Samuel D. Ehrhart, Puck’s greeting to the new year, 1898, from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, Keppler & Schwarzmann, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
We fished a bunch this year. We fished for cutthroat in Idaho and pike in New Hampshire. In Mississippi I caught my largest fish ever, a black drum, and after fishing for tiny brook trout spent an hour in a peculiarly pleasant Vermont laundromat (which still sends me friendly emails–how did it get my email address?). In the Catskills Joan Wulff told me to relax my shoulder, I jumped a tarpon in the Everglades, and we floated past suburban golf courses near Chicago. I spooked bonefish just outside the fence of the Honolulu airport, while military and commercial jets alternated use of the runway. We stood on ladders in Nevada. It was a good year for for fishing.
Honolulu with Jake Brooks. That’s Kris in the picture, not Jake.
This will start the third year for this blog. Before I kept a blog I kept journals, but a blog is harder. Someone might read it, so the writing needs to be better. My journal now consists mostly of baseball scores and random notes. The last journal entry was during the World Series, October 30. Nationals won. Dammit.
One of the blog’s sideshows is the statistics page. I can keep up with how many people are reading stuff and what country they’re from. I had more than twice the number of lookers this year than last, and I figure not all of those were me reading myself. There’s not a lot of specifics in the statistics. I can tell if someone goes onto the blog on a particular day, what they looked at, and what country they’re from, and there are daily, monthly, and yearly totals. Most visitors are from the States, with Canada a distant second. China is third, but I suspect that most visits from China have more to do with bots than reading. Namibia? Bangladesh? Jordan? I think my kids stopped reading, but I can’t really tell that from the scorecard, so they still got Christmas presents. Where is Moldova?
New Hampshire with Chuck DeGray.
It’s gratifying when someone reads several items, and it’s always fun to see something that I wrote for purely personal reasons, that has nothing to do with fly fishing, get read. Why did that South African read my post from last year about True Grit, and who in England is reading that post about Zurbarán’s Crucifixion? The most popular post for the year was about Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which is a wonderful place and a place I’d encourage anyone to go. My April Fool’s post about buying Pyramid Lake ladders got plenty of traffic.
Early in 2018 I posted a blog that included a lie a guide had told me, about his background as a Navy seal. He wasn’t. He apparently wasn’t any kind of military. In 2019 somebody who knew the guide found the post and it started to circulate. I suppose the guide told the story to work a larger tip, or maybe to justify his wacko right-wing politics. He wasn’t a bad guide, and he told a good story, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to fish with him again. I did leave him a good tip though.
With Richard Schmidt, Pass Christian, Mississippi.
Of all the places we fished last year, the place that surprised me most was the Talapoosa River in Alabama, and the fish that surprised me most was its redeye bass. I had never been on a pretty Southeastern river, so that was some of the surprise, but the fish fit the river. Redeye weren’t the river’s only fish: we caught Alabama bass, bluegill and long-ear sunfish, but it was the redeye that charmed.
They’re a small fish: they rarely weigh more than a pound, but they need clean water and, one supposes, pretty places, because they themselves are so clean-lined and pretty. They have a fine shape, well proportioned scales, fins, and jaws, and a bright iridescent turquoise belly and lower jaw balanced by smallmouth bands of warpaint on the face and olive green horizontal lines rising to their back’s dark mass. Lovely.
Tallapoosa River with East Alabama Fly Fishing
Mathew Lewis is an Auburn-PhD candidate geneticist who studies redeye and has written an excellent small book on fly fishing for Redeye Bass, titled, appropriately, Fly Fishing for Redeye Bass. I’ve fished for river bass before, smallmouth in Virginia and Illinois, Guadalupe and largemouth in Texas, and there’s a commonality to it. Cast to the banks. Cast the slackwater next to current, cast to faster current for smallmouths and slackwater for largemouth. Matthew and I traded some emails, and I meant to come back and write specifically about the redeye, but I never got around to it. I think about those fish and that river though, and it’s a place I would go again.
