Maggi Hambling: Nightingale Night

In response to hearing the increasingly rare sound of a nightingale singing, Hambling has produced a new series of paintings in a striking palette of gold and silver laid over a dark black ground, evoking a mood, a feeling of wonder and vitality, a moment in time

Maggi Hambling: Nightingale Night, installation view, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 9 November 2024 – 27 April 2025. Photo: © Pallant House Gallery, Barney Hindle.

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
9 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

by DAVID TRIGG

Despite its plain and unremarkable appearance, the nightingale is renowned as a master songster. The migratory bird weighs only a few grams, yet from its small frame emerges a song of sublime proportions, which has been celebrated by writers, poets and musicians for millennia. In the spring of 2023, as the bird was returning to our shores from West Africa, Maggi Hambling experienced its fabled song for herself when she and some friends spent an eventful night in a Sussex woodland with the folk singer and conservationist Sam Lee. In the darkness, as the rain poured down, its call cut through the night. It was a wondrous moment for Hambling, inspiring a new body of paintings in which the nightingale’s transcendent song is translated into mercurial convulsions of gesture and colour.

Maggi Hambling, Nightingale Night VI, 2023. Oil on canvas, 21 x 17 in. © Maggi Hambling. Photo: Douglas Atfield.

Each canvas in Hambling’s Nightingale Night series (2023-24) adopts a striking palette of gold and silver laid over a dark black ground. The metallic pigment is spattered, flicked and brushed; sometimes it is applied thickly, at other times in a more fluid manner. There is a range of scales here, from small and intimate pictures to larger compositions with a dominating presence. In each, abstract flashes and expressive daubs dance and flutter to evoke the fleeting nature of the nightingale’s nocturnal song or, as in works such as Nightingale Night VI, its swooping movements.

At times Hambling allows the paint to drip erratically, flowing in rivulets to create forms reminiscent of woodland foliage. Elsewhere, the paint is more controlled, as in the celestial Nightingale Night IV, which appears like a swirling galaxy or a nebula in deep space. In many works, the rich and varied marks echo the rippling sequence of tweets, trills, roulades and whistles that Hambling heard on that wet spring night. Indeed, the nightingale can produce more than 1,000 different sounds, though the artist has not sought to capture its full repertoire of syllables.

Maggi Hambling, Nightingale Night II, 2023. Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in. © Maggi Hambling. Photo: Douglas Atfield.

The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) said of the nightingale: “Its ingenuity mocks the efforts of all musicians.” His 1605 book Musurgia Universalis includes the first attempt to transcribe the bird’s song as musical notation. But when the musicologist Daines Barrington hired a flautist to play the transcription in the 1770s, he noted: “It was impossible to observe almost any traces of the nightingale’s song.” The similarities between birdsong and western music are, of course, coincidental and while it is clear that the nightingale’s song cannot be captured using regular harmonic intervals, paint is an altogether different matter.

Hambling’s paintings are certainly rhythmic and lyrical, though they do not directly represent the nightingale’s song. Rather, the expressionist paint- handling evokes a mood, a feeling of wonder and vitality, a moment in time. They are a response to a very personal, life-affirming experience and, in this respect, they stand in contrast to her recent Maelstrom series (2022-23), which responded to the trauma of a near-fatal heart attack and the ongoing war in Ukraine. But they are not without melancholy, for they are also reminders that the nightingale is under threat in Britain. Since 1900, its population has declined significantly, and this has only accelerated in the last 50 years as the bird retreats further to the south and east because of climate change and loss of habitat. Hambling’s works stand as testament to an increasingly rare springtime phenomenon.

Maggi Hambling, Leonard Cohen, 2023. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. © Maggi Hambling. Photo: Douglas Atfield.

For visitors to Pallant House Gallery who may be curious to hear the nightingale’s song for themselves, there is an iPad loaded with field recordings and a playlist including music by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey and Will Young, all of whom have greatly inspired Hambling’s work, including several pieces in the exhibition. An early forerunner to the Nightingale Night works is the painting Leonard Cohen (2016-17), which uses the same restricted palette and painting techniques. But what started as an attempt to convey the late singer’s voice in paint accidentally became a semi-abstract portrait as Hambling’s brushstrokes subconsciously cohered into the shape of a silhouetted head rendered in gold against a jet-black background.

Maggi Hambling, Listening to Nightingales II, 2023. Oil on canvas, 21 x 17 in. © Maggi Hambling. Photo: Douglas Atfield.

The silhouetted head is revisited in her two self-portraits, Listening to Nightingales I and II (both 2023). As with Leonard Cohen, these bodily apparitions are not solid, giving instead the impression of disintegration and dissolution. They recall the impasto heads of Hambling’s War Requiem (2012), an installation of paintings depicting war victims that was inspired by Benjamin Britten’s great 1962 choral work of the same name, which first was performed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. Here, the heads are not experiencing violence or trauma but an epiphany – the loss of self-awareness that Hambling experienced as she felt herself briefly becoming one with nature. As with the Nightingale Night paintings, they convey a sense of intangibility, capturing a fleeting moment that can only be partly preserved in paint.