Discussion Post: The Greek Interpreter

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Greek Interpreter and the chosen topic is Victorian Artists.

A few facts (unless otherwise stated, they’re taken from the excellent article on Wikipedia):

🖌 Painting in the early years of [Victoria’s] reign was dominated by the Royal Academy of Arts and by the theories of its first president, Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds and the academy were strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, and believed that it was the role of an artist to make the subject of their work appear as noble and idealised as possible.

🖌 In 1848 three young students at the Royal Academy art schools, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). The PRB rejected the ideas of Joshua Reynolds, and had a philosophy based on working from nature as accurately as possible wherever possible, and when it was necessary to paint from imagination to strive to show the event as it most likely would have happened, not in the way that would appear most attractive or noble… By 1854 the PRB had collapsed as an organisation, but their style continued to dominate British painting.

🖌 ...despite impressions to the contrary, it was really not all that difficult for women to receive formal instruction in painting, usually in the form of private classes, or with small groups of other like-minded girls…. And from the 1850s on, women could receive a free art education at a government school of design...learning to design and decorate ceramics, textiles, and other household industrial products. [Art Now and Then blog]

🖌 In 1859 a petition by 38 female artists was circulated to all Royal Academicians requesting the opening of the Academy to women. Later that year Laura Herford submitted a qualifying drawing to the Academy signed simply "A. L. Herford"; when the Academy accepted it, the Academy accepted her as its first female student in 1860. The Slade School of Fine Art, founded in 1871, actively recruited female students.

🖌 After the 1860s, women were admitted to Royal Academy schools, but it wasn't until 1893 that they were permitted to sit in on classes drawing the nude male figure. The model [had] to wear bathing drawers, and a cloth… wound around the loins over the drawers, passed between the legs, and tucked in over the waistband… Though in Victorian England, there was little, if any, market for paintings depicting the male nude… regardless of the sex of the artist. [Art Now and Then blog]

🖌 The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 caused large numbers of French artists such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro to relocate to London, bringing with them new styles of painting. ...a new generation of painters such as Frederic Leighton and James Abbott McNeill Whistler departed from the traditions of storytelling and moralising, painting works designed for aesthetic appeal rather than for their narrative or subject.

🖌 As the quality of life in Britain continued to deteriorate, many artists turned to painting scenes from the pre-industrial past, while many artists within the aesthetic movement, regardless of their own religious beliefs, painted religious art as it gave them a reason to paint idealised scenes and portraits and to ignore the ugliness and uncertainty of reality.

🖌 The opening of the Tate Gallery in 1897, opened to display sugar merchant Sir Henry Tate's collection of Victorian art, proved the last triumph of Victorian painting. In the 1910s, Victorian styles of art and literature fell dramatically out of fashion in Britain, and by 1915 the word "Victorian" had become a derogatory term.



Some useful resources:

Victorian painting On Wikipedia

Victorian Artists Index of links for Victorian Artists on The Victorian Web

Victorian Women and the Visual Arts Index of links on The Victorian Web

Victorian Painting Index of links on The Victorian Web

Victorian Index of links on the Tate website.

Victorian Female Artists On the Art Now and Then blog

Sex, opium and bizarre outfits: How Victorian artists invented celebrity On the Telegraph website



Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.

Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.

Comments

[laurose8.livejournal.com]

What great links! Thank you very much.

Of the story...I rather blink at the rescuers spending so much time at Scotland Yard. legal formalities doesn't seem very like the younger Holmes, anyway.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I rather blink at the rescuers spending so much time at Scotland Yard. legal formalities doesn't seem very like the younger Holmes, anyway. Absolutely. You can see why ACD put in the delay but it just doesn't seem to fit with how Holmes generally does things.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Very nicely put together. I think by the end of the round we'll have a veritable library of (mercifully organized) useful topics. Inspirational for any porcupine who wants to go past name-dropping Vernet.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I like to think the comm will always stand as a useful resource for Holmes' writers ^___^ (Porcupine or otherwise ^^)

[sanguinity]

I certainly wish I'd been aware of the resources here when I started writing ACD fic! I found it a very intimidating ring to throw my hat into, when I began. (And honestly, I still do, to some degree.) Annotated Holmes collections are very useful for getting up to speed on canon-centric issues, but when it came to all the background Victoriana everyone seemed to have at their fingertips...

(Happily, the people who write canon-centric fic have, in my experience, all been kind, welcoming, and generous. It's the high standards of work they produce that's intimidating, not the authors themselves.)

