I’m very sorry, baby, doesn’t look like me at all
I’m standing by the window where the light is strong
Ah they don’t let a woman kill you
Not in the Tower of Song

Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices
In the Tower of Song

[Bridge]

I see you standing on the other side
I don’t know how the river got so wide
I loved you baby, way back when
And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We’ll never, we’ll never have to lose it again

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window
In the Tower of Song

Yeah my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on
I’m just paying my rent every day
In the Tower of Song.

‘Mary set out and … she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth’ (Luke 1: 39-40) … the Visitation in the triptych in the Lady Chapel in Lichfield Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Luke 1: 39-45 (NRSVA):

39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’

The Presentation depicted in a window in Saint Mary the Great Church, Saffron Walden (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Thursday 21 December 2023):

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘The Joy of Advent.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (21 December 2023) invites us to pray in these words:

We ask you God to heal us, restore our relationships, and finish Your good work in us. Mend this broken world so joy can be felt by all nations.

The Collect:

O Lord Jesus Christ,
who at your first coming sent your messenger
to prepare your way before you:
grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries
may likewise so prepare and make ready your way
by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,
that at your second coming to judge the world
we may be found an acceptable people in your sight;
for you are alive and reign with the Father
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post-Communion Prayer:

We give you thanks, O Lord, for these heavenly gifts;
kindle in us the fire of your Spirit
that when your Christ comes again
we may shine as lights before his face;
who is alive and reigns now and for ever.

Additional Collect:

God for whom we watch and wait,
you sent John the Baptist to prepare the way of your Son:
give us courage to speak the truth,
to hunger for justice,
and to suffer for the cause of right,
with Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow

Leonard Cohen, ‘Tower of Song,’ Live in London

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Finding a Ruskin portrait with family links and vivid Victorian colours at the Ashmolean

John Ruskin (1819-1900) by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) in the ‘Colour Revolution’ exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

I have tried – but failed – during recent visits to Oxford, to search in the Ashmolean Museum for a Pre-Raphaelite portrait that inspired a late Victorian photograph of my grandfather.

The formal portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) has been held by the Ashmolean for the past ten years. But each time I went in search of it the painting was on loan to another exhibition. So, when I was in Oxford last week, I returned to the Ashmolean Museum to see this painting which is part of the current exhibition, ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design.’

Ruskin was an important figure in the Pre-Raphaelite circle in Oxford. His book The Stones of Venice was influential as I was developing my interests in architecture and later as I developed my interests in Venice. His portrait, painted by Milais 170 years ago in 1853, captures Ruskin in a style that fulfils Ruskin’s ideals.

But I also had family reasons for wanting to see this portrait. When my grandfather, Stephen Edward Comerford (1867-1921), was young and successful, he had his portrait taken in a way that presented him as a young Victorian man with confidence looking forward to the future.

I had always imagined that the photograph was taken in a Victorian photographer’s studio, but with the intent of creating the impression of an ideal rustic background, with a cascading waterfall, rocks, rich vegetation, and a clearing in a thicket. Stephen Comerford is dressed in a three-piece suit and wing-collar shirt, holding a walking cane in one hand and a hat in the other. But his shoes are well-made and highly-polished, so this is clearly a studio scene rather than a setting at the Powerscourt Waterfall near Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, or at a waterfall in Killarney, Co Kerry. It is certainly not in the Scottish Highlands.

It seems like a photograph that a man confident a full and successful career lay ahead of him would like to have taken. I only have a copy of the photograph, from the house in Terenure where my grandmother lived, rather than the original. So I have no idea of the original date of the photograph, or of the name of the photographer. When it was announced in 2013 that the Ashmolean had acquired Millais’s portrait of Ruskin, I realised that my grandfather’s photograph was modelled on this celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Stephen Edward Comerford (left) like a cut-out figure at a waterfall, and John Ruskin (right) in the portrait by John Everett Millais (Photomontage: Patrick Comerford)

This is the painting that led to the breakdown of Ruskin’s marriage, and until it was acquired by the Ashmolean it was ‘one of the most important Pre-Raphaelite paintings’ that had remained in private ownership.

