Brechin

A little behindhand for Holy Innocents.  It took me some time to locate an image of the Victorian anti-type to the Massacre  - Christ's 'Suffer little Children to come unto me'.   This is a three-light window in Brechin's honorary  cathedral,  produced by Morris &Co, under Henry Dearle and attributed to him, although several elements, including the tiled sky, the female heads and the infant faces are plainly copied if not actually drawn by Burne-Jones. [it was after all, a house style]

My attention was caught by the mother and babe on the far right, whose dark skins give a global aspect to the religious message, albeit marginalised.  i must now search for other versions.  Happy New Year to all newborns and their forebears.

[Apologies and credit to Sandy, from whose anonymous blog I borrowed the image, my own proving hopeless...]  .

Lovely Lily Cole @ NPG

hoping this link connects :  -

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwkvD1aTo3I>


https://www.artfund.org/whats-on/exhibitions/2019/10/17/pre-raphaelite-sisters-exhibition?utm_term=PRE-RAPHAELITE%20SISTERS&utm_campaign=AIYI_191219_PROSPECTS_RESEND&utm_content=email&utm_source=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email&cm_mmc=Act-On%20Software-_-email-_-Lily%20Cole%20on%20Pre-Raphaelite%20Sisters-_-PRE-RAPHAELITE%20SISTERSLily Cole

https://www.artfund.org/whats-on/exhibitions/2019/10/17/pre-raphaelite-sisters-exhibition?utm_term=PRE-RAPHAELITE%20SISTERS&utm_campaign=AIYI_191219_PROSPECTS_RESEND&utm_content=email&utm_source=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email&cm_mmc=Act-On%20Software-_-email-_-Lily%20Cole%20on%20Pre-Raphaelite%20Sisters-_-PRE-RAPHAELITE%20SISTERS

Merry Christmas

Marina's Pre-Raphaelite Muses

Artist Marina Elphick brought four of her soft sculptures to the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters conference at York, where their contemplative expressions made a great addition to the scholarly papers about overlooked artists, and provoked a debate over the pejorative use of the term 'doll' [not Marina's choice] .  

The fabrics used are especially noteworthy, and the craftwoman's skill is alluring.





I am very happy to see Georgiana BJ wearing her famous coral necklace...

 and I  particularly  like the hair.


From previously seeing only images on Marina's website [ https://marinamade.me/]  i  expected the figures to be smaller, whereas they are a good size that enhances their presence, and can stand and sit in various poses.

the background figure is their creator  

AND HERE'S THE WHOLE GROUP 

Honorary Pre-Raphaelites: Florence Welch and Lily Cole

When the NPG’s Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition was first projected, my aim was to include images of later models and actors whose features and presentation evoked some aspects of the original movement  - partly because many of the nineteenth  century images have a distinctly modern or contemporary look, and partly because of the loosely comparable social trajectories that begin with modelling.

In the course of creating the exhibition, this aspect was necessarily dropped; one may feel there are already too many exhibits and labels.  So I was delighted when last week, two present-day representatives of the theme took part in events associated with Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the NPG.  Both have portraits in the Gallery collection.

Lily Cole, who has the same translucent skin and delicate features as Elizabeth Siddal, as well as Siddal’s tall and slim figure, and recently acted in that role for the BBC Radio3 programme Unearthing Elizabeth Siddal, came to film a personal introduction to the exhibition for the Art Fund.   I will post a link when it is published.

Then singer-songwriter Florence Welch took part in a conversation with photographer Tom Beard, ranging widely over their shared experiences and the visual links between the aesthetic adopted by Florence in life and art and that of the Pre-Raphaelite movement,  with some acute observations about both contemporary and historical imagery.  Plus neatly juxtaposed pictures from the exhibition and Florence’s albums. 

It was a triumphant evening, enhanced by the enthusiastic audience of Florence followers and lookalikes.   No Photography allowed  but the above picture shows their heroine with Tom Beard’s triple-mirrored photo recently acquired by the NPG.   Which chimes well with the picture of Fanny Cornforth posing against a cheval mirror in the garden of Rossetti’s home in Cheyne Walk, in 1863.