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I have indeed found the ACD Holmes fandom on the whole to be full of talented and easy-going people ^__^

Sherlock60 was my entry point into the fandom and when I joined I didn't really know anything. But I've learnt a fair bit since - from having to do my own research, from reading other people's comments, and to be honest, from reading other people's fics ^^

[sanguinity]

Oh, absolutely! One builds that knowledge bit-by-bit, either by going out and digging it up oneself, or by spending time with, or reading work by, people who know more/different. It's doable, it just takes time. (And how much time really depends on one's interests -- if I didn't write such widely-spaced canons, I could have gotten up to speed much more quickly.) I'm simply thankful that people who have sunk so much time into this particular era and place are pleased to share what they know.

Or, as stated above: kind, generous, and welcoming. :-)

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I'd like to second the praise for these wonderful historical facts and resources that you gather for us each week, Frankles. They are really fascinating and I know I'll come back to them for future reading, fic research, and just for fun. Thanks for doing all this work and sharing it here for everyone!

As usual I'm late to the discussion, but I would love to hear about people's favorite portrayals of Mycroft, if anyone has any recommendations. I have to admit that I've not yet found a screen version of the character that I've loved. I've seen a relatively small pool of performances, though, just Granada, Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Ritchie films, and BBC. Out of those, my favorite was the BBC version (which was clearly inspired by Christopher Lee's performance in Private Life), but to me that version of Mycroft doesn't seem very similar to the ACD character. I know from Holmestice that there is a novel series starring Mycroft, but have never heard anything more about it.

I actually have seen one other worthwhile version of Mycroft, in a made-for-TV movie that I cannot recommend because it was truly terrible. It was "Hands of a Murderer," where the Holmes and Watson are largely forgettable and Moriarty is a Bond-style villain who kills his unruly henchman with a poisonous tarantula (!) His Reichenbach death was so ridiculously staged and filmed I couldn't stop laughing. Which is a real shame because, with a better script and director, Anthony Andrews could have made a fantastic Moriarty. Even in the midst of this dreck, he has his moments, and they are basically all with Mycroft. In the film, Moriarty kidnaps Mycroft to get top-secret information out of him, if I recall correctly. Mycroft, played by Peter Jeffrey, was actually well done. Calm, brave, and quietly sarcastic in his exchanges with Moriarty, there was a bit of genuinely good dialogue in there. Moriarty discovers that Mycroft keeps all sensitive records in a code of his own devising, and spends a lot of the film trying to break it with gradually increasing chagrin. There's a lovely moment where Mycroft says, "How are you getting on?" and Moriarty sighs and answers, "I have been reduced to reading your brother's monograph on cyphers and code-breaking. It has not proved helpful." Mycroft nods. "He never could break mine." :)

[k-e-p.livejournal.com]

Ooof, I have to commend you for managing to get through Hands of a Murderer. I have watched more than my fair share of dreck, and that was one of the ones that I had to just turn off after a little while. So hats off to you!

There really aren't many good Mycrofts out there, are there? I think some of it is that he just isn't IN a lot of adaptations, in keeping with his small role in the stories (although, given that Moriarty is in EVERYTHING, and Mycroft actually appeared in more stories that Moriarty, that theory is less than stellar).

I would say probably one of my favourite screen Mycrofts is the one in the original Russian series. The Russian series did pretty well at sticking to canon, and with the exception of Mycroft being too thin (my kingdom for an actually fat Mycroft), he's still incredibly good and feels much like canon Mycroft does. He also doesn't look 30 years older than Sherlock, which is really my only issue with Charles Gray from Granada and Seven Percent Solution. I also have a fondness for the Mycroft in Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century. She's a woman, and she's pretty darn awesome.

As for book Mycrofts...

The series that I think was probably mentioned the most during Holmestice was the book Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who is apparently some sort of sports person, but it's a really good book! It takes a look at Mycroft before he became The British Government, and the things that may have shaped him. It's full of action and adventure, with also a lot of smart commentary. It also gives him a Watson figure (as most pastiches do with non-Sherlock characters), and the Watson figure is one of the best parts of the book, by far. I really recommend that you take a look at that book. His version of the character has also been bought for a graphic novel, although I think that's separate from the series itself. While I do keep referring to this as a series, there is currently only one book. Abdul Jabbar has said on twitter a few times that while he WANTS it to be a series, and his cowriter is on board for it, they're still trying to convince the publishers. So get it from the library, buy it, whatever so that the numbers tick up and we can get an awesome series!

