Professor Butter Beard and Norman Garstin’s “The Rain It Raineth Every Day”
“When that I was a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.”
- William Shakespeare, “Twelfth Night”
An Irish Impressionist painter who names his painting with a quote from one of my favorite Shakespeare plays? How can I not fall in artistic love.
But to set the stage…..
A delicious Sunday morning. The dawn mist is heavy with the promise of afternoon Spring thunderstorms. Muffins are in the oven (more on them in a minute). My home is full of the aromas of brewing cinnamon-spiked coffee, toasted caraway seeds, browned butter, and a slightly damp Nels (who is already curled up and snoring, having wiggled her way under my favorite Scottish blanket on the sofa). I have waggled myself a space in the sofa’s corner and am flipping back and forth between Nigel Slater’s “A Thousand Feasts” and Nicola Lamb’s “Sift,” but my mind keeps wandering back to that Irish Impressionist.
Norman Garstin was born in Caherconlish, County Limerick, Ireland to the Anglo-Saxon Captain William Garstin and the Irish Mary Moore. He was raised by his aunts and grandparents following his father's unexpected suicide and his mother's resulting incapacitating disabilities. He first set out to be an engineer, then an architect, and then sought his fortune prospecting for diamonds in South Africa in the company of Cecil Rhodes, the English-born South African who was to become the creator of the diamond company De Beers and the founder of the state of Rhodesia.
Garstin returned to Ireland after a bad riding accident in which he lost the sight of his right eye. It was then that he began to fully listen to his own interior passions and decided to pursue a career in the arts of drawing and painting. He travelled to Antwerp in 1878 where he studied at the Koninklijke Academie, which had been founded two hundred years earlier by David Teniers the Younger, a Flemish Baroque painter, printmaker, draughtsman, miniaturist painter, staffage painter, copyist and art curator.
He moved to Paris in 1871, where he remained for three years studying at the studio of Carolus-Duran, the French painter and art teacher. Degas and Manet invited him into their circle, introducing him to the emerging artistry of painting “en plein air.” After Paris, and influenced by the French naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage, Garstin travelled to paint in Britanny, the south of France, Spain and Tangiers, finally landing in Venice, drawn by the desire to understand and absorb the tranquility of the watery “Titian blue.”
In 1886, Garstin finally “landed” in Cornwall and became one of the early members of the Newlyn School, an artist colony situated in and around the small Cornish fishing village of Newlyn, situated close to the town of Penzance (yes, there be pirates!). The opportunity to paint “en plein air” instead of in a studio was enabled with the innovation of portable tubes of oil paint and the invention of the box easel with its built-in paint box, making it much easier for artists to explore and paint the undulating countryside. The Newlyn School artists found everyday life in the harbor and the nearby villages were ideal subjects for their paintings and their works often captured the harsh conditions experienced by the fishing fraternity and the hazards and tragedies which were often associated with that profession.
“The Rain it Raineth Every Day” is thought to be his best-known work. The painting depicts the seafront between Newlyn and Penzance in Cornwall in blustery and rainy weather, with dramatic sea waves crashing onto the promenade. Among the buildings visible in the distance to the northeast are the still-present Queens Hotel and St Mary's Church. Brave morning strollers attempt to shield themselves with struggling umbrellas as they navigate both the wind and incoming sea. Only the one young girl, wearing her Titian blue dress and safely wrapped in her mother’s tight embrace, looks directly into our viewer’s eyes, challenging us to join her as she promenades in the driving rain.
I remove the baked muffins from the oven just as the thunder begins to announce the incoming storm. Nels can’t decide whether to follow the scent of the muffins or bury herself a little deeper in the blanket to shield her from the rumble. I convince her with a gentle “clucking” to join me for a still-warm nibble of my “impression” of Irish Soda Bread, baked in a muffin format. The soda bread foundation remains solid – the tang of yogurt (standing in for the standard buttermilk), the sweetness of a plethora of cider-soaked currants, and the woodsy crunch of toasted caraway seeds. I’ve just added an egg (or two), a wee bit of butter and oil, and an additional teaspoon (or more) of sugar. On a rainy St. Patrick’s Day Eve, these sneaky leprechaun additional treasures just might increase our chance of luck and fortune!
“A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.”
Professor Butter Beard’s Irish Soda Bread Muffins
One dozen muffins
1 ½ cups dried currants, soaked overnight in apple cider
1 Tbsp caraway seeds, toasted and cooled
2/3 cup granulated sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 ¼ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
½ tsp fine sea salt
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
4 Tbsp canola (or vegetable) oil
2 large eggs, room temperature
¾ cup Greek yoghurt
Sanding sugar to finish
1) The night before, soak the currants in apple cider (or water).
2) Line your muffin tin with paper liners. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.
3) Toast the caraway seeds and set aside to cool.
4) In a standing mixer, use the paddle to mix the sugar and lemon zest until slightly damp and aromatic. Add the caraway seeds and mix just to combine. Add the flour, baking powder and soda and salt. Mix for one minute to thoroughly combine. Remove the bowl from the standing mixer.
5) Using a microwave, melt the butter in a glass quart-size measuring cup. Whisk in the oil, then the yoghurt, then the eggs.
6) Drain the currants and fold them into the dry mixture using a spatula. Add the wet mix and fold until just thoroughly mixed. Portion the mixture into the prepared muffin tin. Sprinkle the top of the un-baked muffins with sanding sugar.
7) Place the muffin tin on the center rack of the oven. Close the oven door and reduce the temperature to 400 degrees. Bake for fifteen minutes, rotate the pan, and bake for another five minutes to finish.
