Those illustrated include this distant [from the big house] view of the enslaved workers' homes
Mary Clementina Barrett [1803-1831] Slave [sic] houses on the Barrett Plantation |
Those illustrated include this distant [from the big house] view of the enslaved workers' homes
Mary Clementina Barrett [1803-1831] Slave [sic] houses on the Barrett Plantation |
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Marie Spartali Stillman, The Last Sight of Fiammetta, 1876 |
As Pamela Gerrish Nunn and I observed many
years ago, when the present work was known only from its listing in the Royal
Academy catalogue for summer 1876:
‘Eighteen
months later, Rossetti asked Spartali to sit to him for his own version of
Fiammetta. Since her reputation as a
model has tended to obscure her career as an artist and since she is typically
said to owe her pictorial inspiration entirely to Rossetti, it is worth noting
that in this case her choice of subject evidently stimulated his own, and that
by ‘casting’ Marie as Fiammetta, so to speak, Rossetti implicitly recognised
her choice of the theme’. [ Jan
Marsh & Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite
Movement, 1989, p103]
As Pamela now remarks, 'what a beauty! Surely destined to be seen as her masterpiece[sic]'.
Inspired by and titled from an early Italian sonnet that Rossetti translated and was re-published in 1874, the subject is the supposed inamorata of Boccaccio a more or less fictive figure like Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura. She is depicted here as a girl - say in her early teens - dreamily fingering a mandoline amid a bower of roses.
The format is one popularised in the 1870s wave of Pre-Raphaelitism, which appealed to patrons in the manner of Venetian courtesans or Kneller's Hampton Court Beauties. This is a large work, in watercolour, where the figure is finely painted, especially in the delicately conveyed flesh tones, and the surrounding foliage is more loosely rendered, in order to focus the viewer's attention on Fiammetta.
The picture will be auctioned in September at Bonhams in Bond St - so this is by way of a preview.
from Foreword to Stunner: the Fall and Rise of Fanny Cornforth new edition by Kirsty Stonell Walker
Active, interesting ‘afterlives’ have been created for
several of the young women who acted as models in Pre-Raphaelite
paintings. ‘Acted’ is the right word,
for a model plays a role, often in costume, in much the same way as a stage
performer. The role may sometimes
overlap with real life, but as showbiz interviews disclose, the actual person
should not be identified with the parts she plays.
Fanny Cornforth was the ‘stage name’ of young Sarah Cox, who
modelled for Pre-Raphaelite paintings of fallen women and alluring beauties, and whose character was maligned by
commentators who described her as a vulgar, thieving whore. Kirsty Stonell Walker rose to Fanny’s defence
a decade ago, using documentary sources and her own instinct to produce a
vigorous and engaging biography.
She was an undoubted ‘stunner’, physically attractive with a
fine figure, sweet features and ‘a mass of the most lovely blonde hair – light
golden or harvest yellow’. Kirsty made
Fanny the star of her own story, not just a supporting figure in the Pre-Raphaelite
soap opera, as the bosomy, grasping ‘mistress’ of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Now, thanks to the reach of the internet
coupled with wider and deeper historical research, much more information is revealed. This revised edition includes new facts about
Fanny’s girlhood in Sussex, about her second marriage and life after Rossetti,
and a full account of her last years and death from dementia.
To this is added an enjoyable critical account of Fanny’s
subsequent ‘appearances’ in fiction and film – where of course historical
characters play new roles. Fanny
Cornforth has a future as well as a past.
NOTE on Saturday 22 May at the Royal Academy weekend course on Jo Hiffernan as Whistler's model and muse, I will summarise Cornforth's comparable role as Rossetti's 'Woman in White'
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/event/reframing-the-muse
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Rebecca Solomon, The Young Teacher |
Photo shows the unframed canvas in NPG conservation studio prior to Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition in 2019.
it will join another image of Eaton in the Princeton collection, head study by otherwise unknown Walter Stocks.
Suzanne Fagence Cooper previously chronicled the adept manner in which Effie Gray extricated herself from an unhappy, unconsummated marriage to John Ruskin in order to become the wife and artistic partner of John Millais. In ‘How We Might Live: at Home with Jane and William Morris’ she traces the Morrises’ shared and separate lives with clarity and judicious assessment.
