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The Sherlockian Art Collector The idea of Sherlockian art is, on the surface, about art of Sherlock Holmes. Illustrators of the Holmes stories themselves, like Paget or Greuze. Modern Holmes cartoonists like Bond or Shiffman. Art of Sherlock Holmes is, for the most part, not hard to find, not likely to be the subject of an enduring quest. Quests require rare and unknown things, and I’ve been questing for a different sort Sherlockian art since my early days as a Holmes fan. Mind you, it’s a very lackadaisical quest. I don’t claim to be any kind of art afficianado, and don’t travel in those channels much. But when I do stumble into a venue that deals with prints or volumes of aged paintings, I invariably look for two names: Vernet and Greuze. Vernet and Greuze – it’s almost like they should have been artistic arch-enemies, and surely seem so to the ardent Sherlockian. Vernet was the brother of Sherlock Holmes’s grandmother, and Greuze was the one artist whose original work hung in the office of James Moriarty, Holmes’s arch-nemesis. Two artists whose fame has not grown with time, Vernet and Greuze are very quest-worthy. If you find a book on either man, it will be an old book. If you find an art print . . . well, you just don’t find many art prints of Greuze’s work, or any of the Vernet clan of painters. At least that’s the way it used to be. In over two decades of keeping an eye out for such things, I found only one Greuze print, "Boy with Ruff." The young man in question looks somewhat nervous to me, almost as if he’s in Moriarty’s presence. I’ve had it hanging in my Sherlockian study for years as a sort of subtle Sherlockiana, just to see if my visitors have any art knowledge of things Sherlock. Of course, along comes the World Wide Web, eBay, alibris, and the like, and the Sherlockian quest of old goes out the window. Want a rare book? Finding it is now not so much the problem as paying the price to acquire it, thanks to the net. (In most cases – try to acquire a copy of The Elementary Methods of Sherlock Holmes by Brad Keefauver, and even the net can’t help you . . . or me, for that matter.) And this week, I found that the same thing applied to those art prints I’ve been casually looking for all these years. I was on AllPosters.com looking at movie posters and noticed that they had art prints. A quick zap of their search engine and . . . voila! . . . twelve prints by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. And while they don’t have the one specifically mentioned as hanging in Moriarty’s office, there is a very charmingly appropriate one entitled "Le Petit Mathematicien." One almost fancies it being of a young James Moriarty, except for the fact that Greuze died in 1805, making Moriarty a very, very old man (and that fight at Reichenbach Falls not too exciting). Once I decided I just had to have that particular Greuze, I moved on to the Vernets. That brought up eleven prints – five by Joseph Vernet (Holmes’s great-great-great-uncle), three by Carle Vernet (Holmes’s great-great-uncle), three by some guy who had locations with "Vernet" in the title of his paintings, and none by Horace Vernet (Holmes’s great-uncle – or at least the Vernet that I consider most likely to have been brother to Sherlock’s grandma). Vernet prints were a bit pricier, so I settled on a less expensive piece by Carle entitled "Duke of Orleans and Duke of Chartres Meet In 1788." All this has sent me back to the books I’ve picked up on Jean Baptiste-Greuze and Horace Vernet, and I’m now puzzling out an article on the artists for The Holmes & Watson Report’s next issue. My casual quest for art will continue, however, as a print of the exact piece Moriarty had in his office, as well as a work by Horace Vernet, still elude me. Your humble correspondent, |
