Vernon Lee at Kelmscott House

In July 1881 the aspiring writer Vernon Lee [Violet Paget] called on the Morrises at Kelmscott House, following an invitation from Janey whom she had met through Marie Spartali in Italy.   In her characteristically catty manner she reported on house and hosts:

'The room was furnished rather like an extremely dingy sacristy with faded bits of old Italian furniture. A thickset, shockhaired, bearded man, powerful, common, rather like a railway porter or bargee & not unlike a sort of grizzled Charles Grant, was introduced to me as Mr William Morris; but as he was very busy apparently making furniture with two other men I had no opportunity of talking with him. Mrs M. had on the usual crinkled white garb with a  gold sarong around her waist or absence of waist; more beautiful and grand perhaps than in Florence.  She was very lazy and friendly & asked me to call again.'  [Vernon Lee's Letters, ed. Irene Cooper Willis 1937 p.70]

However, on her next visit a year later, she declared that
'the house is beautiful ... homely, artistic & far from any aesthetic house. Mrs M took me into a sweet garden, flowers & vegetables, they have with charming peeps of old brick, ivied houses; & gave me two blue sweet peas, just like Morris papers.' [ ibid p.95]

Then in 1883 Vernon Lee published Miss Brown, a novel about a barely-disguised Jane Burden Morris, who was so distressed and angry that three years later Mary Robinson was told she could not take Vernon Lee  to a grand party because it would cause 'great pain to an old and valued friend.'  Lee commented: 'This is doubtless Mrs Morris who answers exactly to the description & who has spoken in that sort of way before.  I don't at all blame her: my only vexation is that I should have caused the poor woman, whose life is far from happy, so much annoyance.' [ibid, p.221]

Back to the Land! in 1905

A recent visit to Letchworth to talk about May Morris took me back to a book I wrote a long time ago a book on the pastoral impulse in late nineteenth-century Britain, which naturally featured garden cities alongside rural communes, vegetarianism, new schools and much more.  See here for the Faber Finds page.

Among all the books, poems and pamphlets I read at the time, I failed to investigate the Artistic Crafts Series of Technical Handbooks  edited by W.R.Lethaby, a chief Arts and Crafts figure.  Or I would surely have cited this passage, which comes in the middle of  Christopher Whall’s textbook ‘for students and workers’ on Stained Glass Work, published in 1905.  Following 15 chapters on technical matters like cutting, painting, staining, leading, fixing etc., comes one on Colour, which itself then bursts into impassioned protest that reads as a prelude to Howards End:

“I have tried to show you one side by speaking of a little part of what may be seen and felt on a  spring morning, along a ridge of untouched hills in ‘pleasant Hertfordshire’, west of the road between Welwyn and Hitchin: if you want to see the other side of things ride across to Buntingford, and take the train back up the Lea Valley.  Look at Stratford (and smell it) and imagine it spreading, as no doubt it will, where its outposts of oil-mill and factory have already led the way, and think of the valley full up with slums, from Lea Bridge to Ponders End!  For the present writer can remember – and that not half a lifetime back – Edmonton and Tottenham, Brondesbury and Upton Park, sweet country villages where quiet people lived and farmed and gardened amidst the orchards, fields and hawthorn lanes.

Here now live, in mile after mile of jerry-building, the ‘hands’ who, never taught any craft or work worthy of a man, spend their lives in some little single operation that, as it happens, no machine has yet been invented to perform; month after month, year after year, painting, let us say, endless repeats of one pattern to use as they are required for the borders of pious windows in the churches of this land.

This is ‘the other side of things’ , much commended by what is looked on as ‘robust common sense’; and with this you have – nothing to do.  Your place is elsewhere, and if it needs be that it seems an isolated one, you must bear it and accept it.  Nature and your craft will solve all; live in them, bathe in them to the lips; and let nothing tempt you away from them to measure things by the standard of the mart.

Let us go back to our sunny hillside. ‘It is good for us to be here’, for this also is holy ground; and you must indeed be amongst such things if you would do stained-glass, for you will never learn all the joy of it in a dusty shop.

“So hard to get out of London?”

But get a bicycle then; - only sit upright on it and go slow – and get away from these bricks and mortar, to where we can see things like these! Those dandelions and daisies against the deep, green grass; the blazing candle of sycamore buds against the purple haze of the oak; and those willows like puffs of grey smoke where the stream winds. Did you ever? No, you never!  Well – do it then!”

