Friday 3 December 2021

Laura Knight Study Day


Knight's images are notable for their emotional realism regarding  dancers, travellers and circus performers -  subjects and scenes that were and are routinely romanticized in pictorial art.  
'Allez allez oop!' - the painting above  is one such mix of glamour and exertion.   The bareback riders/acrobats are so young - surely under ten, if not six or seven - and evidently nervous as they jump on and off moving ponies in  the ring. 
The formal qualities of the image are as striking as the feeling - legs and arms in folded sequence, greys, yellows and pink for colour palette, spotlight and shadow, brilliantly dynamic movement of figures and mount.
End of next month Milton Keynes Art Gallery holds a scholarly day on site and online. 

   Details:

 The Show is On: Laura Knight’s Career and Contexts

Conference – Janet Axten, Linda Bassett, Ella Nixon, Lily Ford, Catherine Wallace, Hannah Starkey, Annette Wickham, Alice Strickland, Hester Wetley, Damian Le Bas

  • 28 January 2022
  • 10:00 – 7:00 pm
  • A one-day conference on the career and legacy of Laura Knight on the occasion of the exhibition Laura Knight: A Panoramic View
  • Milton Keynes, MK Gallery

Session 1

Chaired by Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director, Paul Mellon Centre)

11.45–12.05 Janet Axten (Social Historian), ‘“Fast, Smart and Outrageous”: Art School Fashion in Laura Knight’s Painting’

12.05–12.25 Linda Bassett (PhD candidate, University of Bristol), ‘The “Sew” Must Go On: The Dressmaker in the Work of Laura Knight’

12.25–12.45 Ella Nixon (PhD candidate, Northumbria University), ‘Laura Knight and the Regional Art Gallery’

12.45–13.15 Panel 1 discussion and questions

13.15–14.15 Lunch

Session 2

Chaired by Fay Blanchard (Head of Exhibitions, MK Gallery)

14.15–14.35 Lily Ford (Filmmaker and Historian), ‘Aerial Bodies: Laura Knight’s Barrage Balloon Paintings’

14.35–14.55 Catherine Wallace (Freelance Art Historian), ‘Technique and Experiment: Drawing as the Foundation of Laura Knight’s Success as an Artist’

14.55–15.15 Hannah Starkey (Artist), ‘So, I ask you Laura Knight – how did this great work come about?’

15.15–15.45 Panel 2 discussion and questions

15.45–16.00 Comfort Break

Session 3

Chaired by Annette Wickham (Curator of Works on Paper, Royal Academy of Art)

16.00–16.20 Alice Strickland (Curator, National Trust, London), ‘Creating a Legacy – Dame Laura Knight RA (1877-1970)’

16.20–16.40 Hester Westley (Artists' Lives Interviewer, National Life Stories, British Library), ‘“Like a Half-Rolled Map”: Tracing the Borders of Female Self-Narration in the Careers of Laura Knight and Subsequent Women Artists’

16.40–17.10 Panel 3 discussion and questions

17.10–17.30 Damian Le Bas (Writer and Poet), ‘The Broken Tongue’

17.30–19.00 Drinks reception




Wednesday 24 November 2021




As European portraits with African attendants go, this is a curious one. 
The main sitter Catherine-Marie LeGendre is shown pushing away the head of the enslaved servant while inviting the viewer to admire the bowlful  of exotic fruits he holds.

More usually, the exotic lad is shown  inviting us to admire the beauty of  the noblewoman who represents his owner [though  as he is as much an accessory as the fruit, he may well have been painted from any young African available to the artist].
The woman's gesture  compounds the discomfort we now feel when looking at such portraits from the age of slavery.    
Liverpool Museums, which owns the painting, have taken the decision to invite viewers to share their responses and opinions.   Here is the announcement.

'After being conserved, the only Lady Lever Art Gallery artwork from the 18th century depicting a person of colour takes new and prominent position in the gallery The Lady Lever Art Gallery is placing a painting featuring an enslaved African person at the front and centre of its displays. The oil painting of Catherine-Marie Legendre, painted about 1705 and attributed to Jean Baptiste Santerre (1658-1717), is the only item in the gallery’s collection, from the 18th century, to depict a person of colour. Following a period in conservation, the painting will be on display from 1 October 2021 in a new and more prominent place on the gallery, inviting comment from the public.  

