Somewhere in the Dolomites

This painting of the view from a mountain pass in the Dolomites was made by my partner's great-aunt, Mary Creighton McDowall, and hangs in the bedroom of our Bristol flat. It was done either during or, more likely, on return from a motor tour of northern Italy [1] in the 1920s, as documented in the book written by her husband, Arthur McDowall, Peaks & Frescoes: a study of the Dolomites (OUP, 1928), and illustrated with a number of her own coloured linocuts. It looks rather more finished in this photograph than it actually is: the oil paint is thinly applied on board and has a brushy, sketchy feel to it.

But here's a question: where exactly is this? It does have something of a resemblance to one of the more famous peaks in the Dolomites (Langkofel in German, Sassolungo in Italian), but it's hard to establish the same viewpoint. We've tried using Google Maps and various other approaches, with mixed results. A certain amount of artistic license may be at work, of course, especially if the painting was worked up from sketches made on the spot, or even from several different spots. But if you're familiar with the area and recognise where it is, then we'd be very glad to hear from you.

They were an interesting couple. Mary was one of the children of Mandell Creighton, historian and Bishop of London. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art, 1903-06, where her contemporaries included Dora Carrington, and was a founder member of Vanessa Bell's Friday Club, alongside the likes of Gwen Raverat, Clive Bell, Henry Lamb, Bernard Leach, Saxon Sydney Turner, Duncan Grant, and Mark Gertler. Which, with the notable exception of Gertler, was quite an assembly of the artistic wing of the upper reaches of London society. However, Mary seems to have been at the more conservative end of this proto-Bloomsbury spectrum, both artistically and socially, and apparently quarrelled with Vanessa Bell following the famous artistic watershed of Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910. Her husband Arthur was a fellow of All Souls in Oxford and a prolific writer and journalist, notably giving positive reviews in the Times Literary Supplement of Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, the early "experimental" work of Vanessa Bell's sister, Virginia Woolf. I suppose you could say they were Bloomsbury-adjacent, but too conventional in their views and behaviour ever to belong to those circles.

As well as a few of those "peaks and frescoes" linocuts, we have another of Mary's paintings in our house, probably unfinished, as seen in the background of the photograph I used for my Christmas card in 2010. Apparently dozens of her oils on board were stacked in the garage of another elderly Creighton relative, all slowly going mouldy, and this one, painted on a stout piece of softboard somewhat abraded at the edges, was given to my partner, selected more or less at random. It stands propped against the wall, opposite the downstairs toilet in Southampton.

In the relative warmth and dryness of our house, a superficial milky bloom that originally covered the paint gradually disappeared, and as the colours strengthened more details emerged. It has been like watching the painting paint itself, day by day, month by month, year by year. In itself, the picture is not anything that would have grabbed my attention in a gallery, but it has inevitably become the object of intense scrutiny and speculation during my daily seated meditations. Enough to make me question that tired old cliché "like watching paint dry" as the epitome of tedium; after all, what could be more engaging, given the right circumstances?

But just to return to that painting of the Dolomites: if you do know your way around those mountains and recognise the scene, then do please weigh in with an opinion. Even if just to confirm that, yes, that does look kinda-sorta how Langkofel / Sassolungo must have looked in the 1920s, when standing near a certain calvary by a particular rocky roadside. Although it is probably now a major tourist traffic route, with car park, toilets, and a restaurant... (But probably not with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hotspot).

1. The area had only just become part of Italy, of course, following its annexation after WW1. To this day, the majority language of Südtirol aka Alto Adige is German. As it happens, in 2010 I had an exhibition (see The Italian Job) in the town known as Innichen to German speakers, and San Candido to Italians, not very far from Langkofel / Sassolungo.