Pre-Raphaelite Sisters Making Art at York 2

https://prsistersconference.home.blog/

Papers on Emma Sandys, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Eaton,  Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Anna Alma-Tadema, Maria Zambaco, Effie Millais, Clementina Hawarden, Edith Hipkins, Kate Faulkner, Fanny Cornforth.  and the NPG exhibition.

Plus a call for new articles on other artists to be published in conjunction.

Oscar Murillo at Margate

 

Kara Walker Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Despite the vast volume of the Turbine Hall, the Fons  Americana still feels spatially constricted.

As sculptor Kara Walker's spoof advert indicates, this is intended for a large British public space.  It's modelled on the Victoria memorial by Buckingham Palace,  or the Albert Memorial and needs a similar outdoor location.

Conceptually however it is magnificent

Artistic soulmates?

this post is very belated owing to intensive work at NPG 
and half-finished, but still i hope worth posting





As a result of visiting the exhibitions of work by Natalia Goncharova and Frank Bowling in the same week, i was struck by their comparability [if there is such a word, not meaning similarity]

Both used colour so dynamically, in the sense of colour being the dramatic driving force of the visual image, whether figurative or abstract or in-between.


Then each was personally displaced from their lands of origin, whose themes were consistent sources of memory, imagination and energy  with being nostalgic.

And both responded to the successive art movements of their time, so that contemporary influences are visible in their own works as in a graphic conversation that might otherwise seem derivative. 

Critics tend to valorise 'original' artists whose work is entirely sui generis, but those who reveal their encounters with others tend to offer an equally interesting narrative  for the viewers.   Film art loves to include references, homage, allusion, subversion.

Mary Sibande at Somerset House

Installation series "I Come Apart at the Seams"

by Mary Sibande

that carries on the trajectory of Sophie who worked as a maid in white households in apartheid South Africa [and probably still does, although now an emancipated citizen]

through the years of struggle that culminated in Mandela's presidency

 and now seem again endangered.

in the Terrace Rooms at Somerset House.  Open daily until 5 January

Elizabeth Siddal's hair

in some haste because of still being super-busy with Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, but here is a link to an interesting item



https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2019/october/lizzie-siddal-pre-raphaelite-muse-winterthur-lock-hair-art-histor

which is currently on view at NPG in Pre-Raphaelite Sisters  exhibition  alongside W H Deverell's etching of Siddal in costume as Cesario playing court to Olivia in Twelfth Night

PreRaphaelite Sisters publication

York University conference 1

Elizabeth Siddal's mysterious drawing

Elizabeth Siddal, Wightwick Manor National Trust

This very small watercolour depicting two figures in dense woodland is now known as The Haunted Wood,  which is a fair description of the scene in which a blue-gowned female leans away from a taller, more indeterminate shadowy one with hands upraised, as if saying 'Here I am', or even 'Boo!'

Reconstructing Elizabeth Siddal's oeuvre has its tricky elements, despite Gabriel Rossetti's careful assembly and reproduction of all, or many, of her drawings and sketches into albums, two of which were preserved in the Fitzwilliam and Ashmolean Museums.  He also assembled as many of her watercolour works as he could, famously hanging them in his Cheyne Walk house.

The watercolours were not photographed, owing to the poor results from the monochrome prints then available from photographs.   The Haunted Wood is one such.   It was given to Wightwick Manor in 2001 by William Rossetti's great grand-daughter, so has a firm line of provenance,  which assumes William inherited it from Gabriel in 1882.

There's no reason to doubt this - and yet it might just link to another piece of information regarding Siddal's works.  The 1892  posthumous sale of works owned by Liverpool shipowner Frederick Leyland  includes four [lots 21-24] attributed to 'Mrs Rossetti'.  

They include two that can be identified with known pieces:  a Lady Clare pen & ink and a Virgin & Child.  And two that are less certain.  One was called 'Figures in a landscape', which  might be identified with the [equally mysterious] couple seated by a field gate serenaded by Oriental musicians.  