'The painting will be displayed with a label which asks: “Does this portrait belong on the walls of the gallery today? Does its display help us tell and understand the history of slavery? Or does it continue to honour someone who benefitted from the slave trade? In light of recent international events, we want to know what our visitors think. We are displaying the portrait to be transparent with visitors and begin this conversation. You can share your thoughts with us by emailing BlackLivesMatter@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk.” 

'This disturbing portrait by Santerre is designed to impress by showing the sitter’s wealth and position in society. It shows a young boy, who is an enslaved African person, brought from a plantation to work as an unpaid house servant. He is wearing a decorative metal slave collar around his neck. His name is not known, but the sitter is Catherine-Marie Legendre (or Le Gendre, died 1749), the wife of French nobleman, Claude Pecoil (1629-1722), Marquise de Septème.  

'Catherine-Marie’s hand rests on the enslaved servant’s head to signify her ownership. It was not uncommon for wealthy white women to be painted with a Black servant in this way. In paintings, people of colour were used to highlight the paleness of the sitter’s skin, which was considered a sign of beauty. Often dressed in ornate outfits, enslaved servants were depicted in paintings as trappings of wealth. The boy is offering a bowl of rare and exotic fruit to Catherine-Marie to emphasise her life of wealth and abundance. 

Alyson Pollard, Head of the Lady Lever Art Gallery said:  'The Lady Lever Art Gallery is seeking to display, more openly, the Black histories and stories linked to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its legacies which are hidden in the collections. Displaying a problematic and disturbing painting, like this, prominently and acknowledging its context is the beginning of a long term project to ensure our collections are not seen and viewed through a single historic lens but instead reflect multiple histories. 

'This painting by Santerre is unique in the collection, being the only representation of a person of colour from the 18th century. Unfortunately, not much is known about the boy in the painting, which is true of many of the enslaved men, women and children and the histories we try to document across our venues, particularly in the International Slavery Museum. The Santerre painting was previously displayed high up on a wall in the William and Mary room and under reflective glass. Its depiction of life for the very wealthy and of the injustices suffered by people of colour at this time make this a very striking image and one which we felt needed to be in a more prominent location.

'This intervention is one of several actions which the Lady Lever Art Gallery is taking in response to Black Lives Matter and the death of George Floyd. The gallery has updated its website to acknowledge Lord Lever’s activities in West Africa during the period 1911 to 1925 and has started the process of reinterpreting its collection, starting with a key work by Sir Joshua Reynolds painted in 1782 entitled ‘Mrs Peter Beckford’. The new text, as of February 2021, now recognises: “Peter Beckford, like many of his Beckford relatives, had plantations in Jamaica and the West Indies. The profits made from the labour of the enslaved people on his estates helped fund the Beckford’s lavish lifestyle.” The gallery is currently engaged in research into Lever’s legacy and is reinterpreting its collection to fully reflect the histories of the collection. 

'For more information on National Museums Liverpool’s response to Black Lives Matter see www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/blacklivesmatter.    '

The Liverpool collection also includes a rather better-known painting with a Black attendant. Painted by Zoffany in the 1760s, it shows the family of Sir William Young - such a cultured gentleman, with his daughters, dog, horse, cello and African lad to help with the children


 

Saturday 13 November 2021

Rumplestiltskin by Georgie Burne-Jones


In 1860-1 when Georgiana Burne-Jones and Elizabeth Siddal planned to collaborate on an illustrated book of folk tales, Georgie produced some woodcut designs before the project was abandoned owing to Siddal's death.

One of the surviving designs is this illustration to story of  Rumplestiltskin,  from  what the Burne-Joneses referred to punningly as [W]Holy Grim[m].   The girl stitching is captive while the  grotesque creature on the left spins straw into gold, in exchange for her necklace, ring and finally her firstborn. Eventually she outwits him by discovering his strange name.

At first I didn't identify this as the Rumplestiltskin tale, as the demonic creature looks witchlike, and there's no visible straw.  But there is gold in the basket and Rumplestiltskin is plying a distaff rather than a spinning wheel as in most illustrations.

There is one print of the image, among Georgie's correspondence in the National Art Library with a letter dated December 1897.  And I'm pleased to have found its title at last.