Catching the five subspecies of redeye should be a thing.
In addition to Matthew’s book there are good things on the web that discuss the redeye:
We spent a great two days fishing with Chuck DeGray as far north as we’ve ever been, and Silver Creek lived up to its hype, but my favorite place to fish–and I suspect Kris’s–was Everglades National Park. It is so alive, so beautiful and isolated, and I promise it wasn’t just because I jumped a decent tarpon. I did jump a decent tarpon though.
Happy New Years! I hope your 2020 is as good as our 2019!
We packed to skip the baggage claim in Chicago. We flew in early on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day looking for things we’d never seen.
The only specialized fishing gear we took were polarized lenses. Our guides, Midwest Waters Anglers, provided all the gear, and it was great gear.
What I lost, Where we didn’t go.
I lost my beloved Bonefish & Tarpon Trust Yeti thermos. I really liked that Thermos.
I wish we’d had time to go to Springfield for the Abraham Lincoln Museum. We could have easily spent more time in Chicago.
What we ate.
By some measures Houston is now the most ethnically diverse city in the US, but that’s somewhat disingenuous. It treats all white people as a lump, which is like treating all Asians and Asian Americans as a lump, or treating all Africans and African Americans as a lump. Chicago’s story is in part a story of 19th and 20th century first-generation Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Welsh, and Jewish immigrants, white immigration that wasn’t from England via New England–the immigrants in The Jungle are Lithuanian. In 2019 the nativist impulse is aimed at immigrants from Mexico and Central America. In 1850 it was the anti-Catholic No-Nothings opposed to Irish and German Catholic immigration. Things never change.
Uncle Sam’s youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing, lithograph, 1854, Sarony & Co., lithographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. American political prints, 1766-1876. From Wikipedia. He looks a lot like Lord Byron.
As of 2010, Chicago is 31.7% non-Hispanic whites, 32.9% black or African American, 5.5% Asian, and 13.3% Hispanic, and 16.1% mixed or other, but there are lots of ethnic traditions not covered in those numbers. We wanted Chicago ethnic food, and got a list of restaurants from our friend Tom, who knows these things. He said that there were three great ethnic food cities in the US, New York, Chicago, and Houston, and that the hard part of the list for Chicago was coming up with stuff we didn’t have in Houston. It’s a great list, even if we only made it to three of the places. Some of Tom’s notes are included in quotes:
Min Hing Cuisine – “great dim sum for breakfast (6 kinds of shrimp dumplings is good enough for me).” We went there straight from the airport. Chinese are about 1.6% of Chicago’s population, and first got there before 1860 with the railroads. The population boomed in the 1950s and 60s.
Parachute – “fusion Korean American, in the best way.” This place has a Michelin star, and seems to be everyone’s favorite restaurant, Alinea be damned. Make reservations in advance. We didn’t make reservations, and getting in on a Saturday night without a reservation might be harder than catching steelhead. We didn’t catch any Illinois steelhead either.
Shokran – “Moroccan kebabs and salads, also tangines and couscous. Cash only. BYOB.”
Staropolska or Lutnia Polish – About 6.7% of Chicago is Polish, with Polish the third language, after English and Spanish. We ate at Staropolska, just around the corner from St. Hyacinth Basilica. The young blonde waitress with the Polish accent was proud that it was the oldest Polish restaurant in Chicago. It could use some freshening, but that might ruin the vibe, and the food was great and the service was great.
Staropolska, cabbage rolls and potato pancakes. That red sauce seemed to be heavily paprikad, and was outstanding.
Jibek Jolu – “dumplings and noodles . . . Uighur.”
Sayat-Nova – “Armenian. Typical middle eastern fare . . . ” It was also in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and we went on the Sunday night of a long weekend when there was still plenty of shopping to be done. After some terrified driving we found a parking garage ($26 for a bit more than an hour, and well worth it). Kris loved Sayat-Nova, and said I have to ask Tom for recommendations wherever we go. I wish Tom could have helped out in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Sayat-Nova. Lamb meatballs in yoghurt and mint sauce.