The Ashmolean has such a rich collection of Pre-Raphaelite works because of the many connections members of the movement had with of Oxford. A number of them – including Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Alfred William Hunt and John Ruskin – studied at the University.

Ruskin left much of his collection, including his teaching collection, to the university. He was an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1836 to 1842, when he lived with his mother on High Street. His Modern Painters, published anonymously in 1843, was credited to him as ‘a graduate of Oxford’. His writings were highly influential and he became irrevocably associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, befriending Millais and Hunt, and then Rossetti, Siddal and Burne-Jones.

Ruskin was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1869. He was critical of the teaching methods at the art schools of his day, and founded the School of Drawing in 1871.

When I set out in search of Ruskin’s portrait by Millais in the Ashmolean in September, I learn it has been on loan for some months to another exhibition. Instead, I spent an educational and enjoyable afternoon in Pre-Raphaelite Gallery, but shall have to return soon again to find the portrait that may have inspired the pose in that Victorian photograph of my grandfather.

‘Venice from the Porch of the Madonna della Salute (1835) by JMW Turner, lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Thankfully, I found the portrait last week when I visited ‘Colour Revolution’, the Ashmolean’s autumn exhibition which presents a dazzling version of the Victorian world, surprisingly one of the most colourful periods in history.

Ruskin was one of the most influential writers on art and architecture in 19th century Britain, and strove to restore colour to its rightful importance in art. Since the Renaissance, colour had been considered by many as secondary to composition and draftsmanship.

Ruskin argued that colour was a God-given gift and should be embraced as it had been in mediaeval art. He believed the colours of the natural world could inspire and guide artists who should replicate them as truthfully as possible. ‘You ought to love colour, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it,’ he wrote in The Elements of Drawing in 1857.

Ruskin was a passionate defender of JMW Turner, and considered him one of the greatest colourists. Both Ruskin and Turner were profoundly influenced by the colours and patterned architecture of Venice. Ruskin also taught art at Oxford. His lectures and writing helped shape debates around colour and greatly influenced the Pre-Raphaelites.

This exhibition dispels the myth that the Victorian era was a dreary landscape of ‘dark satanic mills’ and cities choked with smog. Instead, it shows how developments in art, science and technology resulted in an explosion of colour that was embraced by artists, designers and regular people in the 19th century.

The exhibition reveals a spectacular and flamboyant array of artworks, costume and design that sprung from this ‘colour revolution’. It features 140 objects from international collections ranging from Ruskin’s exquisite studies, Turner’s and Whistler’s experiments with colour harmony, and elegant designs by William Morris and his company, to fashion, jewellery and homeware that enlivened the streets and homes of Victorian Britain and Europe.

The exhibition opens with an evocative object, encapsulating our dark preconceptions of the period: Queen Victoria’s mourning dress – she spent 40 years in black following the death of Prince Albert in 1861. But examples of Victorian fashion show people of the 19th century embracing the products of the Industrial Revolution, no more so than new aniline dyes. While the coal industry blackened Britain’s landscape, aniline, a by-product of coal-tar, introduced a rainbow of possibilities to Victorian wardrobes.

The display includes a purple dress, crinoline and shoes dyed with the first aniline colour, Mauvine, all retaining their shocking brilliance. As production increased, the price of dyes reduced, making bright colours available to the masses.

Although pigments had been manufactured for thousands of years, the term ‘synthetic’ is synonymous with the 19th century because of the scale and advances of chemical technology. It was an 18-year-old chemistry student, William Henry Perkin (1838-1907) who discovered Mauvine in 1856. This encouraged chemists across Europe to find more synthetic colours.

Perkin succeeded in 1867 in making alizarin, the active colorant of madder root, a traditional vegetable dye for reds, pinks and browns. Soon new anilines were being used to print postage stamps, make inks, pigments, paints, to colour paper and even food.