 

Monday 8 November 2021

Erased and Restored

 

Unknown artist, Frey siblings, 1837 

Circa 1837 painting of 3 Frey children in Louisiana and mystery boy (theadvertiser.com)

This portrait of three children from a family in Louisiana has an interesting and not all that uncommon history.  Painted in 1837, it originally contained four figures - the three white children from the Frey family and a tall African-American boy,  who at first sight looks like an older sibling




but who was in fact an enslaved domestic servant named Belizaire, then aged 15, according to  collector Jeremy Simien who now owns the painting. 
 
 Two decades later, Belizaire left the Frey household when sold on to the owners of Evergreen Plantation.     Some time after that, when the painting remained with the Freys, his image was painted over, presumably because slave owning ancestors had become an embarrassment.  

Belizaire remained invisible  when the picture -  attributed to  the artist J,G, Amans - was donated to the the New Orleans Museum of Art, and when it was de-accessioned.  The figure only returned to view when cleaned by a dealer and then offered for sale.

It's odd really, because the four figures balance the composition, and apart from skin colour, there's no indication that the tall young man is not an eldest brother.

Monday 20 September 2021

Lucy and Cathy


Two significant artists were missing from my recent Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  Omitted owing to an already over-crowded cast-list, their absence was especially regretted as these two were literal not metaphorical sisters.

Half-sisters, to be precise.  Lucy and Catherine were  daughters of Ford Madox Brown, the doyen or daddy of the PRB, who declined to join the band because of its juvenile title, but who provided close support to the Pre-Raphaelite aims.

 

And so I am especially delighted that they feature in dual perspective in the Uncommon Power exhibition at the Watts Gallery Compton opening on 26 September.



Both produced modest but accomplished and original works, which are virtually unknown as they remain in private hands.  Descendants have been proud to retain the sisters’ pictures, according to exhibition curator Ruth Brimacombe.    So the new exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view hitherto unseen works by the ‘lost Pre-Raphaelites’ Lucy Madox Brown and Catherine Madox Brown.  


Lucy’s early work The Duet, (RA 1870) presents an unexpected 18th century scene with elements of chinoiserie, but her preferred subjects were drawn from drama and history – notably Romeo at the TombFerdinand and Miranda playing chess from Shakespeare and The Magic Mirror, from a legend about the Earl of Surrey by Thomas Nashe [at top].    All were marked by distinctive imagination and, especially, fine colour effects, they extend the Pre-Raphaelite canon in respect of both style and content.   The Magic Mirror (aka Fair Geraldine) is especially welcome – theme and handling wholly within the PR mode, yet the subject quite original.


Cathy’s companion portraits of her parents deserve wider circulation, although only that of her father is included in the exhibition.  She perhaps had more natural artistic talent, endowing portraits and contemporary genre scenes with visual interest and harmonies, yet more conventional subject choices. The child puzzling over the sum 9+6 on her slate in A Deep Problem (1875, BMAG) combines charm, observation and empathy.   At The Opera (1869) is a stunning take on the usually formulaic half-length female with decorative accessories.  Was Marie Spartali the model? 



 Curator and Gallery have made the most of the limited space available, with a richness and variety of exhibits, almost all unknown to viewers.  Moreover, the sisters’ relatively small output, together with its relatively high quality, make this first exhibition of their works a great chance to assess and indeed establish their place within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.  How do their pictures compare?  What adjustments to the critical history do they provoke? 

 

Friday 27 August 2021

Evelyn de Morgan alert


A warning to scholars writing or thinking about Evelyn de Morgan's artworks: 
it appears that two items shown on the website of the De Morgan Foundation [DMF] as works by Evelyn are not and never have been by her, but should correctly be attributed to William de Morgan. 
 Like his wife, William trained as a painter, but fairly soon changed to the decorative arts, designing and firing the ceramic ware for which he is famed.

The first mis-attributed work is a student-style study drawing of part of the famous antique sculpture known as the Laocoon, showing Laoccoon and his sons wrestling  with a giant python.  Every art academy in Europe probably had a cast of this, and it was a   typical challenge to students.   If she did not  draw this study, Evelyn no doubt knew the piece well.  Its graphic style is similar to her careful depiction of e.g. the Discobolous cast, so the DMF error is only surprising if it has documentary info on the drawing which ought to have prevented the mistake.