Little Bucharest Bistro – “quality Central European food, excellent service.” Romanian. We didn’t go, but the descriptions on the internet were great. It wasn’t far from Staropolska.
Birrieria Zaragoza – “fast casual Mexican all about goat.” The Mexican population is the fastest growing population in Chicago, so it made sense to include something, but it broke Tom’s rule, sort of. I don’t know of anyplace in Houston that specializes in goat.
The best thing about ethnic Chicago restaurants? Other than the food of course. I could wear my stylish fishing clothes, the ones designed by the fashion-forward stylists at Patagonia, to any of them, which I did.
If that wasn’t enough of a list, Tom provided a supplement: “Ghareeb Nawaz Indo-Pakistani. San Soo Gob San-Korean. Galit-Israeli-Middle Eastern. Kaboobi Persian Grill (North side – our favorite). Cabra Peruvian (Rooftop restaurant). If you have time for breakfast before you leave, make it to Dove’s Luncheonette….”.
Books, Movies, TV.
There are tons of movies from Chicago, and we watched The Blues Brothers, The Fugitive, and The Untouchables. Pretty good Chicago movies. We never watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I may be too old for it now.
Mostly I read about Lincoln. I wonder how he managed to govern so well without Tweets. This is a good time to ponder Lincoln, and there’s a ton of stuff out there. Sometimes we get better leaders than we deserve. Sometimes apparently we don’t.
I read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Auggie March. I had tried to read Bellow before, but didn’t quite get it. This time was better. I tried to read The Jungle, but found it too painful. I listened to a lot of Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski novels, but never did figure out how to pronounce Warshawski’s name, which is a weak and obscure joke about the inevitable unlikable character trope in every novel. If they can’t pronounce her name, they’re almost certainly the villain. I listened to some Dresden File novels by Jim Butcher, but didn’t think they were nearly as amusing as when I’d listened to them years ago. Michael Harvey wrote some good Chicago mysteries, and I listened to those when I got tired of the others.
Donuts.
We picked up Polish pastries at Kurowski Sausage Shop, pretzel-like crescents lightly filled with an unidentifiable jam, but I was too intimidated to brave the meat case. On Sunday morning we made a quick drive to Oak Park for Donuts at Firecakes Donuts and a quick visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright studio. The donuts were just fine, and I wish we’d had time to look at the scattered Wright houses. Next time.
There are Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere in Chicago. Chicago should do better.
Playlist.
This was a long list, so it’ll be pretty general.
Chicago’s population is 32.9% non-Hispanic African or African American. The percentage of African American population in Houston, a Southern city with significant historic black communities, is only 22.9%. For the Houston metropolitan area, Houston plus the suburbs, the number drops slightly, to 21%, but for Chicago 32.9% plunges to 17% when you add in the suburbs.
The two cities are of roughly the same size, but their largest growth occurs about a century apart. The historic African American population in Houston has its origin in slavery, but much of the dispersion from the city into the suburbs occurred after the Civil Rights Movement, and Blacks apparently moved out to the suburbs in about the same numbers as they stayed in Houston. In Chicago, the boom in African American population occurred in the great migration, from 1910 to 1960, and plenty of movement to the suburbs occurred largely before the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks apparently stuck to (or were confined to) the City.
Why this is kicking off the music playlist may not be obvious, but there is a lot of great music out of Chicago’s African American community. There are three cities most responsible for the origination of jazz: New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago. The earliest migration of the Blues was from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. This is Great Migration stuff, and stuff that shaped us profoundly.
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, 1925, Chicago
There’s another odd thing about Illinois music, there’s a surprising number of good folk/country/Americana musicians out of Illinois. Illinois is our second flattest state after Florida, tucked in as a drainage between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. It hides all that flatness with a combination of skyscrapers and trees. Anyway, all that flatness makes for great farmland, and except for Chicago, this is Midwest farm country. It’s no surprise that farm country makes for country music and Republican voters.
