There was only a six-year difference in age between the two Caruana Dingli painters, yet they could not have been more unlike or far apart. Both were artists of exceptional merit – and that is about where the similarity ends.
The painter wrote a steady stream of letters which I have found in my father’s quite unorganised archive- Giovanni Bonello
People today know Edward Caruana Dingli better than they do Robert – in fact, Edward’s name has almost become a household word in Malta. That weighting against Robert is probably not as fair as it should be.
Same parents, same upbringing, same talents, and yet they went their separate, often contrasting if not hostile, ways. Edward, the elder, threw his lot in with those shrewd enough to exalt the Empire; Robert, with the artless simpletons who preferred to exalt Maltese nationhood instead. One got all the fat commissions, the other all the rejections, fatter still.
Both were undoubtedly superior artists. A fine genetic pool to start with, and persevering studies had blessed Edward with an astonishing technical skill which he put to excellent use in flattering, skin-deep portraits, in social scenes totally devoid of social conscience, in genre pictures in which prettiness cannot be faulted, but the search for interior harmonies can.
Edward turned shallowness into his profoundest virtue. He always played safe: safe Stricklandian politics, safe traditional, if not tired, aesthetics, safe lucrative contacts and commissions, safe insurance in government jobs. Maybe the only adventurous step he took in his life was dumping his own wife and settling down with the wife of his friend, a former almost-beauty – an outright declaration of war against the shocked and horrified bourgeoisie. That apart, Edward always knew which side his bread was buttered and Marmited. Somehow or other, he always made sure to fall on all fours on the right side of imperialist largesse.
Robert, on the other hand, opted to be more of the reckless prodigal son. He took an active role in anti-imperialist politics, bravely putting his name to his scathing nationalist satires and cartoons, at a time when advancement in any field in Malta presupposed a blind loyalty either to imperialism or to freemasonry – better still to both. His art interests were much more varied, far more adventurous than Edward’s.
Differently from his elder brother who (quite wisely) steered clear of religious art for most of his life, Robert had, through calling or circumstance, to try his hand at it, though none too happily for himself or for his professional reputation.
Edward seemed to be almost totally disinterested in the art revolution that was then sweeping the world, immune to its ground-breaking modernist impulses, its cubism, its non-figurative abstractions, its futurism, its fauvism, its metaphysical language, its expressionism and a score of other boldly deviant artistic doctrines. However torrid, none of these fires ever singed Edward.
They actually passed him by unnoticed, happily sheltered as he was inside his bland Italianate impressionism that had by then turned yes, into superb technical virtuosity, but an ailing, sterile, retarded aesthetic virtuosity nonetheless.
Robert, on the other hand, slowly and perhaps belatedly, started feeling the siren’s lure wafting from Europe and the time came for him to place his talent and inspiration in the wake of the more moderately daring experimentations that were then taking over all the more progressive metropolises of art.
Some of his later forays into vaguely cubist landscape compositions may rightly claim to be among the very first Maltese ventures into the disturbing and hazardous quagmires of modern art. If for nothing else, for this alone he would deserve the kudos that always seemed to elude him and that he never quite got.
Another trait that distinguished Edward from Robert can be traced in their relationship with their charismatic teacher Giuseppe Calì, the old artist whom everyone seemed to look up to – the doyen and mentor of the Maltese art colony.
Edward apparently nurtured a considerable respect for Calì, while, as the letters show, Robert, though possibly Calì’s favourite pupil, just made no effort to suppress the contempt and disdain in which he held the venerable painter.
Their acute, maybe fanatic worship of art and their even more acute resistance to colonial servitude drew Robert and my father together. The painter, though nine years his senior, shared with him a close friendship, and Robert confided in the 23-year-old Vincenzo Bonello all his heartaches, his ambitions, his defeats, his anger.
Over two periods, when the painter lived away from Malta, he wrote father a steady stream of letters which I have found in my father’s, if I am allowed a euphemism, quite unorganised archive (there may be more).
In 1914-1915, at the outbreak of the First World War, Robert, then unmarried, went to the UK to further his art studies, and from that period I recovered 10 long letters, all written in English and addressed to: Vincent Bonello Esq., 58, Strada Mezzodì, Valletta. Then, in 1923-1924, about 10 years later, Robert settled in Gozo, where he had been engaged to execute some major ecclesiastical commissions.
These later ones he wrote in Maltese, as if following what looks like a rather inconsequential pattern – resorting to English when he was in the UK, and to Maltese when he was in Gozo – one would have thought the recipient would be the determining factor in the choice of language, not the place of posting.
Eighteen letters make up this second batch, this time addressed to Vincenzo Bonello Esq., 58, Strada Leone, Floriana, except for one sent to Father c/o a hotel in Venice.