The second work is the painting of Mercury, messenger of the gods, with winged ankles and helmet, holding s snake-entwined caduceus.  This is more problematic as it certainly resembles Evelyn's work more than William's, and neither its date nor full provenance are securely known. It was apparently acquired in 1910 by Wilhelmina Stirling, Evelyn's sister, when both William and Evelyn were alive, and will have known the correct authorship.

Such emendations to published information are an art historical hazard.


 

Monday 23 August 2021

Maria Zambaco Sculptor


It felt good some years ago to track down in the storeroom of Georgetown University a delicately accomplished figure sculpture by Maria Zambaco, hitherto known only for a sequence of portrait medals in low relief. See 6 December 2017.


 It’s now clear there are several casts of L’Amour irresistible around the art market, indicating that it proved a relatively popular piece. Also that it dates from 1896, when it was on show at the Beaux Arts in Paris. in fact it’s possible to expand Zambaco’s known oeuvre quite substantially, thanks to now-easily-searchable sources and with the knowledge that from the late 1880s she also used her birth name, exhibiting as M.T.Cassavetti.

 Among the first exhibits at the 1886 RA (as M T Zambaco) she showed a terracotta bust of Alphonse Legros, the professor under whom she studied at the Slade School, and who perhaps encouraged the submission to the RA summer show, together with another work ‘Study of a Head’ that may have been a second bust, or a bas relief, as the medium is not specified. A new bust, listed as ‘Portrait of a Lady’ was at the RA in 1887, the same year as portrait medallion depicting Lily Langtry was executed - wrongly naming her 'Lydia'. 


 Then in 1888 came a bronze bust ‘Medusa’s Horror’, presumably with snake-filled hair and terror-filled expression. In 1889, as M.T.Cassavetti, she submitted two decorative works to the second Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society show at the New Gallery in Regent Street. One was a plaster ‘study for a house decoration’ and the other a ‘Tangerine fireplace’ cast by Enrico Cantoni, a London-based plaster moulder. 

By this date, she had partly relocated to Paris, to study under Auguste Rodin, sculpture doyen, and in 1889 exhibited at the Exposition Universelle a patinated figure entitled ‘Tentation’, which was accompanied by a case of portrait medals – possibly the same group that she asked Rodin to get forwarded to the Salon in 1890. ‘Tentation’ sounds so tantalisingly comparable to L’Amour irresistible that it’s a pity neither it nor most of the other works are located. 
 However, her portrait medal of Auguste Rodin Sculpteur, dated 1888, is to be found in the Musee Rodin, complete with a reversed ‘N’ in his name, which seems a surprising beginner’s error for an artist who was by now well-practised in medal-making.

So  Zambaco's output is shaping up to be more substantial than we thought.

Wednesday 21 July 2021

Clare Mackail

Georgiana Burne-Jones and Clare Mackail, NPG 

  

The Burne-Jones universe knows about the BJs’ children Philip and Margaret.  And Margaret’s elder children, Angela [Thirkell] and Denis Mackail.

But there was a third grand-daughter – Clare Mackail – who isn’t much mentioned in the biographies.   Just a passing reference by Fiona MacCarthy, not surprising since her subject, EBJ, died just a couple of years after Clare’s birth, but raising a slight curiosity, since descendants of famous people often feature in their life stories,  fleetingly or a source of family anecdotes.

I worked out that Clare is the solemn grand-daughter pictured with GBJ in photographs by Emery Walker taken around 1900 and passed to the NPG in 1960 with a whole lot of glass negatives from the Emery Walker archive.

And she was given GBJ’s pen and ink illustration to Thomas Hood’s Bridge of Sighs, according to GBJ’s inscription  on the back.
 
Prompted by his own curiosity, Tim McGee has published a short account of Clare’s life, poignantly titled Barely Clare  ,  
which fills the biographical ‘hole’

Born in June 1896, the youngest Mackail started at St Pauls’ School for girls at age 12.  When she left in 1913 her physical and mental health were causing concern.  Through music and art, her friends included the family of Gustav Holst, plus their friends Ralph Vaughan Williams and Myra Hess, and fellow students at the Slade school ‘Pegs’ Ritchie and Reine Ormond, niece of John Singer Sargent.  After war was declared in summer 1914,  Clare volunteered as a VAD or Red Cross nurse, serving first in Balham and then at Moray Lodge in Kensington.