Jazz
I probably should have done better, but Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s first recordings are from Chicago. The singers Dee Alexander and Johnny Hartman, and Herbie Hancock.
Blues
Of course the Blues Brothers was set in Chicago. Where else would it be? All of these musicians were from, cycled through, wrote about, or sang about Chicago: Robert Johnson, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jimmy Rogers (no, not that Jimmie Rodgers), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Little Walter, Luther Allison, Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Son Seales, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Lonnie Brooks, Earl Hooker, Freddie King . . . Is Bo Diddley the Blues? We talked about going to a blues bar on Saturday, but we’re old, things start late, and fishing starts early. Next time.
Dovydenas, Jonas, Muddy Waters, Checkerboard Lounge, 423 E. 43rd St., Chicago; Chicago, Illinois, 1977, Library of Congress, Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection.
Folk/Country/Americana
John Prine, Allison Krauss, Shawn Colvin, Son Volt, Wilco, Steve Goodman.
Has there ever been a sadder song than Steve Goodman’s A Dying Fan’s Last Request? Not only was Goodman in fact dying, he was a Cub’s fan. There is nothing more pathetic than the Chicago Cubs, but it’s still one of the best baseball songs ever.
Scattered and Inconsisten Rock
In early adolescence, I thought Chicago was the greatest band ever. I liked the brass, I liked the politics, I liked the guitar. I hadn’t listened to them since. Color My World was probably the first song I learned to play on the guitar, though in my defense it was probably before it became the most important high school prom song ever written. I still think 25 or 6 to 4 was a pretty great song. Pretty good song. Ok, I still like it.
Reo Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Smashing Pumpkins.
When Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville came out in the 90s it got great reviews and I bought a copy, probably without actually reading the reviews. We were on a family car trip and I started the CD in the car. Some song came on, Flower? Fuck and Run? Anyway, it was really not age appropriate, either for me or my children. This trip was probably the second time I’d listened to it. It’s pretty raw in a “I grew up in Chicago suburbs and graduated from Oberlin” sort of way. It may be age appropriate for my children now, but it’s still not age appropriate for me.
Random Stuff
Allister, Somewhere Down on Fullerton.
Mobstability, Crook County (Bond Crusher Mix).
Rhett Miller, The El.
The Lawrence Arms, A Guided Tour of Chicago.
Andrew Bird, Pulaski at Night. Good song.
Common, Chi-City.
Frank Sinatra, My Kind of Town.
Graham Nash, Chicago/We Can Change the World.
Sufjan Stevens, Illinois.
Dan Fogalberg, Illinois.
Ben Folds, Effington.
Twista, Crook County.
Kanye West, Homecoming
Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, Lake Shore Drive
Jim Croce, Bad Bad Leroy Brown.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mahler, Symphony #9 in D. The Chicago Symphony Center Orchestra Hall is magnificent.
Guitar.
Didn’t take one. A guy in the airport told me that he always checked his guitar, and convinced me that I could do the same with a good enough case. Kris thought that was a great idea. Stuffing a guitar in the overhead is a pain. I got back to Houston and ordered a new case.
We fished with Kurt Nelson, co-owner of Midwest Waters Anglers. I picked Midwest by the worst possible method: I googled Chicago – flyfish – guide, and they were the first website that popped up. It’s a good website, and I got lucky, Kurt’s a fine guide. Illinois isn’t exactly a destination fishery, and Kurt said most of his clients lived in the City or are in Chicago for family or business. Like me probably a lot of people get to Kurt via Google.
Midwest Waters apparently guides several rivers around the City, and where we fished was the most urban, but Kurt said his other rivers were blown out from rain. We fished the 28-mile DuPage River, in Chicago suburbia, from Plainfield eight miles down river to Joliet. We were usually isolated by vegetation, but sometimes we floated past backyards, and sometimes we could hear the whack of golf balls from the golf course and race a golf cart. We passed under roadways and train tracks and power lines that sizzled with current. We passed by large engines that we couldn’t see but that were too large for tractors and too immobile for trains. There were some kayakers, but not many–during the summer there would be a tube hatch, but not this late. For such an urban place the river and the banks were surprisingly clean.
