Armida's seductive garden

 

A London blue plaque for Marie Spartali Stillman is being installed at the former Spartali home just off Clapham Common.   Now located at 2 Lavender Gardens, the Regency-era mansion to which the wealthy, exiled Greek family moved in 1864 was called The Shrubbery thanks to its extensive grounds.

The English Heritage plaque memorialises the artist whom Henry James described as a sincere, spontaneous Pre-Raphaelite in the Victorian art movement that now carries that name, and one who ‘inherited the traditions and the temper‘ of the original early Italians who inspired the PRB.

Marie studied with Ford Madox Brown, who became a lifelong friend and mentor.  She was close to Brown’s daughters Lucy and Catherine, who also became artists, and knew other members of the art world – Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Julia Cameron, William and Janey Morris.  The home circle was Greek Orthodox, including the Cassavetti, Coronio, Ralli and Ionides families.  Her first pictures were inspired by her Greek heritage featuring classical heroines Antigone and Corinna, followed by medieval figures from the British myths of King Arthur.

She also produced a range of work in other genres, notably vibrant flowerpieces and landscapes, mainly set in the Isle of Wight, where the Spartalis had a summer home, and where they were acquainted with photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, for whom Marie posed in a number of ‘subject’ pictures, as Hypatia, as the mother of the Muses and as the Spirit of the Vine. Later, in the spirit of friendship, she also sat to fellow artists Brown, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones.

Unusually for her time, her gender and her social class, Marie determined on being a professional artist, which was challenging.  When she sold her first picture, to a rich shipowner, her father urged her to make it a gift,  lest a sale suggest he could not maintain his family.  Naturally modest, she was also inhibited by the proscription on women and publicity.  As Virginia Woolf noted, ‘The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles’,  yet the prime duty of an artist was to ‘make a name’.   Whereas Rossetti, for example, told each client that the current painting was his best to date, Marie tended, in the words of one friend to ‘run down her own work’.

Her own ambition was further constrained by sympathy for others.    She fell for William Stillman, an American widower with three children whose reports of Ottoman repression in Crete made him a minor hero in London, and later devoted much time to caring for her sister with mental health problems.  When she defied her parents to marry Stillman  (they suspected him of fortune-hunting) she redoubled her efforts to paint and sell,  following the current Aesthetic fashion for half-length female figures surrounded by flowers, with poetic titles.  Steadily, these developed into figural scenes from Italian authors Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio,  a trend that hallmarked mid-period Pre-Raphaelitism.

Stillman became a foreign correspondent for the Times, specialising in Balkan and Italian affairs.  The family therefore lived for some years in Florence, and then Rome, where Marie painted  during winter months, returning to Britain with pictures for the summer exhibitions.  Her output over five decades was extensive, and though the titles of many works are known from exhibition records, a substantial number have vanished from view, only now  surfacing again via auction houses.   She exhibited most regularly in London, but also occasionally in Paris, latterly in Rome, and also in the United States,  where her son Michael Stillman forged a successful architectural career.  Her daughter Effie became a sculptor and her step-daughter Lisa an artist in crayon and watercolour.

Thanks to the support shown to Marie and William by Leslie and Julia Stephen, the families became close to each after Julia Stephen’s death, when her daughter Vanessa spent time working in Lisa’s studio, watchfully observed by the young Virginia Woolf.  Something of Marie’s determined art practice seems reflected in Woolf’s insistence that the first need for an artistic woman  is a room on her own.

Marie’s late work, A rose from Armida’s Garden (1894) brings together several strands in her career.  Delicately drawn and sweetly coloured, it joins her other ‘Rossettian’ female half-lengths that were so popular with clients and now tend to define ‘PreRaphaelitism’.   The subject is the alluring figure of Amida from Gerusalemme Liberata, the fanciful Italian epic about the Crusades by Torquato Tasso, with elements taken from Ariosto.  Armida abducts the knight Rinaldo to her magical garden, where he forgets and forsakes his crusading task, until all enchantment is defeated and Jerusalem is besieged.

Spartali’s sorceress  belongs with other fin de siècle femmes fatales, who divert romantic heroes from their sterner masculine duties.  She is also a figure of the allurements of visual pleasure in art, offering escape from the realities of life, and false promises of glory.   In this guise she links back thirty years to Spartali’s Antigone, the heroine who refuses to forsake duty, a link that obliquely draws attention to the emptiness most of late-Victorian art, and does so by very beautiful means.