At some unrecorded date, she was ‘attacked’, or possibly sexually assaulted,  by her brother-in-law James MacInnes, composer, baritone and violent alcoholic, who married Angela in 1913 and was divorced by her in 1917. Clare’s comic sketch of ‘Aunt Clare’ with nephews Graham and Colin on the 49 bus, taking them out to tea and rebuking their table manners, is reproduced by McGee.

In 1918 Clare received 'electric treatment' for an unidentified condition. In 1921 she returned to the Slade for one term in the Life class.  After this, there are few sources of information until 1932 when she underwent thyroid surgery.   'I am exceedingly dull by nature', she told artist  Will Rothenstein  in 1933, 'and of course for years now, having been completely out of touch with the world through illness, have lived entirely in my imagination.'  

 By 1934 she was living in Hampstead as an invalid lodging with Louise Orr and her daughter.   Soon, she joined friends in the UK branch of a shadowy theosophical network founded by Eugene Milne Cosgrove known as The Group. Osteopath and astrological healer Bertha Orton led the British offshoot as its ‘archbishop’; Louise Orr, Hilda Field and Hilda Roberts were among the disciples who gathered  monthly, to meditate and allegedly  worship the full moon.  

The meetings, with a deal of occult performativity and costumes to match, took place at Orton’s homes: Four Winds, outside Farnham, and 43 York Terrace, Regents Park.   They adopted Sufi-style names, Clare becoming Roshan or Shining Light.   Members made several transatlantic trips, evidently to visit Cosgrove in Illinois and California.  Angela Thirkell would later characterise the group as Clare’s ‘peculiar female friends and their dotty religion.’  Men were members too, one being an established astrologer from Harrogate.

When World War Two struck, the circle named itself the Group for Sacrifice and Service.  On the night of 11 May 1941, ninety-nine members held a 12 hour vigil at York Terrace to pray for peace.   It proved to be the last night of the Blitz, and at 1.45am an explosive bomb destroyed a neighbouring building, killing 15 members of the Group, including Orton, Louise Orr and Catherine Field.   Clare Mackail was rescued from the debris with a broken arm and vertebrae.  She and Hilda Roberts retired to Four Winds, which later passed to a Sufi group as an inclusive retreat.   By the mid-1960s Clare was living in a small flat in Petersfield, where she died in January 1975, aged 79. 

Georgiana Burne-Jones and Clare Mackail, NPG


Friday 25 June 2021

Beatrice Offer

Beatrice Offer (1864-1920) was an early student at the Slade School, whose artworks display the Slade's hallmarks of confident figure drawing and broad, expressive painting.

A rediscovered selection of her works is currently on show at Bruce Castle Museum, Tottenham, close to where Offer lived with her second husband,  businessman and local councillor. They were found in storage by curator Deborah Hedgecock and prepared for exhibition in 2020, now open until the end of 2021.

Beatrice Offer Love Potion [detail] Bruce Castle Museum



The most striking are single female figures with a compelling gaze and darkly suggestive settings, often seen by candle- or fire-light. In one untitled piece, a witch with pointy hat and broomstick is glimpsed behind a seated girl. In  A Melody a shadowy head appears behind a harpist, recalling Julia Cameron's Whisper of the Muse.  In A Love Potion, fumes rise from the goblet of a sorceress, who reclines on a leopard skin [a stock studio prop] with a live bloodhound at her feet, in an unusual horizontal composition.  

The Crystal Gazer shows the eponymous subject with a future-telling globe.  She wears a green garland and offers the viewer a direct, inviting expression.     So far, so 1890s, with a good dose of pictorial occultism, suitable for the era of W B Yeats.  The works are accomplished and bold, commanding attention across the room, several with a Rossettian air - trademarks being wide eyes, parted lips, tumbling hair.  The brushwork is fluid and stylishly loose especially on the drapery.

Beatrice Offer 

Esme Dancing, Bruce Castle collection

as is seen in Esme Dancing [Esme's real life identity unknown] which is SO Edwardian and surely referencing Isadora Duncan.    There's a portrait of novelist Ouida, presumably drawn from photos, and a very interesting image of Hedda Gabler .   


Beatrice Offer, Auntie's Best Bonnet, Bruce Castle coll.


Not well reproduced in my snapshot, and not obviously Ibsen's rebellious heroine from its title 'Auntie's Best Bonnet'.  Deborah successfully linked image and title through this quote, which is Hedda's contemptuous judgement on the new hat belonging to her husband's aunt Julia, which Hedda deliberately mis-calls an old bonnet owned by the housekeeper. In Offer's painting, Hedda holds the album of photographs over which she revives her relationship with Eilert Lovborg, recalling times spent by 'we two on the corner sofa'.