We put in at a canoe launch near Plainfield. Kurt fished a StealthCraft drift boat with a 30 HP Yamaha jet motor. That’s a pretty big motor, but we only used it as a convenient snag for my fly line. Even with the obstacle I would rather fish from a drift boat than just about anything, and this was a big comfortable boat. There are, after all, always obstacles just waiting to snag your fly line. My feet never got wet, and I’m certain that thanks to the boat it never rained. Ok, maybe not that last.
There was steady current from bank to bank, without a lot of river drama: we weren’t reading seams or casting to rocks. We did look for eddies, but they were always where a tree or bank cut stopped the current for a few feet. There was some water clarity, not much but some. It was also overcast, which didn’t help visibility. Kurt said it was usually clear enough to sight cast, clear in part because of invasive zebra mussels. We fished for smallmouth, though I did cast for carp once or twice, casting to mud puffs in the water. Kris caught a nice fish early on a medium yellow popper, ten minutes from the launch. It was dark green with bronze fins, a couple of pounds, exactly what a smallmouth should be.
Over the course of the day I fished a big deer hair frog and medium yellow poppers, Bougles, both cast to the banks then drifted like dry flies with periodic pops or gurgles. I never catch fish with frogs, and I didn’t disappoint this time. Consistency is important, and bad juju with frogs is one of those things at which I’m consistent. They always look so excellent, cost so much, and then fail me because, well, me. I just can’t fish them with conviction.
Kurt Nelson photo
I caught some fish on the poppers, at least one anyway, and Kris happily fished poppers most of the day. Most of the fish I caught were on a purple conehead woolly bugger variant, maybe a size 6 or 8, tied with grizzly hackle and lots of green rubber legs wrapped behind the conehead. I fished them like a dead drift nymph, waiting for any line tick or hesitation. That was new for me and woolly buggers, which I usually retrieve like a streamer. Since the fly often ticked along the bottom I must have hook set a thousand times for the five or six fish I caught. If Kurt had charged by the hook set he’d be a rich man.
I really should learn to take pictures of the flies I fish. I never take enough pictures.
I caught my biggest fish, about two pounds, when for some reason I let the line rest midstream on my a backcast, and then Kurt yelled did you see that! when I picked up to cast. Of course I didn’t see it. I was facing the bank and my back was to the fly. I lay the fly down and the smallmouth came again for it. Luck, dumb luck, I wish I could be as consistently good with luck as I am consistently bad with big deer hair frogs.
Kurt Nelson photo
There was lots of riverside vegetation, and lots of floating grass from the week prior’s rain. I did plenty of vegan fishing in the trees, and most retrieves required grass removal. There was river grass piled at my feet where I cleaned the line and my fly. Sorry Kurt.
I reckon we cast a thousand times between us, and by the end of the day my shoulder ached and my forearm began to cramp. We cast, and then cast some more, and then cast for a while. By late in the day we were worn out and lazy, just flinging the fly to any old place and maybe letting it sit just a wee bit longer than strictly speaking could be considered fishing as opposed to hanging out.
We didn’t take our own rods, and one of the things I realized was how much I like to fish with guides’ stuff. They pick their stuff well. Kurt fished nice Hatch reels, but more striking were the rods, one piece rods, which I’d never cast before. Used to be ferrules were considered a design flaw and the fewer the better, but even then one piece rods were rare. These were Loomis IMG Pros, 8’10, 7 weight for me and 8 weight for Kris, and casting was a joy. Yeah, there were lots of tangles in grass and trees, but I never minded taking risks with that rod, and most of my casts did more or less what I wanted them to do, which was first not to hook me or anybody else and second to go somewhere in the vicinity of the bank.