Sidi portraits

ON BELONGING

Photos by Ketaki Sheth of the Sidi people of African descent in India

Room 33 @ NPG from 13 April

One of India’s leading contemporary photographers, Ketaki Sheth has a long-standing interest in questions of identity and representation. In her most recent project, shown here, she features the Sidi, a people of African descent living in India. With origins in historic trade routes, they have called India home since the seventeenth century, adopting many of the conventions of dress, food, and ceremony characteristic of the subcontinent. At the same time, they maintain a distinct identity and culture. 

There are currently about 70,000 Sidi living in India. Descended from sailors, traders, and slaves, some continue to think of Africa as an ancestral homeland, but nearly all consider themselves Indian in every other way. Most live in the western state of Gujarat and the southern state of Karnataka.

Sheth’s photographs are true portraits—insightful pictures of personalities living in Sidi communities. At the same time, her project explores the complexity of national and cultural identity and how this might shift over time, questions that relate closely to the Collection in National Portrait Gallery.  With a group such as the Sidi, how does one begin to separate issues of nationality, ethnicity, and culture? And how much of personal identity is shaped by tradition and context?  As touching as Sheth’s photographs are, they also remind us how complicated portraits can be.

see more  here NPG blogpost

Ruskin as Educator

Mad governess or wise instructor?

This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Sesame & Lilies, the texts on education and gender that have done almost as much as his unconsummated marriage to damage John Ruskin’s reputation today.  It is also 45 years, give or take a few months, since the appearance of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which explosively began the attack from which Ruskin’s name has hardly yet recovered [I was sorry to hear the familiar assault uncritically repeated in Amanda Vickery’s recent TV series on the struggle for female suffrage]

The anniversary is the occasion for a scholarly conference in Cambridge, organised by the university there that, having begun life as Cambridge College of Art, in 2005 re-named itself Anglia Ruskin in recognition of the fact that he gave the college’s inaugural lecture in 1858.

According to the blurb, ‘Ruskin’s work is just as important today as in his own time.  He was voted one of the top ‘green campaigners of all time’ by the Guardian in 2006; he was a powerful voice in promoting women’s education, while believing passionately in ‘separate spheres’; he worked tirelessly to promote the education of the working class; he was an artist, and influential art critic and author of a brilliant example of Victorian life-writing, Praeterita.

The fun parts include a special viewing of Ruskin’s watercolours in the Fitzwilliam Museum; and a foyer performance of a comedy called Ruskin’s Women – Effie, Rosey-Posy, Joanie and who else? – by Ros Connelly, whose recent plays include  suffragette dramas about Emily Wilding Davison and Lady Constance Lytton. 

UPDATE

In fact, RUSKIN’S WOMEN was not about actual women but a witty unpicking  of [some] of his writings on the subject as a dialogue between a sculpted Noah and a caryatid.   Performers in the photos:   Barry Evans, Ben Kidder, Henry Lay, Isabel Rees, Kirsty Harris, Flaviana Cruz and Lydia Cato.

It complemented the academic papers, which were lively and full of humour – I’ve seldom laughed so much at a scholarly conference – and included a couple of songs composed by Ruskin as well as all manner of erudite expositions of rarely-visited texts.   So it was all fun.

  

The Magi by Pieter Breughel the younger

Paintings by the Breughels are interesting in relation to depictions of the Magi, being rather different to Italian versions, and this newly-located work by PB younger is additionally intriguing because of the way the Holy Family are pictorially marginalised and the majority of the space is allocated to Northern peasants going about their daily business on a very snowy January day - notwithstanding the presence in their midst of two richly-laden beasts that look like mules crossed with camels, at the end of a train headed by three kings well-wrapped against the cold.    
The first two kings are already kneeling to the  almost invisible Christ Child while Balthazar, wearing a thick fur coat, strides forward bearing his gift, which looks more like pearls than myrrh.  His attendant, in heavy woollen cape and hat follows.  These two are distinctly dark-skinned, so we know the artist is conveying the message about the Wise Men representing Europe, Asia and Africa.  

But as with most of the other figures,  their features are not distinctly personalised.  None of the peasants are paying them much attention, as if Africans were everyday visitors to a Flemish village in mid-winter.   Perhaps the two guys in scarlet hose carrying halberds are some kind of official guard or escort?  There are more soldiers to the right, one of whom is heading purposefully towards cooking pots on a fire in a peasant's hut
The veiled figure in dark hat and cape walking in the procession is rather mysterious - any clues as to his identity or occupation?

Auction estimate either side of half a million euros.  Details and great close-ups  here

More Spitalfields Nippers

Or rather, a public presentation of Horace Warner’s remarkable photographs of children in  Whitechapel in 1901 by the Gentle Author at the National Portrait Gallery at 7.00 pm on  Thursday 2 April.   More info and booking  here

and here one of the pictures – a Nipper in her best bib inspecting  a drawing by Edward Burne-Jones of Maria Zambaco (or her lookalike – many of EBJ’s careful studies have Zambaco’s features):

 

The Whitechapel Art Gallery was originally a development from the fine art exhibitions of works loaned by contemporary artists organised by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett of Toynbee Hall.  Rev Samuel enjoyed discoursing to those visiting the exhibitions on the high spiritual messages in pictures by G.F.Watts, Frederic Leighton, Burne-Jones etc.

