Christmas Details Competition from Times Gone By 2001-2009

Looking through my Details records, the Christmas Competitions stand out. Perhaps the reason for this is the time spent over long dark days, sometimes in inhospitable libraries, though I once remember finding Poussin's   Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion while browsing through Sister Wendy's 1000 Masterpieces in W H Smith's, a book which I subsequently bought. 

The intrinsic value of the Christmas Details Competition is not in the completion of the hunt for the answers, but in the ongoing process of searching itself, followed by the reward of finding each answer. The longer the detail eludes identification, the greater the satisfaction at finding it. My comments recently about the software that is now available to assist the competitors do reflect a feeling that I have which is that competitors with no knowledge of or interest in art history can find the answers and indeed win a competition by pressing buttons on a smartphone. Tom Lubbock used to congratulate the winners, but such congratulations would be empty, I think, if all their efforts consisted in using crude image searches. 

Not wishing to be a hypocrite, I do admit that I use the resources of Google and other library resources myself, but I hope not in a mechanistic way. Does this matter? It matters to me as the Competition is about art and invites the competitor to use her/his knowledge of art, not just to operate a search programme. So in 2009, I was unable to find one last detail, which was the hand of a St John the Baptist. I eventually found it by searching through Tom Lubbock's series of "Great Works" where I found that he had featured the picture in one of his critical essays. This gave me immense satisfaction as I had found the last answer and it also enriched my knowledge of Phillipe de Champaigne.

I am aware that there has been quite a number of views of this Blog in recent days and one or two correspondents have written to me. I can't answer correspondence at present but I shall do so after 7th January. 

Relatively speaking, I think that the Christmas Competition has got easier in recent years. 

There is a traditional toast at Christmas for "absent friends". For me, in this Blog, this brings to mind the late Tom Lubbock, a truly original critic, refreshingly fearless in his opinions who approached works of art from unexpected angles and sowed seeds of thinking that continue to bloom. Though I never met him, he was still a kind of friend through his writings and remains so.

Following that line of thinking, I have decided to put up Christmas Competitions from years gone by. My original pages from the Review are beginning to oxidize and decay. Putting them here will prolong their life! I am putting up Christmas Competitions from 2001-2009 inclusive as that is all I have from Tom Lubbock's years. One day, I may try to obtain the earlier competitions from the 1990's.  Apologies for the scrawl and scribble on the originals that was added in those years of endeavour. I did not find all the answers in every year. I have also got the "Answers" which Tom Lubbock published in the following January. I could put these up here if anyone is interested.

Any comments are welcome here.

If anyone has copies of the competitions prior to 2001 and can post them up here or send an image to me, it would be much appreciated. I have got the answers, but I have no idea which details were included in the competitions.

One final point I would make is that some of the earlier competitions were exceptionally difficult, resulting in one year in there being only 12 fully correct answers. Consequently, it can be a real test and there is nothing wrong with that.

Christmas Details 2001 - "Face off"

In 2001 I failed to find the answer to number 3 which was by "Anonymous, South Netherlandish". Tom Lubbock decided that entrants who gave the "wrong" answer to two other details were not to be penalised. I disagreed with him on this point and wrote to him at length, explaining what I thought. He wrote back to me as follows:

Dear

Thanks for your protest. It's like this. You have rules. But there will always be situations where it is not clear how those rules should be applied or interpreted - as the compendious history of law and legal rulings attests.

The Christmas Details results produced a tricky situation. Correct answers were required. But those two recurrent incorrect answers weren't incorrect in the normal way (eg rough guesses, or mix-ups with a similar picture). Rather, the contestants had identified the detail, had a reproduction of the correct picture in a book in front of them - but unfortunately their book gave them the wrong title. It seemed to me it was the book that was incorrect , not them. So the wrong answers were allowed. (At least, I know this is how the Bosch mistake occurred, about the Picasso I don't know, I only strongly presume, but allowing one, I allowed the other.) That's how I decided to apply/interpret the rule, the word "correct" - by the spirit not the letter.

Of course the decision is disputable. But the point is, it wasn't a concession to ignorance. The wrong-title people had identified the picture which the detail came from - and so those who gave the right titles weren't being robbed (and no naming or apologies needed). It was a concession to bad luck: precisely a matter of fairness, as I saw it. Though I could perfectly well have stuck to the letter, and just said "bad luck!" - hence mention of Christmas. (It strikes me that many, much more important matters also turn on somebody's decision to say, or not to say, "bad luck") But I wonder, if you'd been adjudicating this, whether you would actually have decided it differently.

Yours

Tom Lubbock

Christmas Details 2002 - "Straight Answers"

I recollect that this year I failed dismally to find more than half a dozen answers. There were only 12 fully correct entries. 

Christmas Details 2003 - "Drawn and Quartered"

Christmas Details 2004 - "Christmas Quilt"

I found these fabrics very interesting to spot as some of those which appeared to me to be from one era were in fact from another.

Christmas Details 2005 - "Christmas Posts"

I enjoyed this one, too. My last one here was the Munch, I think. I thought at one time that I would never find it. It is notable here that these were numbered vertically in columns. Poor Tom Lubbock was always the victim of the staff at the IoS who made mistakes...

Christmas Details 2006 - "White Lines"

This was the hardest competition that I ever succeeded in completing. For me, Number 1 was atrociously difficult. I only found it by a laborious process of examining the style of the lettering which eventually led me to Joan Miro through his squiggles and ultimately to Photo: This is the Colour of my Dreams. This search covered a period of several whole days. There was also an error here where the IoS staff included the same detail twice. I corresponded later as follows:

Dear Mr Lubbock
As one of your occasional correspondents about the Details Competition and a failed entrant for the 2006 competition (though with a correct set of answers), I wondered if you intended to use the "missing" picture from the 2006 Competition? "Missing" because Pierrot was included twice?
I should be intrigued to see what other difficult task could have lain in wait....
Are you likely to use this for one of the regular competitions? Or will it remain forever mysterious?
Yours sincerely


"Dear

Well, I didn’t see a copy of the paper that carried the results of the Xmas competition, but in the text that I wrote for it (which may have been cut, of course) I said that the detail that got lost was from Saenredam’s Interior of the Church of St Udolphus (1649). It would have showed an area of white wall with a bit of brown rafter peeping in. This painting has already appeared in the regular competition (Details 567) and so it won’t appear again – at least, I try not to do repeats, except in the Xmas competition, when the visual theme sets the agenda.

Yours sincerely
Tom Lubbock"

Looking at this now and Tom Lubbock's selection of images, it might have been something like this: 

Would I have been able to find that?

Christmas Details 2007 - "Can you get your head around these images?"

This was (another) year when I failed to find all the details. The details that eluded me were number 2 which was a portrait of Edward VIII by Sickert. I just could not decide what the image was of, it did not occur to me that it was a head-on view of a busby.  Number 5 was another error by the IoS staff who did not select the circular part in the painting but a tiny bit out of the top left hand corner of Bruegel's Children's Games. Nonetheless, some entrants managed to find the answer.

Christmas 2008 - "Can you get your head around these jumbled-up bodies?"

This was not too difficult.

Christmas 2009 - "It's all in the Details"

As I noted earlier, number 8 of John the Baptist caused me the most trouble.

This was the last Christmas Details that Tom Lubbock put together as he was very seriously ill in 2010 and died in 2011.