No, i'm joking. I don't view these artists as rivals. Though the comparisons are interesting in respect of late-Victorian picture-making reputations.
Marie Spartali Stillman's now-famous and much-reproduced image of the lady Dianora in the Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo, (1889) transformed from winter to spring by sorcery, finally came on to the art market last week and sold for £874,500 hammer price.
It's a lovely piece, in detail and in whole. A wonderfully Romantic scene, delicately and deliciously drawn and coloured. A bit fragile as regards condition - not surprising in a large 780 x 1000mm work on paper in Spartali's characteristically dry watercolour - and superbly reproducible in terms of merchandise.
The auction details and essay here
A few moments later, Gloria in Excelsis (1893) by Evelyn Pickering de Morgan depicting a pair of Christmas angels announcing the birth of Jesus to the Shepherds (not seen) with a host of seraphim in the sky, fetched £622,500.
see here Evelyn de Morgan
Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919) | Gloria in Excelsis | 19th Century, Paintings | Christie's
It too is brilliantly drawn and coloured with elegant peacock wings and rippling drapery, but more robustly painted in oil and with an impressive pillared frame. The only drawback, in my view, are the juvenile Victorian faces of the seraphim, with windblown hair as if literally flying in heavenly air.
Both works came from the long-mysterious collection owned by Joe Setton. Both deserve to be publicly available for study.
A third female artist, much less well-known, in fact almost completely unknown, was represented by a small medievalising illustration of a girl trying a wedding ring for size.
By Alice Macallan Swan, this you might have bought for just £15,000, noting its Pre-Raphaelite debts to Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla and Millais's Bridesmaid.
The most intriguing and hitherto quite unknown work in the sale was lot 31, which depicts a medieval scholar in a midwinter library to whom an older necromancer reveals a vision of a rooftop garden overlooking ships at sea, with himself and an inamorata surrounded by courting couples and musicians.
The catalogue describes this as a version of Boccaccio's Messer Ansaldo tale. The authorship is ascribed to Rossetti's circle. Both seem good guesses, but not compelling ones. The main seated figure is reminiscent of Simeon Solomon's style, and the populated vision recalls the manuscript illuminations that were popular in the late 1850s. But what exactly is the story?
Untitled and unsigned, it sold for £40 000.
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