In Rome in the spring of 1832 a twenty-two-year-old Russian art student called Prince Grigory Gagarin met a twenty-six-year-old Irish girl called Julia Taaffe. After a few weeks of courtship he proposed to her and she refused.
All that is known of the courtship are the watercolour drawings he sent her. They were preserved in an album by Julia’s great-niece and passed on to her great-niece. The accompanying letters have disappeared except for a few lines here and there on the same sheet as the drawings. Perhaps Brigid Brophy, herself is the third great-niece in the chain. One must be allowed to speculate since most of the story she has hung on the watercolours is speculation. In fact, this must he one of the very few books written almost entirely in the past conditional tense or its equivalent: “It was surely at the Villa Medici, under the auspices of Horace Vernet, that Gagarin met Julia Taaffe”. Vernet the painter, was the director of the Academie de France in Rome, which then as now was housed in the Villa Medici: he was very hospitable and gave parties where intellectuals and artists mixed with members of society. Julia could therefore have met Stendhal and Berlioz there, but would just have missed Mendelssohn.
She was not really a wild goose at all – an Irish Catholic expatriate whose ancestors had fled to Europe after William III’s victory. Her branch of the family had remained in its castle in County Louth. But she was the youngest of ten girls, most of them unmarried: the two who had managed to find husbands had married into the Malian aristocracy. Brigid Brophy therefore concludes that Julia and her sister were sent to Rome to do the same. This enables her to make some gentle feminist remarks about “the fate of girls” in the early nineteenth century, and to assume that Julia regarded the multitudinous suitors who surround her in Gagarin’s drawings as “agents of social and economic stringency”. In one picture she is a flower, the suitors are caterpillars (“an explicit sexual metaphor”), and “Julia herself perhaps felt like a flower in a flower press”.
Brigid Brophy’s sympathies lie with Julia – who looks a smug puss. But certainly she does not dislike Gagarin. Nobody could. His drawings, as well as being charming, droll, and accomplished, display an endearing good humour and self-irony which seem very tolerant and mature for a love-sick youth of twenty-two. Besides, he looks exceedingly attractive – tall, slim and dark. If he made himself look taller and slimmer than his rivals, that too is rather endearing: he was, after all, trying to woo Julia.
Gagarin was a pupil of the famous Russian Neo-Classical painter Bryulov. These early drawings fall into two categories: spoof Neo-Classical compositions in which Julia appears as a goddess or triumphant Roman general; and others, which show Gagarin’s later romantic Biedermeier style almost fully developed. The most successful and enchanting of them is a night piece with himself writing a love letter to Julia like some “male Tatiana”. Gagarin is not unknown: though not, perhaps, Russia‘s Caspar David Friedrich, he is at least her Blechen, or perhaps her Bonington, since he painted mainly in watercolour.
Brigid Brophy’s publication of these drawings, presumably unpublished before, is a small art-historical coup, and specialists in Russian nineteenth-century painting may be mildly shocked to find them presented in a jeu d’ esprit rather than a learned journal. Like Julia Taaffe, Brigid Brophy can be a tease.
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