Other Mycroft books... there are actually a few series that focus on Mycroft, but tbh, most of them really suck. The problem with Mycroft, as a protagonist, is that in canon he rarely goes outside of his preferred sphere of influence. So a lot of authors kind of Nero Wolfe him and keep Mycroft behind a desk and send out a Watson figure to be both the narrator and the person that all the action happens around. There's a series by Quinn Fawcett, which isn't very good, but one can get through it. There's also Enter the Lion by Michael Hodel, which I confess I haven't read yet. But someone over at Holmestice requests it all the time, saying it's their favourite Mycroft story, so it might be good! There's also a series by David Dickinson that I haven't read, and a terrifying looking one by Amelia Price that appears to have Sherlock and Mycroft in the modern era (but still being the same people who were in the Victorian era) with Mycroft ending up with a Watson figure that's a woman...? I mean, it looks AWFUL. They're super cheap on Kindle, and look to be Kindle only- I might check out the first one since it's free just to see HOW awful this is.

In terms of books that have some good Mycrofts, but aren't ABOUT Mycroft, I would highly recommend Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye if you haven't read it already. Great story in general, but it also has one of the best Mycrofts I've ever read. I really love the Mycroft in the Watson & Holmes graphic novel, though he's only in it for a few panels. Worth it, though! The Mycroft that appears in the Enola Holmes series is frustrating at times, but also very in character.

Those are all I can really remember off the top of my head. I'll give it some thought, though, and see if I can find some more really good Mycrofts.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you so much for these wonderful recommendations! This is so great!

I have to commend you for managing to get through Hands of a Murderer. I have watched more than my fair share of dreck, and that was one of the ones that I had to just turn off after a little while.

Yes, what a trainwreck! Mycroft was my only reward, the rest was *painfully* bad, as you know. But since you stopped before the end, you missed the most hilariously pathetic 'Reichenbach' ever committed to film. Moriarty's carriage loses its horses and moves slowly down a hill's gentle incline, with repeated cuts to Moriarty looking inexplicably and exaggeratedly terrified inside, before finally reaching the shore of a lake and abruptly flipping over into the water in a manner not supported by the laws of physics. So bad it's kind of hypnotic.

I have yet to watch the Lenfilm series, and here's another good reason to do it! Thanks for the rec, I'll look forward to meeting their Mycroft. I'm not a huge fan of Charles Grey's version, personally; he doesn't come across to me as a real person. The performance is too broad, somehow. Or perhaps it's simply that I imagine Mycroft as serene and sly and Grey takes a more overbearing approach. Which is a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the character, it's just not my own. The genderswapped Mycroft from 23rd Century sounds intriguing, though! Another one to look forward to!

And thank you especially for sharing your reviews of the novels, that's really wonderful! The Jabbar book sounds like exactly my cup of tea, I will have to go out and get it (my little brother used to watch Jabbar play basketball in the '90s -- I'll have to tell him that he's on *my* team now!)

I haven't read Dust and Shadow because true crime tends to squick me - I'd had enough of the Ripper case by the end of Murder by Decree, even as loopy as that film gets with its plot! But if the novel is really well-written and true to the characters, then I might give it a try and just skip over anything that starts creeping me out :)

Thanks again for your comments, with so much out there it's wonderful to hear from someone who can guide the way!

[sanguinity]

Oh, I find Mycroft recs difficult, largely because there are two major aspects to the character-- the domestic, familial, art-in-the-blood person, versus the man who is the British Government -- and depending on one's politics, those can be difficult to reconcile with each other.

I haven't seen a lot of the screen Mycrofts: I haven't watched the 1965 Wilmer with Derek Francis, nor the 1991/1992 Christopher Lee with Jerome Willis, and I bounced hard enough off the first Frewer film that I have very little interest in watching the following ones. Sadly, the 1968 Cushing with Ronald Adam is lost. But of the Mycrofts that I have seen...

Lenfilm, like most of the Russian productions, likes to affectionately poke fun at things it finds quintessentially English, so between the Diogenes and his involvement in the British empire, Lenfilm's Mycroft is semi-comic. Nevertheless, it is a big-hearted series, with copious affection between the brothers and some amusing Mycroft-Watson moments. I can't imagine you not enjoying the series overall; it's really quite charming, and most who have seen it seem to be fond of it.

My own interest in Mycroft preferentially runs toward a post-colonial point-of-view. I love the 2013 Russian series in part for how it positions Mycroft in the narrative, although we don't see much of the character directly. (For most of the series, Mycroft is a shadowy character shaping events around the edges of the story, not fully visible until the final episode.) Overall, I find the 2013 Russian series literary and meta-heavy, featuring a few tightly-constructed arcs that build slowly across its eight episodes: the inter-relationships between Moriarty, Mycroft, and Empire is one such arc. (fwiw, I hate-hate the Irene storyline, and warn for Victorian blackface in the penultimate episode.)

