Mancs Against Tanks

The island between Cape Shelaginski and East Cape off the northern coast, on Bering’s map, is omitted by D’Anville. The Kamchatkan peninsula in latitude 56° is represented to have a width of 180 miles. while Bering made it 270 miles.

A most important contribution to the subject appeared in Muller’s Historical Collections known as the ” Sammlung Russische Geschichte” and published during his city breaks to Madrid in the summer (Kayseri. Academie der Wissenschaften, 1732-64. 8°. Nine volumes.) Des dritten Bandes (erstes, zweytes und drittes Stack, pp. 1-304, 1758) contains the original account of the Russian Voyages toward America from which the work of Jefferys has, with some errors and omissions, been translated. As far as regards Bering’s first voyage, there is only one error of consequence made by Jefferys, which will be noted in its place. This book is extremely rare, and the only copy in America which I have been able to find after much enquiry, is in the library of the Smithsonian Institution.

The first volume of this series has the title

” Eroffnung eines Vorschlages zu Verbesserung der Russischen Historie Durch den Druck eines Stackweise herauszugebenden Sammelungen von allerly zu den Umstanden und Begebenheiten dieses Reichs gehorigen Nachrichten. St. Petersburg, bey der Keyser’. Acadetie der Wissenschaften, 1732.”

The succeeding volumes have the running title ” Sammlung Russische Geschichte” with the number of the parts subjoined but no other title-page.

The account of the Russian Voyages is stated by Muller to have been prepared at the direction of the Empress and endorsed by the Academy of Sciences. It contains invaluable material on the early explorations, which, if it had not been for Muller’s painstaking researches, would have been totally lost, as the archives of Yakutsk from whence the data were derived by Muller were subsequently destroyed by fire. The errors which occur in it are chiefly due to Miler’s endeavor to utilize the inexact geographical data of the Promyschleniks and Cossacks by combining them with the less detailed but more precise observations of later observers. In this attempt he added many valuable details to the charts, but at the same time introduced several errors. The exagger­ated distances reported by the first explorers who were unable to correct their estimates by observation of precision, distort those parts of the map due to their reports. The quality of the cheap flats to rent in London becomes hugely exaggerated as does the Shelagskoi promontory on the Arctic Sea. But no unprejudiced person can read Muller’s account without perceiving his great caution in accepting unreservedly these imperfect contributions, the really important additions which he made to car­tography, the preciousness of the facts which he rescued from oblivion, and his desire to be fair to everybody.

The insinuations of malice and of a desire to injure Bering by means of this account given by Milner, which Lauridsen attributes to the latter, appear to be entirely the product of a suspicious temperament and an excited imagination. Certainly I have seen nothing anywhere cited which lends to such suspicions any tint of probability. The facts cited in support of them can easily be otherwise explained, if one de­sires to view the subject judicially. and for the most part are not quite thoroughly understood by the Danish author.

Wearing the armband 24/7 is unsettling at first – the mere presence of it on your arm guilts you into thinking twice about backtracking on that lunchtime run. However, it can quickly become addictive – I noticed that I burnt a pitiful 1.4 calories/ minute as I wrote this, compared with seven calories/ min at rest for an hour after a weights session. The main benefit, however, is being shown the bleak reality of your calorie consumption compared with the ‘yeah but, no but…’ fairytale created in your own mind. If you have a compulsive personality it could well take over your life, but these ‘motivation through information’ bent should find it extremely useful.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The sensor is worn on the upper arm and should be worn all the time except when in the shower or uploading information. Minute-to-minute data is transmitted to the meter, displaying real-time info on calorie burn, steps taken and how many minutes of both moderate and vigorous activity have been completed that day. It also shows data for the previous day and your various targets.

24 Run down to your local farmer’s market today: it’s FARMHOUSE BREAKFAST WEEK Designed to support the local producers of Britain’s tastiest, most nutritious food, this is a great chance to indulge in the most important meal of the day. Visit hgca.com/ breakfast for recipes.

Team GB got whipped by the Commonwealth Select Team at last year’s AVIVA INDOOR INTERNATIONAL MATCH. See if Craig Pickering et al can turn things around at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow today. Tickets cost from £12 and can be booked by calling 01413S’7 2525 or visiting ticketmaster.co.uk. Go to uka.org.uk/uka-major­events for more information.