The other was entitled 'Annunciation',  which does not immediately accord with any extant composition, even though the subject is among the commonest images in the whole of Western art.
Is it possible that the Haunted Wood in fact depicts an unusual rendering of the Annunciation?  With the blue-clad Virgin startled by the unexpected appearance amid trees of the archangel, hands raised in a 'behold' gesture?

If this were so, the inference would be that William Rossetti bought it from or after the Leyland sale, but did not agree with the ascribed title, so no Annunciation subsequently featured among the list of Siddal's works.   Certainly, other Annunciations place the episode indoors, so this would be exceptional.

But not unique.  Following his well-known Ecce Ancilla of 1850, showing the Virgin on her bed,  Gabriel Rossetti broke with pictorial convention in 1855, creating a sunlit al fresco scene of Mary paddling in a stream (or washing clothes, though any garment is exiguous) while the Angel hovers between sapling trees, arms outstretched.   This was originally owned by George Boyce. 

D G Rossetti, Annunciation 1855-8, PC

This provides a precedent for Siddal's woodland scene - or maybe her conception prompted his, which offered a possibly more plausible reason for Mary being outdoors; there could be no biblical justification for her to be wandering in a forest.  But Siddal's imagination was always stronger than her scholarship.

A few years later, Gabriel reprised the subject with  the Virgin now seated reading in a garden, as the Archangel leans over a rose-trellis to make his prophetic announcement.

D G Rossetti, Annunciation, c,1861, Fitzwilliam Museum

In the context of these works, i think Siddal's mysterious image may  well be intended for the same subject.

.r

PR SIsters at National Portrait Gallery

Scheduled for  October, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters opens a new window on the subject, looking at the actual women within and behind the art.  Those ‘stunners’ who inspired and modelled for the painted saints, heroines and courtesans.   Those women who painted alongside the more famous men.  Those who as wives and partners, studio assistants and household managers, participated invisibly in the making of Pre-Raphaelite art.

How did these women relate to the images?   What did they really look like? How did they become involved?  How did they fare?  What happened to them in later life?  The exhibition invites you to ponder, explore  and assess the creative contribution made by a dozen individuals in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, during the half-century to 1900.  It presents a wealth of art works, from the iconic to the unknown,  depicting women cast in dramatic roles and in portraits.   It reveals their own artistic ambitions and glimpses of their private lives.

In 1848, the year of European revolutions, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood [PRB] was launched by a group of young artists with the aim of challenging the tired conventions of the day through the rediscovery of  clarity, sincerity and moral feeling.  Over the years it evolved as an aesthetic endeavour, invoking imagined idealities inspired by legendary themes.

The fact that one can here write ‘young artists’ on the understanding that all were male is symptomatic both of the time and of virtually all art criticism.  In fact, women were also inspired by the aims of the PRB  - ‘a set of crazy poetical young men’, according to one young woman, who ‘are full of true feeling in spite of their craziness’ – and in response dreamt of creating  an ‘art sisterhood’ for mutual support.   This did not happen, but the sense of shared values created a circle linked by friendship and aspiration that extended to the next generation.  

One of the models featured is Fanny Cornforth aka Sarah Cox, Sarah Hughes and Sarah Schott,  about whom Kirsty Walker has written so sympathetically.  While other artists cast other models in the emerging Venetian style of mid-period Pre-Raphaelitism, Fanny can be credited with inaugurating the Rossettian version with Bocca Baciata, then with inspiring a whole sequence of courtesan images including the Blue Bower [top]. 

 Less familiar is the original [or at least an early] version of Lady Lilith, for some reason later reproduced as a colour lithograph, well after the large oil with Lilith's altered features had reached collector Samuel Bancroft in Delaware.

Advance booking for tickets to Pre-Raphaelite Sisters is now  available

Le Modele Noir

The great exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay is not only about artists’ models of African ancestry, but a whole bunch of other individuals including political figures like  Toussaint L’Ouverture,   writer Alexandre Dumas,  actor Jeanne Duval, comic  Chocolat, dancer  Josephine Baker and surrealist Ady Fidelin.  The central focus however is on the French Caribbean woman who posed for the attendant in Manet’s so-celebrated Olympia, presenting an admirer’s bouquet to the naked courtesan.  And who has now been identified – although only by first name, alas, thanks to a note by Manet ‘Laure / 11 rue de Vintimille’.