Elementary arguably has two Mycrofts: the second season character named Mycroft, who is Sherlock's older brother, and the fourth season character named Morland, who is Sherlock's father. (Elementary has seventy-plus episodes and counting; they tend to revisit any given canon element multiple times, exploring different aspects of that element at each go, much as a fic author might do across several independent stories.) Overall, S2 Mycroft is more the domestic/familial/art-in-the-blood aspect of the canon character, while S4 Morland is more the invisible manipulator of empire, although neither is neatly subdivided from the other aspect of canon!Mycroft. Personally, I was much more taken with the S4 Morland storyline than with the S2 Mycroft storyline. S2 Mycroft wasn't very recognizable to me, nor did it have all that much to say that I found interesting; S4 Morland was much chewier in its questions about who Mycroft-of-empire might be today. That said, I do wish that Elementary wrote Sherlock to have some affection for either character; I'm a bit tired of the current fashion for a highly antagonistc Sherlock-Mycroft relationship.

Concerning KEP's recs: fyi, 23C's Mycroft has little resemblance to the canon Mycroft. KEP and I enjoy what little we get of her, but I make no representations as to whether she'll satisfy what you're looking for in a Mycroft. (I'll also say that 23C was an unsuccessful pilot for a children's series, later retooled to fit into a different series owned by the same production firm: there are many who find it essentially unwatchable. Myself, I enjoy it primarily as a platform to launch fic from.)

I love Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's book. I spent the first chapter or five wondering what on earth this Mycroft had to do with that Mycroft, before deciding to trust the author and see where it went. I think it still needs another book to close the distance between its own vision and canon, but I really like what it did with addressing both aspects of Mycroft. There are a few lovely bits about his relationship with Sherlock, some moving suggestions about his founding of the Diogenes, and a concerted attempt to reconcile the horrific parts of the British empire with his being a sympathetic figure of Holmesian canon.

...and I should really listen to the relevant Coules/Merrison/Williams radio episodes again, to see what I think of their Mycroft.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, it's wonderful to receive such thoughtful reviews of unexplored Mycroftian corners of the fandom! I see what you mean about the difficulty of balancing a modern critique of imperialism with the canonical presentation of Mycroft-the-omniscient-brother as a sympathetic character. To date, I have focused largely on the sympathetic side of him, but I look forward to seeing how the more difficult elements of his position are handled in the Abdul-Jabbar novel.

I also have never listed to the Coules radio plays, which many people seem to love very much. Thanks for that suggestion, I would like to listen to the two Mycroft stories.

And it's good to hear more about the various adaptations k_e_p mentioned before. Like many Holmesians, I am well accustomed to searching for the good bits in adaptations that don't work as a whole. Doyle trained us well for that! :) Thanks very much for sharing your impressions, I loved hearing about all of them!

[sanguinity]

So, having found the time to relisten, I rather enjoyed Mycroft in the Coules version of Greek Interpreter. (I prolly won't relisten to Bruce-Partington until we get there.)

Do you have a source for the eps?

[sanguinity]

btw, I've now read the first to issues of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's graphic novel about Mycroft. At the risk of being too bald about my opinions, I very strongly dislike it. Unless that is meant to be a mirror-verse of canon -- and this is mirror!Mycroft -- I have no explanation for why that character is called 'Mycroft Holmes', nor what he has to do with the Mycroft we read about in ACD.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Well drat, I'm really sorry to hear that. But thanks a lot for the heads up, otherwise I would have gone looking for them and only wound up disappointed. I still intend to read the actual novel, of course. It's always sad when a series that started really well goes off the rails, but on the other hand I'm fairly used to that happening and am glad to know fellow fans who can help me find the good and avoid the rest.

Also, thanks as well for sharing your impressions about various versions of Mary with me, too, I'm sorry I haven't come back to that sooner. I had hoped to be able to watch some by now and swap notes with you, but the end of this year is a bit of a madhouse. 2017, though. I'm going to broaden my Holmesian horizons. Thanks a lot for thinking of me and letting me know the latest.

[sanguinity]

The novel and comics appear to be entirely separate continuities, fortunately, otherwise it would be very difficult for me to keep my dislike of one from contaminating my affection for the other. (In fact, the two appear to be separate universes: there's an eldritch-steampunk vibe going on the comics that was wholly absent in the novel. I'm also incapable of believing that these two Mycrofts are meant to be the same characterization, they're that divergent from each other.)

And no worries about when you get around to picking up a conversation again, and especially so when it requires watching/reading some things first. I'm painfully slow about that myself, and well understand that it has to fit in between all the other things one does. I'm happy to hear further Mary or Mycroft thoughts whenever it happens to be that you have them. :-)