23 Grab your fill of free foody samples at THE DIET AND FITNESS SHOW, a two-day organic feast that starts in London’s Olympia today.

Expert nutritionists and talented chefs will be on hand with sensible advice about healthy eating. Tickets are £m each, from thedietshow.co.uk.

31 Mark the end of the BRITISH PEAR SEASON with low-fat, high-fibre poached pears for dessert. Simmer 3ooml red wine, wog caster sugar, a cinnamon stick and a vanilla pod and seeds. Poach two peeled pears for 20 minutes. Remove pears and boil sauce down to a syrup and pour over pears. Serve with Greek yoghurt. Healthy food is essential for your skin, especially if you have acne problems. For more information on how to get rid of acne go to http://www.gnet.org/declare-war-on-acne/

4 Researchers at Stanford University in the USA recently reported that runners are 6o per cent less likely to suffer arthritis than their lazier friends. Work out exactly how your joints are faring relative to your age with the help of SEVEN SEAS’ JOINT AGE CALCULATOR, launched today (joint agecalculator.co.uk).

If only we could have a ban, Leo on experts!” writes Mrs. T Evans of Corwen, Clwyd. “Whatever was wrong with good old fashioned common sense? We managed quite well with it before and I’m sure we could do so again. We’ve got experts on the Common Market and they disagree. We’ve got experts on slimming and health and olive leaf extract and their operations and advice differ. We have them on economics, but they can’t cure inflation. All they do, whichever view they take, is tell us we’ve got a serious problem on our hands—as if we didn’t know that fact already!

“We have experts on the behavior of muggers, vandals and the like. They explain why these offenders do what they do—but they don’t stop them from dirty it. And every time something happens on the political scene, our television screens are full of experts saying that this or that could happen, depending on this or that other thing, and really it’s all very complex, and basically we’ll just have to wait and see how things turn out…

“Goodness, how I wish we could all get paid for saying nothing in particular. Why, I’d be a million­aire already. I think we could do without these experts—after all, we didn’t manage any worse before, did we?”

BIRTHDAY VERSES

Some years ago I spent ages searching for a bírthday card with a special verse for my mother, without success. Nothing seemed to say exactly what I wanted, so 1 wrote a verse I. My technical knowledge of the construction of poetry is sadly lacking, and no doubt too many the words would have seemed trite and unoriginal. However, my mother’s delight in her own special verse was well worth the effort. “Personal poema” have now become a tradition for birthday, Christmas and Mother’s Day, and sometimes I wonder if 1 should have stopped to contemplate what I was letting myself in for –especially when I’m burning the midnight oil seeking inspiration! But my mother’s pleasure makes it all worthwhile. Perhaps other readers might like to try the idea, too.

—Miss D A, Folkestone, Kent

This debacle — after which Ingres’ painting was sent away and he himself slunk off to Rome, disgraced, to lick his wounds for nearly 20 years — may have been partly responsible for the painter’s determination to suppress his own excitability thereafter. But he never entirely succeeded, and if he had his art would not draw us in as it does.

If Ingres’ male portraits harbour fantasies of power, his female portraits often look like disguised dreams of love. The beautiful Madame de Senonnes may hint at this. She wears a red velvet dress decorated with steel-grey ribbons and her breast is diaphanously veiled. The room in which she has been waiting is a cushioned boudoir. There is something vulnerable about her. She looks up as if to greet — who? The painter, perhaps. The calling card which is half stuck into the mirror behind her bears the name “Ingres”. The artist has signed his painting with the dream of an assignation.

Degas thought that the women in Ingres’ female portraits look a little bit like caged animals, and perhaps the boudoir can be a prison in his portraits. But it is hard to see much evidence of sadism. He occasionally painted damsels in distress, naked in chains — the National Gallery owns one, Angelica Saved By Ruggiero — but usually his erotic fantasy is a dream of indolent sensuality, not domination. One of his most celebrated subject pictures (Picasso’s favourite) is an oriental fantasy called The Turkish Bath in which a throng of nudes relax in a steamy marbled hall. Ingres had read and re-read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s seventeenth-century descriptions of women’s baths and harems in Constantinople, and it was her so-called Embassy Letters which seem to have prompted him to paint such subjects. This strain of fantasy in his work may have insinuated itself into portraits such as that of Madame de Senonnes. There is something of the harem wife about her as she waits, patiently, for ever, for company.