First produced in London in 1891, the play was regularly revived between 1903 and 1911, notably with Mrs Patrick Campbell in the title role.

Offer's personal life was tragic: two sons died in babyhood and her first husband, a sculptor, died soon afterwards in a lunatic asylum.  To support herself Beatrice successfully turned to drawing decorative 'fancy heads' for commercial reproduction in glossy magazines, and then, perhaps for consolation, to devotional paintings.   A breakdown at age 55 preceded a suicidal leap from her bedroom window.  More biographical details from  #(94) (DOC) Beatrice Offor Artist 1864-1920 | Alan Walker - Academia.edu





Tuesday 22 June 2021

Emily Sargent

Emily Sargent view in Capri, n.d. Pitman Gift, Ashmolean Museum

 Sister to the more famous John Singer  -  how often is this sort of comment used in respect of women's art?  A small exhibition containing watercolours by Emily Sargent (1857-1936) is on display at the Broadway Museum, before transferring to the Ashmolean.  This nicely-chosen street view in Capri is one included, demonstrating the artist's accomplishment.

There's some degree of cant about the familiar lament regarding 'neglected' or 'forgotten' women artists, as if posterity were to blame.  But some [not all] did not seek attention, much less 'fame' or recognition.  They drew and painted for the satisfaction of so doing. If they exhibited, it was often in connection with some charitable endeavour, much like the embroideries and babies' knitwear contributed by others.    Emily Sargent was surely one such artist.

At the same time, she did not neglect or forget her artworks. It appears that some hundreds survive.  This group belonged to a member of her family, as did 37 others recently presented to Tate Britain [not yet online]. 

Wednesday 26 May 2021

update

 


Al-Annuri – the Moroccan Ambassador

In 1600, there was a significant shift in England’s relationship with the Islamic world. Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri was forty-two years old when he travelled to England as the ambassador of the Moroccan ruler, Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur. He was met at Dover on 8 August by members of the Barbary Company trading in Morocco, who took him and his retinue into London.

Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, 1600. © University of Birmingham Shakespeare Institute

Al-Annuri’s mission was to establish an Anglo-Moroccan alliance which would unite Moroccan Sunni Muslims and English Protestants against their common enemy: Catholic Spain. Al-Annuri’s proposal to Elizabeth was to invade Spain and reconquer Al Andalus (the mainland of Spain that had been under Muslim rule for centuries) and also launch a joint campaign against Spanish colonies in the Americas and Asia. Morocco was willing to supply the English fleet with provisions, infantry and money.

After being met at Dover, they travelled to London, arriving at Tower Wharf on 15 August. From there, they went to the household of Anthony Radcliffe, a merchant, on the Strand. Londoners observed, what they perceived to be, the Moroccans’ unusual dress and Islamic customs, including prayer. Then five days later, the Moroccans had their first audience with the Queen at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. Clearly eager to impress, the palace was prepared with ‘rich hangings and furniture sent from Hampton Court’.

Sunday 23 May 2021

DGR by Legros

 

                                     


Donato Esposito recently uncovered this chalk drawing by Alphonse Legros within the Slade School collection [where Legros taught] at UCL and correctly identified it as a portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  Comparing it  and especially the not yet entirely receded hairline, with the photos of DGR taken in October 1863 by Lewis Carroll [as he then wasn't] the portrait must have been drawn around the same season, Rossetti's first summer in Chelsea, when he frequently invited guests.   Legros was there on 16 July, for example, in company with Swinburne, Whistler and some other fellows.

In the Legros collection at UCL, mostly comprising etchings, are a few other unidentified sitters.  Some may have been studies, others look like portraits, whose names have been lost.  These two for instance

    


Tuesday 18 May 2021

Louisa Waterford

 


a much-overlooked artist, not least because  her major work is on the upper walls of a village hall in far [depending where you are] Northumberland  but worth a big detour.     

Born into high society, her father being British ambassador to Paris, her elder sister married to Viscount Channing, Louisa fell for the dissolute Marquess of Waterford at the famous Eglinton Tournament and spent several years as a 'hunt widow' in Ireland until his lordship broke his neck in a riding accident..  

