T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #4

This is the fourth post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his brilliant “A Horse’s Impossible Head: Disunity in Delacroix” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019). It’s a description of Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855):

Take the horse’s head. It is first and foremost a picture of a creature looking death in the face; and if one goes on to think about it, the face of death – the face the horse seems to fix with its desperate glare – is most likely that of the fallen rider, the man in the turban, his fingers still clutching the horse’s mane. The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. The choice of supporting colours is a stroke of genius. The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch. The cold gold of the horseman’s tunic, again with its exquisite green filigree, is a kind of deathly counterpoint to the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath: the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows.

Zero in on the word “carnality” (“The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch”). Clark is a carnal writer. He apprehends through his senses. He’s a thinker, too. But his descriptions are intensely sensuous: “The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity”; “the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows.” He devours color: “the wild red of the horseman’s turban”; “the cold gold of the horseman’s tunic ... with its exquisite green filigree”; “the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath.” The passage enacts the painting it describes; it’s a sensation delivery system. 

Credit: The above illustration is Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855).