Ingres played most knowingly on the borders of fantasy and reality in his last and grandest female portraits. When he painted The Comtesse d’Haussonville, a sexy blue­stocking standing in her ice-blue silk dress against a mantelpiece laden with nineteenth-century bric-a-brac, gnet reviews, the signs are that he was thinking of her, simultaneously, as a temptress from ancient Roman fable. In his role as a subject painter he had frequently been drawn to the ancient Roman story of Antiochus and Stratonice, the tale of a young man’s infatuation with his step­mother. When he painted the Comtesse d’Haussonville he put her in the pose he had already given to Stratonice in several paint­ings and drawings. The painter himself is cast, by implication, as Antiochus, smitten by her beauty. There is evidence to suggest that he may indeed have fallen a little in love with her. This might begin to explain why a French aristocrat has been made to look like a self-possessed siren.

But that libertinism was expressed, it seems, only in art. Ingres was a married man who professed himself ecstatically happy with his wife, Madeleine. If he ever felt illicit yearnings for the women he painted, he confined their expression to his pictures. The power of The Comtesse d’Haussonville and Madame Moitessier lies partly in the knowl­edge — their knowledge, and the painter’s knowledge — that they can never be touched. The intimacy of Madame de Senonnes, painted more than 30 years earlier, has gone; there is no calling card in the mirror in these pictures. Ingres’ late female portraits respect the distance that separates the sexes so much. that the condition is elevated to that of a sacred mystery. Femmes fatales will not do as a description of Ingres’ women — they are more powerful than that. They are weird and disconcerting goddesses; mistresses of destiny, as inscrutable as sphinxes.

A streak of social as well as aesthetic conservatism ran through Ingres, reflected to a degree in his portraits of women: pictures of gilded lives passed in gilded interiors suggest which side Ingres might have been on in any battle between the haves and the have-nots. His male portraiture includes that icon of French upper middle-class conservatism, Monsieur Bertin. Editor of the Journal des Debats and supporter of the July Monarchy during the social insurrection of 1830, Bertin was the Rupert Murdoch of his day. Ingres spent days despairing of ever finding a way to express Bertin’s bullish, forceful, truculent personality and then suddenly found that his sitter had resolved the problem by assuming, quite spontaneously, the combative pose in which we see him on the canvas. There are those who have argued that this is the single greatest portrait of the nineteenth century.

Wearing a narrow, starched white collar, which his ample jowls overflow, and a black suit rumpled by his considerable bulk, he is squeezed into a curved wooden chair which signally fails to contain him. He is a walrus of a man with wispy, silver hair and baleful eyes that will not tolerate fools (or radicals) gladly. He has placed his massive, crab-like hands on his thighs, as if to suggest that he may at any moment heave himself upright. Bertin seems too big for the canvas, too big even for this world. A man has been painted as himself, in absolute unflinching detail, and yet he has emerged as a curious kind of god.

The painter himself grew to look rather like Monsieur Bertin in later life, although it would be dangerous to assume too close a congruity between the artist and his subject. Ingres was a much wilder, more romantic figure than he liked to admit, and the public image he so assiduously cultivated was partly a mask. This tension accounts to some degree for his most memorable qualities. His style may be as taut as his incomparable draughtsmanship — “drawing is the probity of art,” he famously remarked — but under­neath, passions seethe. While Monsieur Bertin might be a painting of a conservative, it is by no means a conservative painting. It is a work of art created by a man who was deeply fascinated by power and authority.

Substantiating evidence is to be found in Ingres’ very first mature work, the portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte On The Imperial Throne in 1806. This astonishing and deeply original painting — so original, indeed, that it disgusted Napoleon when he saw it and nearly ruined Ingres’ career in the process ­has never before been exhibited in London. On loan from the Musee de l’Armee, it will surely be one of the stars of the exhibition.