Father’s letters to Robert seem to have gone missing, and rather unfortunately so, as reading the half-correspondence today is like overhearing only one side of a telephone call. I can only surmise what language my father used to correspond with his absent friend, as I doubt very much he would have written to a close Maltese acquaintance in either English or Maltese, though he had a good command of both. Were I to guess, I would opt for Italian (one of Robert’s letters confirms it).
The sequence of the second of these two batches of correspondence (from Gozo) presents more difficulties, firstly because Robert often left the date out entirely, or just jotted down a rather unhelpful ‘Friday’.
Secondly, because from the envelopes posted in Gozo, someone cut away the postage stamp – together with the date stamp. But, with some hesitation and uncertainty, it is not totally impossible to reconstruct the Gozo sequences.
These letters deal preponderantly with current matters, painters’ gossip, art work in progress, money problems, the international, but mostly British, art scene and, rarely, with more personal issues.
Robert repeatedly makes it clear that he relied very firmly on the judgment of his younger friend in Malta, and that Vincenzo was about the only person he trusted unconditionally, be it in life or in art. His confessions have all the freshness and immediacy of something written with no other agenda than that of getting the load off his chest, and with the degree of freedom and candour that an expectation of confidentiality confers on the writer.
I feel I can safely say that Robert’s letters to Vincenzo constitute a fundamental breakthrough in the understanding of the art milieu of the early 20th century. I do not believe that the spirit any other Maltese artist of that period has had the fortune of being documented so intimately, almost invasively, as Robert Caruana Dingli’s does through these, his own, candid writings.
Robert wrote his first ‘London’ letter to Father from a lodging house in Brixton Road on July 11, 1914, the day after he reached London. He made it there, travelling all across Europe by train, only stopping in Rome for two hours on the way. “I arrived like a negro with the dirt of the smoke on the train and as tired as I could be”.
The boarding house cost him £1. 10s. per week, with food (four meals a day) thrown in – admittedly on the inexpensive side. The tram fare from his lodgings to the West End set him back one penny.
Perhaps the principal reason for Robert’s travel to London was to try and sell an old master painting, claimed to be the work of Rembrandt, which he had shipped to England (how Robert acquired this painting merits a study on its own).
The letters constitute a fundamental breakthrough in the understanding of the art milieu of the early 20th century- Giovanni Bonello
In London he planned to meet Dr Arnold Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929), the world-famous German authority on Rembrandt, to have the picture certified (difficult to see how – Germany and Britain were then at war). Bode may not have been the most accommodating of choices: he had the reputation of being highly ungenerous with his attributions. His mordant remark about Rembrandt having painted 700 pictures, of which 3,000 survive, still echoes today.
Before leaving Malta, Robert had had some sort of showdown with an ecclesiastic in connection with the painting. He asked Father: “How is the priest getting on after he heard that I have left the island? Let him come here if he likes – he would find it a hard bone to chew.”
He made use of his correspondent to convey messages to his father Raffaele: “Tell him that I am alright”. He inquired how the people of Malta were “twisting the news of his departure.”
The next letter, dated December 22, has a new address: The Olives, Footscray Road, New Eltham. Nostalgia for Malta and for his Maltese friends had, by then, started creeping in painfully “I cannot forget our happy times in Malta,” he tells Father, “I cannot in England find a friend” he could care for as much.
“The English people are a different temperament, though so kind and good.” He adds he missed the long conversations he used to have with Father on art-related issues: “how many, many new things I have got to tell you about in art”.
His studies in London had started bearing fruit: “I am still experimenting and never feel more fascinated, the deeper I seek the more startling discoveries ... methods, technique, composition and schemes. If only I could show you my last landscape. I hope I will not come in need of money and be compelled to sell.”
He had in mind “the one of the cave that is so dramatic, so new and so inspiring, I shall feel my heart breaking if I will part with it... it is what I call a revenge in the hard struggles of my experiments, it is a success, it is finished and I am perfectly satisfied with it, more so, in fact – if only I can show it to you, it is Rembrandtesque, it is true, but is a different technique, it is not imitation. Oh it’s grand, Bonell, I do not mind speaking out my heart to you.”
Robert told Father that as he was “hotly painting” this cave landscape, his landlady walked in and commented: “When I look long at it I feel there is something unearthy (sic) in it – I feel that in that cave there one would find an old hug (hag?), a witch who will be terrible to meet”. He informed Father that the lady “is absolutely profane in art and yet her remarks are just the thing I wanted to know”.
His minute description of this painting, the technique he used and the results obtained run into three long pages. He concedes that, writing about art, he never knows when to stop.
Then some news about the war: a futile, ruthless attack on December 16 by the Germans on Scarborough, an unfortified town, that left many victims, an “action of barbarism and wholesale murder ... you in Malta, I expect, are pretty safe with the French fleet guarding the island and the rest of the Mediterranean. I can just fancy how my father watches the French battleships in the harbour – he admires them so much”.
The Allies had delegated the defence of Malta during that war to the French navy, whose principal Mediterranean base had become the Grand Harbour.
(To be continued)