Kurt fished short leaders, maybe 7 feet, but they were longer than what I usually use for bass, and they were tapered a bit, with a butt of maybe 25 pound and a 16 pound tippet. He said that sometimes he used a mid section, but that because of the floating grass he wanted fewer knots. The leader worked well though, and the flies turned over. The grass I caught was usually on the flies anyway, and the single knot was rarely a problem.
The fly line was a bass line with an aggressive front taper, maybe a Rio smallmouth line? I fished a streamer for a bit, a pretty white baitfish thing tied on maybe a size 4, on an intermediate tipped sinking line. That line was a monster. It was also a magnet for grass, so I didn’t fish it long.
Kurt pointed out something interesting, something that explained a lot to me about smallmouth. Some fish fight the hook, some fish don’t, and then there are variations in between. I’ll never understand, for instance, the Gulf Coast popularity of speckled trout: it’s like catching grass on an Illinois river. Once hooked it’s done, and even the hook-up isn’t all that exciting. Largemouth are great fun but it’s mostly fun in the violence of the first few minutes, especially for bigger fish. Smallmouth never give up. They take like largemouth and then they don’t stop until they’re in the net. Then they swim away.
Like I said, Illinois is not a destination fishery, but Chicago is a destination city. While I’m in no hurry to fish the DuPage again, I’ll fish again near Chicago next time I’m there. I’d fish with Kurt again in a heartbeat. It reminded me of the Broken Bow in Oklahoma, not the river itself, but how the river fits in its space. If you live near there, in Dallas or Tulsa for the Broken Bow or Chicago for the DuPage, if that is your river, it is a very good river. No one will ever know and appreciate that river like the angler who gets to fish it three or four times every summer, year after year. You can learn a lot on the DuPage, not because it’s magnificent, or beautiful, or any sort of superlative, but because of days floated and green and bronze fish, some lost, some caught, some watched, because special knowledge of that river is yours. You could learn everything you need to know about fly fishing on that river, and with Kurt. I liked the river, but I was a visitor for a day. It would be an entirely different place if it were home. It could be a good home.
Follow Fifty Flyfish on Facebook. Illinois was state 14.
Francisco de Zurbarán, Spanish, Agnus Dei, c. 1635-1640, Museo del Prado.
My favorite museum is Madrid’s Prado, but every time I go to Chicago, I visit a Francisco de Zurbarán painting, The Crucifixion, at the Art Institute. That’s pretty consistent with my fondness for the Prado. I guess I like Spanish stuff, and there’s not that much Golden Age Spanish art outside of Spain. The Art Institute is in Chicago, which as a city is just a bit less well-known than New York, and relatively speaking it has a particularly good collection of Spanish art, which is just a bit less well-known than Dutch or Italian art. New York may have gotten the Dutch and Italians, but Chicago lucked out with the Spanish.
Francisco de Zurbarán, Spanish, The Crucifixion, 1626, Art Institute of Chicago, Creative Commons license.
There’s nothing that really explains my attraction to The Crucifixion. It’s a big painting, Christ is at least life-sized, but it’s in a room of big paintings in a museum full of good stuff. In the room there’s at least one other Zurbarán, and I think a spectacular El Greco, but it’s The Crucifixion that I always remember. I am Christian, but lackadaisically so: father forgive me. When Jesus gathered disciples by the Sea of Galilee I’d likely as not have said I’d just as soon keep fishing. In these later days of evangelical paranoia I kinda wish most Christians would keep their mouths shut: if you’re Christian aren’t you supposed to expect persecution? Isn’t marginalization part of the package? But the religious particularly suffer from the curse that if you can think it it must be true. Maybe that’s part of what I like about The Crucifixion, its focus and austerity. There is no noise.
Zurbarán, born 1598 in Extremadura, was a contemporary of the better-known Velázquez, born 1599 in Seville. They both trained in Seville, were both court painters for Phillip IV, and both died in Madrid in 1660. It was the age of El Greco, Murillo, and Zurbarán. It was the age of Cervantes. It was the Golden Century, el Siglo de Oro. In Spain there was music and architecture and world domination. Spain was New York City.