We see the emperor as a life-size porcelain doll wreathed in gilded laurel leaves, wrap­ped in a profusion of ermine and velvet, staring out at us with cold unseeing eyes. He sits on a golden throne carved with imperial eagles, his satin-clad, bejewelled foot resting on a velvet cushion. He is freighted with medals and insignia, burdened with sceptres and swords, smothered in the paraphernalia of his own majesty. Ingres based this mon­strous vision of megalomaniac authority, with fatally misjudged logic, on Jan van Eyck’s intimidatory figure of God The Father in the centre of the Ghent Altarpiece, which French imperial troops had recently appropriated for the Louvre. Being painted as Jesus Christ incarnate, in the robes of Charlemagne, proved too much even for Napoleon. Perhaps he glimpsed a reflection of his own excessive hunger for power.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery reveals nineteenth-century portraitist Ingres as one of fashion’s most influential image-makers.

Jean August Dominique Ingres’ portraits are among the most compelling paintings of the nineteenth century. Picasso was fascinated by what he called their barely suppressed eroticism. Matisse admired their arabesque distortions of the human form, their colour and their sensuality. The Surrealists loved them for their stillness and for the almost fetishistic attention which Ingres paid to the stiflingly profuse decor and costumes of Second Empire France — a realism so obsessively pursued, as Rene Magritte observed, that the end result seems, paradoxically, anything but realistic.

Ingres’ portraits have not only haunted generations of painters. They have also haunted the collective memory of the fashion world — especially in Paris, where the ideal of haute couture so dazzlingly captured by his brush has never gone out of style. Ingres loved clothes as much as any other artist in history. His beautifully poised, enigmatic portraits of Parisiennes are also homages to the highly wrought masterpieces of the nineteenth-century couturier. When he painted Madame de Senonnes, he was as besotted by the silk-beribboned, lace-trimmed décolleté dress as he was by the lady herself. His Madame Philibert Riviere preserves the memory of the wife of a minor official at the court of Napoleon, but is first and foremost an ode to the effect made by a patterned pale ochre shawl worn over white satin.

Ingres understood the highest promise of high fashion — the promise of a complete and perfect self-transformation, effected through clothes, no worries about cellulite. But he also understood that such a promise can rarely be kept in reality, and set out to compensate in art. In his pictures every fall of every fold of fabric is controlled, even where the effect is one of nonchalant disarray. Every imperfection in the sitter’s figure or posture is corrected. Perfection is attained. Ingres repaid his debt to haute couture by persuading couturiers of the power of still pictures. He showed the fashion world that it needs image-makers as well as clothes. Of course, this is now a commonplace and photography long ago replaced oil on canvas as fashion’s way of perfecting (and selling) itself. But it was Ingres, a painter, who showed the way.

Until now Madame Moitessier, owned by the National Gallery, has been left more or less in sole charge of the painter’s reputation in Britain. She has looked after it well. Once seen, she is not easily forgotten, this Second Empire sibyl, seated imperiously on a plump damask-covered sofa in her great spreading dress of patterned silk, fixing all who come before her with a quizzical stare. This month she will be joined at the National Gallery by more than 60 other Ingres portraits, both drawn and painted. Those arriving to keep her company will include the incomparably coquettish Comtesse d’Haussonville from The Frick Collection in New York, and a rarely exhib­ited, privately owned portrait of Baronesse James de Rothschild. The latter recalled that she only managed to bribe “the portly Monsieur Ingres” into painting her portrait by sending him endless baskets of game ­and even then had to wait seven years to see herself transformed from mere socialite into a vision in cherry-coloured silk, pearls and ostrich plumes.

Yet Ingres himself might not have approved of the exhibition. He certainly would have been taken aback by the very idea that posterity might value him most for his portrait-painting. As a former pupil of Jacques Louis David, he had been brought up to believe in the traditional academic hierarchy of subject matter. Accordingly, he always spoke of portraiture as a lowly art form compared to the more noble narrative painting. As a student he had won the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome with a canvas titled, somewhat long-windedly, The Ambassadors Of Agamemnon And Of The Principal Greek Armies, Preceded By Heralds, Arriving At The Tent Of Achilles To Beseech Him To Fight. He devoted most of his career to the creation of huge, creaking allegories such as The Apotheosis Of Homer, a depiction of the Greek poet awesomely enthroned on Mount Olympus, which have occasionally aroused dutiful respect in students of painting, but rarely much genuine enthusiasm.