The marriage of William Morris, designer-businessman, and Jane Burden, stableman’s uneducated daughter, has always been the subject of curiosity. Not so much for its cross-class features, which were relatively common in the Victorian age, but for its sequel. Eight years after the wedding and the birth of two children, Jane began a love affair with artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris’s friend and business partner – with the agreement if not approval of her husband.
William Morris is everyone’s hero. Jane has a terrible reputation, as silent, sulky, faithless wife. With sympathetic warmth, Cooper leads us through the couple’s experiences. She imagines them in various locations but does not invent their thoughts. Some known details are omitted – Jane’s unfulfilled wish for a son, her clandestine correspondence with Rossetti, Morris’s extravagant spending. But there is so much to include. Notably the evolution of Morris’ aesthetic taste from quaint medieval to proto-modern plainness, plus the analytical account of the tiny ornamented booklets that Jane created - when and for whom were they designed?
No letters from Jane to Morris or his family survive, so we don’t know what she called him at home. In the group, he was ‘Topsy’ or ‘Top’; outside it would always be ‘Mr Morris’.
In its focus on personal lives, biography like this is not ‘history from below’ so much as what Phyllis Rose called ‘higher gossip’. It draws readers along engaging narratives to which we can relate. Morris, whose achievements are so various in poetry, design, manufacturing, politics, calligraphy, translation and publishing, also wrote of his ‘disappointments and tacenda’ – about which to keep silent. These include his failure as a lover, and most painfully, the awfulness of Jenny’s epilepsy, which struck when she was fifteen, blighting both her own days and those of the family. Jane grieved acutely and had her own ‘unspoken’ list of regrets.
The strength of Cooper’s storytelling, signalled in the book’s subtitle, is its attention to how wife and husband created each of their homes, with comfort and fine objects but no luxurious superfluity. If we can believe it, nothing that was not either beautiful or useful.
Their relationship, too, was a shared construction, mortared with tact, which weathered the storms. When Rossetti’s guilt for ‘stealing’ his friend’s wife drove him to a paranoid breakdown, Morris allowed him to convalesce at Kelmscott until Jane acknowledged the affair was at its end. Morris did not gloat over this outcome, and the subsequent affection between the couple was noted by all observers. Jane devoted her widowhood to securing Morris’s memory through books and buildings – his lifelong pleasures.
When is
public art offensive and what should be
done with it?
Cecil Rhodes by Henry Alfred Pegram, Oriel College Oxford |
To be
removed: Historical statues that celebrate those who should not be honoured,
even for their philanthropy, as that effectively camouflages their execrable
careers, as in the cases of slave trader Edward Colston and imperialist Cecil
Rhodes. Removal amplifies rather than
erasing history, as re-valuation.
[censored detail] in Pursuit of Rare Meats by Rex Whistler, restaurant, Tate Britain |
To be
debated: Sculptures that offend or distress members of the public, typically
images of nudity or violence. Is the
classical naked woman reclining for (male) visual pleasure so engrained in high
art that objections are pointless? Many
communities find it indecent. What of
more explicit works like Courbet’s ‘L’origine du monde’? would that be on display in the National
Gallery as it is in the muse d’Orsay?
Full male
nudity is often worse and has been so since decorous figleaves were added to Renaissance
statuary. Often, the intention to shock
and offend, as in work by Robert Mapplethorpe, the Chapman brothers, Gilbert
& George, is recognised by being carefully curated within museums, rather
than openly in public spaces.
Matthias Grunewald, Crucifixion, Isenheim altarpiece, Colmar
Curiously, ubiquitous figures of torture and crucifixion do not prompt much concern, even though paintings and sculptures of Christ hanging on the cross seem very horrific. Should they attract warning signs?
Laura Knight Self with Ella Napper 1913 NPG |
Several MK speakers alluded to Knight's famous and famously popular Self-Portrait painting Ella Napper as a standing life model, noting the double back views, so that both the egocentric artist's face and the erotic display of the female nude are obscured. But also, that the artist claims for herself the traditional male role.
Once more, I was struck by her hat - surely a version of the bohemian artist's wideawake? rather like a beard a sort of emblem signifying 'Edwardian painter'. And then the scarlet top, joined with the other assertive reds. Where have we seen these before?
In G. F. Watts' Self-Portraits [of which he did many] Both the black hat and the red gown