In the exhibition too is a fine array of bronze busts by Charles Cordier, conceived as anthropological/ethnic examples but before casting modelled in clay from actual women and men in Paris.  As ever, it’s the critical mass of images rather than the single examples that enables the exhibition to present a mixed rather than monochrome picture of nineteenth century French society – albeit chiefly, it appears, resident in the northern areas of Paris around the places de Clichy and Pigalle, or employed as nannies for well-to-do families in more fashionable quartiers    

There is a fine selection of images of the acrobat known as Miss LaLa - real name Olga Albertina Brown - and her performance troupe:

The exhibition title The Black Model from Gericault to Matisse indicates the chronological sweep from 1800 to 1950,  but in fact the exhibits continue beyond this, featuring several recent responses to Olympia that reverse the white and black figures, such as Larry Rivers’ mixed media ‘I like Olympia in Black Face 1970, complete with white and black cats  :

Plus  Aime Mpane’s tile work Olympia II 2013 which visually imprisons the pair as if behind a grille and places a large skull within the flower bouquet.    Seen alongside Gauguin’s 1891 copy,  these iterations underline the continuing impact of the original.   One would like to see similar works by contemporary female artists of African heritage.

Many more images in the substantial catalogue published by Flammarion, which also includes a list of 38 dark-skinned male and female models registered with the Ecole des Beauz-Arts and other ateliers, 1901-1933  with names, addresses and brief descriptions (negre / noir / type abyssin / mulatresse / belle gorge etc)

Call for Papers

The University of York is organising a conference in December to extend the scope of the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at the NPG. 

The CfP  is  attached here.

Jenny Morris postscript

the better image of Evelyn de Morgan's chalk portrait, as promised.

Georgie Burne Jones recalled the day in 1876 when she received a note from 'poor Janey at Horrington House' asking for the address of a doctor 'because Jenny had fainted suddenly and frightened her very much'.   This was perhaps the first major seizure.

By 1901 Georgie reported that Jenny 'now never speaks  without being spoken to .. and seldom smiles'.  And six years later, after a visit to Kelmscott, Georgie added that 'a week in Jenny's company' had made her understand Janey's situation 'as I never did before.' 

Fanny Cornforth's last days

Christopher Whittick and Kirsty Walker have separately published on the final years of Fanny Cornforth, Pre-Raphaelite model and Rossetti's devoted companion, which make for relatively sad reading, although with today's greater familiarity with alzheimer's and other dementias her experience was by no means unusual.

And the detailed record kept by the Graylingwell asylum or hospital  now in West Sussex Record Office makes this clear.  Admitted from Chichester workhouse on 30 March 1907 as a widow with no known relatives, she was 'well nourished', indeed stout, but 'very deaf', confused, 'excitable'  and upset, with no sense of orientation and no memory for recent or remote events.  In September she fractured her wrist in a fall, and kept attempting to remove the plaster cast.  By January 1909 she was bed-ridden and effectively blind, and on 24 February she died, the causes listed as pneumonia and senile dementia.



The melancholy chronicle is aggravated by the absence of all friends and relations, and by the fact that the hospital record is for 'Sarah Hughes',  which was Fanny's name during her first marriage.  So there is no trace of her second husband John Schott - who predeceased Fanny.  The record cites two informants who appear to have transferred Fanny to this version of community care:  Mrs Mant from the Homestead at Felpham, described as her landlady, who committed Fanny to the Chichester Union workhouse, and Ann Humphrey of Outram House Felpham, who stated that Fanny had been  'strange in her manner' for some time and occasionally violent. Both addresses sound like private care homes,  which  presumably moved their most decayed residents to poor law public hospitals on a regular basis.

The whole register makes for absorbing reading,  with the accounts of Fanny's companions [all female in this ledger and the hospital section] suffering not only from senility but also psychosis  - frequently hearing distressing voices urging them to suicide and some suffering mental breakdown after having stillborn infants.  Several younger patients were discharged, registered as 'recovered',  which implies  families to return to.  It's a rare glimpse into historical mental health services via record-keeping.