Louisa retired to Ford in the far north of England, where she built and decorated the hall with instructional images [not murals because they are on paper]. Lots of them, many using local people and local animals as models.


The Hall is now a free museum. Home page - Lady Waterford Hall (ford-and-etal.co.uk)





Monday 19 April 2021

Racism 1880s

 

In a speech in 1888 prime minister Lord Salisbury referred back to the election of 1885 when the Conservative candidate had won the Holborn seat, saying that the winner had been  “opposed to a black man, and, however great the progress of mankind has been, and however far we have advanced in overcoming prejudices, I doubt if we have yet got to the point where a British constituency will elect a black man to represent them ... I am speaking roughly and using language in its colloquial sense, because I imagine the colour is not exactly black, but at all events, he was a man of another race". 

The defeated candidate was the Hon. Dadabhai Naoroji.

‘Few more unfortunate utterances have ever fallen from the lips of a British prime Minister’, began a Radical response published in the Pall Mall Gazette, the London evening newspaper. ‘It would have seemed unspeakably shocking to him to have sneered at the colour of a brother noble’s hair or even at a country squire’s freckles. These people are within the circle of the sacred caste. But to those who are without, the mere Irishry, the Hottentots, and Blackfellows generally, Lord Salisbury can be as rude as a bargee without ever dreaming that he is displaying a vulgarity of soul that is disgraceful to an English gentleman.

‘We see the same thing constantly in the case of slaveowners, and in a less degree the dealings of men with women.  A man loses caste for ever if he cheats another man at cards, but if he cheats a woman of her honour he is none the less received into society and indeed is regarded by many who would cut him dead if he cheated at cards as a very fine fellow indeed.

‘Now in Asia our myriad subjects have been made to feel that in the eyes of this proud patrician, who after all is but of yesterday compared with many of their ancient families, that they are all but “n*****s”.

‘Many a better man than Lord Salisbury has been a “Blackman”. Equally, it is true that many of our fellow subjects in India have skins swarthier in hue than our own.  That was also true in all probability of Christ and the Twelve Apostles …  The whiteman is the aristocrat of the world and he sums up his superiority in his own estimation when he sneers at the blackamoor.’

Salisbury's defence when rebuked was inimitably imperialist.  Claiming that the term ‘black’ did not imply contempt, he remarked that “The people whom we have been fighting at Suakim [sic, in Sudan], and whom we have happily conquered, are among the finest tribes in the world, and many of them are as black as my hat".   And, he went on, the House of Commons was too unique and “too delicate to be managed by any but those who have been born within these isles".  

In 1892, Naoroji was elected as MP for Finsbury.

The author of the letter in the Pall Mall Gazette and of its anti-racist views was a Dissenting minister named J Page Hobbs, who was based in Leicester.  According to Sydney Gimson, whose family owned the large iron foundry and engineering works there, his fellow middle class Radicals in the Leicester Secular Society were vehement Individualists in the wake of John Stuart Mill, but also decided to hear ‘the best that could be said for the new Socialism which was then rapidly coming to the fore.’  On consecutive weeks in January 1884, they listened therefore to H.M.Hyndman and William Morris, both from the newly-launched Social Democratic Federation, followed in the third week by J.Page Hobbs on ‘Sensible Socialism’. 

Gimson and his architect brother Ernest were greatly impressed by Morris, who gave what became his default speech on ‘Art and Socialism’.  It’s likely that current political events were also discussed, including the British military expedition against the Madhist uprising in the Sudan, on which Morris had forthright views.  When General Gordon was killed ‘defending’ Khartoum, Morris’s anti-jingoist comment was ‘Khartoum has fallen – into the hands of those to whom it belongs’.  That might have been too extreme for most of Leicester’s Secularists, by maybe not for Page Hobbs.

Hobbs is best remembered for a famous exchange that took place in the Gimsons’ home after Morris’s lecture.  ‘After supper we were talking about the lecture, Page Hobbs sitting in an easy chair, Morris on a dinner table chair,’ recalled Gimson. ‘Page Hobbs said, "You know, Mr. Morris, that would be a very charming Society that you have been describing, but it's quite impossible, it would need God Almighty himself to manage it!" Immediately Morris jumped up, ran his fingers through his hair and ruffled it, walked once or twice round his chair, then, shaking his fist close to Page Hobbs' face, exclaimed: "All right, man, you catch your God Almighty, we'll have him!" There was a burst of delighted laughter, in which Page Hobbs heartily joined.’ 