Marie Spartali 3

CATALOGUE DETAILS here

We are getting towards the end of writing and editing the catalogue for the forthcoming exhibition opening at Delaware Art Museum in November.    There will be a total of 41 pictures by Marie, plus 8 works showing images of her by other artists, and some decorative items, including embroidered slippers and japanesy designs for room screens.  A good number of the exhibits have not been seen in public for the last century or more; others have been briefly glimpsed since the 1980s in auction rooms and exhibitions, so maybe half altogether have never been available for sustained attention.

One of the most interesting aspects of the search for exhibits and the accompanying research into them is the revelation that Spartali Stillman, hitherto mainly known as a Pre-Raphaelite successor in the British context, is that her career was as much if not more successful in the United States, where she exhibited consistently from the 1870s onwards.  In her catalogue essay Margaretta Frederick explores the artistic networks in New York and New England that Marie was engaged with, initially through her husband but soon very much on her own account.  Henry James was an early admirer of her work, commenting on this picture:

The interest resides partly in the peculiar beauty of the model, and partly, chiefly even, in the remarkable, the almost touching, good faith of the work. The type of face and the treatment suggest the English pre-Raphaelite school, but in so far as the artist is a pre-Raphaelite, she is evidently a sincere and, as we may say, a natural one. There is a vast amount of work in the picture, little of which is easy and some of which is even awkward, but its patience, its refinement, its deep pictorial sentiment, give the whole production a singular intensity. . . . We have seen things of late which had more skill and cleverness, but we have seen nothing which, for reasons of its own, has been more pleasing. There is something in Mrs. Stillman’s picture which makes a certain sort of skill seem rather inexpensive, and renders cleverness vulgar; an aroma, a hidden significance, a loveliness.

A more fulsome American critic was James Jackson Jarves, who was however less specific in his observation and so effusive as to be therefore less effective:

The paintings of Mrs. Stillman are romances in color. Her color sense is so strong that it overpowers every other artistic feature, and she breathes, thinks, and works under its absolute dictation. For it all other points in picture composition are sacrificed or made wholly subservient. It is an effect of temperament, and modified only by a picturesque poetical sentiment which finds its native expression in heart-warm tints and glowing combinations and contrasts. These two forces beget a kind of troubadour and medieval literature in color, pastoral lyrics, and whatever breathes innocence, culture, transparent, stainless emotions and character, happiness unconscious of evil and strong in its might of virtue, rejoicing in nature’s deepest greens, ethereal blues of perfect skies and unbroken sunshine, bright flowers of paradisiac hues, harmonizing with rival colors, of richest, graceful costumes amid limpid fountains and emeraldine waters, their silent music stealing over the senses so irresistibly that we feel Ponce de Leon’s search for the fabled fountain of youth has at last been successful and the spectator has entered the veritable Garden of the Hesperides and become one of the guileless, beautiful dwellers therein. Perpetual youth, beauty, gay romance, and serious passion undefiled become tangible realities to a receptive mind, able to comprehend that art has a loftier mission than to imitate nature, and is never so great as when using its own creative, intuitive powers to make a world of its own, apart from the natural, everyday world.

As often happens with pioneering exhibitions that aim to showcase unfamiliar or overlook artists’ work, re-discoveries keep cropping up.  We think the guillotine is now down on exhibits, but as there remain quite a number of untraced pieces that were shown and even reproduced hen exhibited for example at the Grosvenor Gallery, one can never tell;  if one or other most-sought-after picture were suddenly to surface, I at least would be keen to add it to the exhibition.  It is only by actual sight of Spartali Stillman’s work that its range and qualities can be fairly assessed.

So, if anyone knows of a hitherto unlocated picture, please let us know.

Catalogue details:

Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman is made possible, in part, with a gift from the Delaware Art Museum Docents in memory of Evelyn Tietze, a Museum Docent for more than 30 years. Additional support is provided by grants from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.

Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman / edited by Margaretta S. Frederick and Jan Marsh. Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Del. Nov. 7, 2015 – Jan. 31, 2016 and at the Watts Gallery, Compton, Guildford, UK (Feb-May 2016).

ISBN 978-0-9960676-1-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stillman, Marie Spartali, 1844-1927

Published by Delaware Art Museum. Distributed by Antique Collectors’ Club.