During eight months in 1626, Zurbarán painted 21 paintings for the Dominicans of San Pablo de Real Monastery in Seville, including The Crucifixion. It was his first major commission, and established his reputation. Painting commissions for rich monks isn’t much of a thing anymore, but Seville in 1626 was rich as a Spanish grandee, and how else are monks going to spend their money? Wine, women, and song only go so far, especially if you’re a monk. Spanish wealth is in the history of that painting: the power and overwhelming religious devotion of Spain, the height of the Counter-Reformation and Spanish art. It’s a grand moment, cruel and unfettered, and all of that history hangs on the Institute’s wall with TheCrucifixion.
But you don’t need the history. The painting speaks for itself. In that painting Christ is dead, pierced through the side. There’s nothing in the painting that points toward the certainty of Resurrection. The repose of the face doesn’t portray future life but release from recent pain. Maybe divinity shines in the luminous skin, but Christ’s skin is almost equally shadow. This Crucifixion is a lonely, isolated moment, powerful not in its divinity but in the ropey humanity of the muscles of Christ’s arms and torso, the collapse of the head, and the vulnerable turn of a knee.
Mrs. George Swinton (Elizabeth Ebsworth), John Singer Sargent, American 1856, Art Institute of Chicago.
Artists often display their technical chops by painting cloth, and Zurbarán’s loincloth is a bit of a drum solo. Zurbarán was adept at painting white cloth, and he often included draped white cloth in his paintings.* The loincloth is clean, draped, and uncontaminated by suffering. I suppose it adds some contrast to the otherwise rigid cross, and something is necessary to keep the privates private. Maybe it aids the composition by adding movement, but its lushness seems odd, inconsistent. It floats in space separate from the body and the cross.
Cynically I always think that the painting’s black background shares an artistic impulse with a velvet Elvis, and Zurbarán used the same background often, perhaps most famously in his Agnus Dei, the best of which is in the Prado. Maybe a Velvet Elvis in a Mexican market is a cultural remnant of those black backgrounds?
The focus on Christ alone is outside previous conventions of Crucifixion art, but the Counter-Reformation demanded it. In earlier European art the Crucifixion generally required an audience. It required Mary and the other Mary and some angels and some saints and maybe a halo and maybe the depiction of the patron who commissioned the painting, who just happened to be in Jerusalem for the long Passover weekend. There is an El Greco Crucifixion in the Prado that has so many people and angels–one angel catching in its hand the gushing blood from Christ’s side–that one wonders why all those witnesses didn’t just overpower the Romans and pull Jesus off the tree. Zurbarán gives us none of that. Zurbarán’s painting is a dark wooden crucifix on a lonely wall. It doesn’t portray devotion, it demands it.
El Greco, Spanish, The Crucifixion, 1597, Museo Nacional del Prado.
It may also be that Zurbarán wasn’t very good at painting backgrounds. I’d like it to be more, I’d like there to be genius. His painting’s dark monochromatic bleakness (there’s a term for it, tenebrism) is often compared to Caravaggio, but there’s no evidence that he was influenced by Caravaggio other than shared mastery of extreme chiaroscuro. Whether influenced by Caravaggio or no the style was something of a thing in Seville. It shows up in early Velázquez, and Velázquez’s greater success must be in part because he could move so successfully beyond black velvet as a medium.
Diego Velázquez, Spanish, Christ Crucified, 1632, Museo del Prado.
Whatever. This is a fishing blog, and I shouldn’t be writing about a painting. I should be writing about the ecological devastation of the Great Lakes. I should be writing about alewives, lampreys, round goby, and zebra and quagga mussels, of algae blooms caused by agricultural runoff and the coming invasion of the Great Lakes by Asian carp. This is decidedly not a Jesus blog, and the mysticism that a relatively obscure Spanish master inspires is probably going to doom this bit of self-indulgence to even greater obscurity. Still, right now this is also about Illinois, and of all things Illinois that painting is what I think of first.
The round goby, Ontario’s invading species program, http://www.invadingspecies.com.