[ Sydney Gimson, Random Recollections of the Leicester Secular Society, March 1932, pp.20-23]


Thursday 15 April 2021

The Rossetti Brothers' Seances

 

In the early 1860s  - a decade I have inhabited for some years now - much of British society was taken up and taken in by a craze for self-styled Spiritualist seances.   More or less serious endeavours o receive communications from dead relatives and celebrities, seances involved a darkened room, a moveable table and a group of which one member was identified as the 'medium', to whom messages were put.  Responses chiefly in the form of 'yes' and 'no' were typically received through raps or tilts heard and seen by all, from 'spirits'  who were initially identified through questions.

As a fashionable parlour game, this was harmless; for many it was proof [of a kind] of the existence of an afterlife as then promised by some varieties of Christianity that promoted 'reunion in heaven', now that traditional belief in heaven was severely compromised by geological and Darwinian thinking that quite destroyed the creationist view of the universe.  Seances as such were distinct from the wide Spiritualist movement, which claimed to apprehend an invisible realm beyond the terrestrial.  Messages from 'beyond' were eagerly sought by the bereaved.  It was wholly fanciful, though not wholly fraudulent - mediums could be as baffled as anyone about the nature of the apparent communications.

William Michael Rossetti, the level-headed, rational, atheist brother, was most involved in the seances.  Dante Gabriel was already intellectually sympathetic to occult and superstitious notions, but less persuaded by the mediums, professional or amateur, and indeed rather irreverent towards the spirits.  Possibly he felt real ghosts could do better than table-tilting and knocking.

William's records of the seances in various houses round London in 1866-67 read like the minutes of inconsequential meetings with motley participants.   Long known of from WMR's personal archive preserved by his daughter and descendants until given to Dick Fredeman and sold by him to the university of British Columbia, the full transcript of the Seance Diaries has now been edited by Barrie Bullen, for publication by Peter Lang.

The majority of the communications came from a spirit identifying as Elizabeth Siddal, who had died in 1862.  Sadly for posterity, she failed to reveal anything substantive about her afterlife, or even her previous life, and no details on whether her death was suicidal or accidental.  The Rossettis on one occasion communicated with their late father, but gave up [in some disgust?] when his spirit proved unable to understand or speak Italian - in life professor Rossetti seldom used English.

Also included with the Diaries is a completely crazy epistle from fellow artist Anna Mary Howitt to Gabriel Rossetti in 1856, which over 8000 rambling words offers a garbled version of Georgina Houghton's later exegeses of the Spirit's rhetoric, and illustrates the gravity of Howitt's psychic breakdown - surely not caused by but certainly coinciding with Ruskin's critical censure of her painting of the rebellious Boadicea. 

It remains the greatest regret that this canvas was destroyed, and that Howitt's earlier works, The Castaway and Gretchen at the Fountain, which apparently both sold, do not survive either.  And a pity that no spirits from beyond the grave offer to describe them to us.



Thursday 11 March 2021

The Libyan Sibyl


 The Dean of Jesus College Cambridge has drawn my  attention to Burne-Jones's depiction of the  Libyan Sibyl in the extensive sequence of Morris & Co glass in the college chapel, to inquire if the portrayal was based on Fanny Eaton.  It's a good question, given that Eaton was the favoured model for numerous dark-skinned and exotic figures in the 1860s, and this design dates from the early 1870s.

But is there any evidence that EBJ used her as a model, or drew her in other guises?   I can't immediately find any.   

I incline to think that all the EBJ Sibyls, like most other figures in the window designs, are generalized images.   It's notable that the Libyan is dark-skinned, as pictorially befits a mythical figure whose role is (presumably) to serve the population of north Africa.  But I'd guess that EBJ's decision was prompted by the ten Sibyls on the floor of the duomo in Siena, where the Libyan is notably Black.


 

It is however, also interesting to note that another EBJ/WM window at Jesus College includes a second Black figure, in the person of Balthazar, the third Wise Man or Magus representing pagan Africa in the Adoration of the Kings.  



 It's true this Balthazar is not very dark.  But, together, the designs introduce a glimpse of diversity into an otherwise all-European  decorative scheme that purports to depict events in ancient Egypt and Syria.