Customer Reviews

The Hound of Heaven: A Pictorial Sequence

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I won't make this too painful.

"The Hound of Heaven," by Francis Thompson is an impressionistic poem describing the spiritual salvation of the author from a life of drugs, debauchery and debasement. Though inspiring and powerful to some, the poem struck me as overwrought though hyper-sincere.

Painter RH Ives Gammell spent 30 years deciding how to capture the poem on canvas, resulting in a 23-panel oeuvre displayed in this book. Gammell, fascinated by the theories of Carl Jung and by all things esoteric, painted the poem not as a tale of Christian salvation, but as the journey of the soul toward wholeness. Using the Academic painting style he championed, Gammell populated his canvases with all manner of alchemical symbolism, goddesses, pagan and Christian allusions, animals and natural elements.

Brigid M. Boardman enters the fray to detail the accomplishments of both artists and to try to explain what is going on in the paintings. Her explications -- which are as tortured and overwrought as the paintings and the poem that preceded them -- don't always make sense. Where they capture Gammell's intent, they fail to connect with any sense of symbolism comprehensible to a modern reader. And there is much that she leaves unexplained entirely.

While the paintings -- with their earnestness and studied emotionalism -- are fun to look at in their own way, it all comes down to this: "The Hound of Heaven" is a crappy interpretation of crappy paintings about a crappy poem.