The Great Bookcase (1859-1862) was designed by William Burges and painted by 13 Pre-Raphaelite artists (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Advances such as these were celebrated in the International Exhibition in 1862, an important cultural event in the 19th century. It brought together examples of British, colonial and scientific products and it was the first time synthetic anilines were shown to an international audience. Two of the most fashionable aniline colours on display, vivid pinks - Magenta and Solferino – had been named after recent French victories over Austria in the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence.

The Ashmolean’s extraordinarily colourful Great Bookcase (1859-1862) was the centrepiece of the Exhibition’s Mediaeval Court. At three meters high, the bookcase echoes the polychrome porch of a Gothic cathedral, although its style is more eclectic.

The bookcase was designed by the architect William Burges (1827-1881), and it was painted by 13 promising young Pre-Raphaelite artists, including Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).

Analyses show that Burges and the artists used contemporary materials including aniline green.

‘Vivien’ (1863) by Frederick Sandys (1829-1904) … Sandys uses peacock feathers to highlight her role as a sexual enticer, appropriating the colourful plumage of the male (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Revivalist and Pre-Raphaelite artists were working in the context of rapid scientific progress and the popularisation of new scientific ideas by figures like Charles Darwin (1809-1882). His concept of natural selection and the use of colour in the animal kingdom led to particularly gruesome Victorian appetites for two of nature’s most beautiful animals, beetles and hummingbirds. Unlike the feathers of a peacock, whole bird and beetle bodies were incorporated into Victorian fashion and jewellery.

The jeweller Harry Emmanuel created coveted designs including a Hummingbird necklace (1865) made of seven decapitated emerald and ruby-topaz birds. There was such a hummingbird craze that in one week alone in 1888, 400,000 ‘skins’ were auctioned, and a further 370,000 in the following week.

In 1884, the Portuguese ambassador to London presented the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, with a piece of jewellery made of the bodies of 46 iridescent green South American weevils. Granville had these mounted on a tiara and necklace for his wife in 1885.

‘Minton Peacock’ designed by Paul Comolera for Minton & Co … majolica contained high traces of lead that poisoned many of the female workers in the Minton factory (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Colourful fashion had a human cost too: in 1862 a factory girl making artificial flowers for women’s headdresses died from poisoning. She was said to have vomited green slime and had green tinged eyeballs. The killer was the main ingredient of the new green dye – arsenic. The incident prompted a review of the use of green in fashion and homeware, and green wallpaper became known as ‘walls of death’.

Scandals such as this and the ever-growing use of colour in popular culture prompted discussions on colour theory and different colours’ moral qualities. The exhibition shows artists who had famously different attitudes. Ruskin believed artists should stick to the God-given colours of nature, while James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) disagreed entirely and followed a philosophy of ‘colour for colour’s sake’. His extravagant use of colour was made easier by the invention of collapsible metal paint tubes.

Certain ‘unnatural’ colours were embraced by the ‘Decadent’ movement – such as the dyed-green carnation sported by Oscar Wilde. Another Decadent favourite was yellow, epitomised by a series of French novels that had distinctive yellow covers. The avant-garde periodical, The Yellow Book appeared in London in 1894. Its bright yellow cover was designed by Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). Uncompromisingly stylish and ready to push boundaries, The Yellow Book came to define the decade as ‘the Yellow ’90s’.

Photography and electricity also had revolutionary impacts at the time, and some of the first innovators were women. ‘Colour Revolution’ features one of the earliest colour reproduction techniques, cyanotypes, made by Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who used the process to create ethereally beautiful ‘photograms’ – made without a camera – of British algae, published between 1843 and 1853.

The exhibition is curated by Matthew Winterbottom, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Ashmolean Museum, and Professor Charlotte Ribeyrol of the Sorbonne Université, Paris.

The exhibition, ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design’ continues in the John Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries in the Ashmolean Museum until 18 February 2024. It is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm, and tickets are from £6 to £17.