A newly-discovered - or rather uncovered - painting by Joanna Boyce is unveiled by Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.     

more details:  https://www.academia.edu/144603133/Joanna_Boyce_portrait_of_Samuel_Naylor

Francis Williams, [nearly) FRS

a

A few weeks ago, Prof Fara Dabhiowala gave a brilliant talk on this painting [in V&A since 1928] decoding its presentation and accessories in a masterly art historical account of research in action. 

 The artist was identified as William Williams [no relation], the portrait was dated to 1760 and the contradictions between the naive depiction and the highly intellectual content is now fully explained.

The research repays study, so it's good to add that that the whole text is published in the LRB Fara Dabhoiwala · A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due

 

The British Empire in the Art Gallery

the 'decolonisation' of British museums is a curious process, given that most museums with any historical aspect are effectively and unavoidably based on the imperialist narrative.    Virtually all now participate in its acknowledgement. 

on 27 September the NPG in London will host a day of presentations organised by the Centre for Museum Cultures at Birkbeck, surveying the British scene.  These include Reflections on Entangled Pasts at the Royal Academy and the Re-hang at Tate Britain, plus curatorial reports on the Bluecoat and Walker art galleries in Liverpool, Bristol art gallery and Manchester art gallery, with contributions from UCL's Legacies of British Slavery, the University of Birmingham, Devi Art Foundation, the University of the West of Scotland and the University of Melbourne.  Given the familiar focus on Caribbean slavery, there's a welcome input on the 'Indian' empire, plus  case studies of the Beckford legacy at Fonthill, the origins of 'Casta' and the infamous Rex Whistler mural in Tate Millbank's restaurant.

Program from 

BEAGworkshop@gmail.com

'mind you don't all go mad'

 

wrote Ruskin to Morris after thanking him for The Defence of Guenevere

"  You must be wondering much I have not written of your book before now, except in those cold words.  Bu I did not know what to make of it.  Good it is, in many ways wrong also in many ways but whether the wrong of it ought to be, or can be mended I cannot tell.  it is very gorgeous and very intense - but too much of mere sensation in it - there is nothing of human nature but the heart and eyes - your people all live on love, and crimson and gold.   Do you suppose that in the middle ages there were no heads fit for using as well as hearts or that people couldn't think inside of helmets?  The only thing that I can make out you consider a head good for is to have hair on it - what a blessed book it is for hair-deifiers!

It is also more obscure even than Browning.  I am quite certain that the blue closet is beyond all interpretation by any living being.  I speak more vexedly about the things than I should otherwise, and can't enjoy them as much as I should because I think you are doing Rossetti mischief with all these crotchets & quaintnesses and that you all live in a state of perpetual excitement about blood and murder and bones and pokes with lances which is inconsistent with good painter's work & proper business generally.  Still the book's a fine book as an exponent of what one may call Sacred Animalism - showing the nature of the Man-Animal in an elevated & fine state: and the passionate bits couldn't well be better.

The two bits I like best are the prayer of Rapunzel & Alice at page 106.   I haven't read Guenevere yet - but it looks good.  I don't say I'm right - mind - in all this - but mind you don't all go mad".

Ruskin to Morris  n.d  [MSS RP 2917]  in fine literary critical form

Fanny Eaton CENTENARY

 

            MARCH 2024  sees the centenary of the death of Fanny Eaton

#Led by Brian Eaton, her descendants plan to gather at her grave in Margravine Cemetery Hammersmith to celebrate her life and memory.

12.00 noon SUNDAY 3 March and  

12.00 noon MONDAY 4 March   potentially followed by refreshments nearby 

Margravine Cemetery lies between Barons Court underground

 and modern Charing Cross Hospital on Fulham Palace Road.  The grave plot is close to the Hospital end of cemetery.  From that west entrance, 50m from gate turn right and follow path round to right.

Margravine Cemetery is now a nature reserve.

ALL WELCOME

Now you see us Four Centuries of Women artists

 

Tate Britain  May - October 2024

Picture: tate.org.uk

Enslaved Children in Brazil, 1822 watercolour for sale

SOTHEBYS NY 31 JANUARY 2024 LOT 251

Portrait of Maria, Emma, 'Cammondongo' and a doll seated at a table at Gloria Cottage, 1822 | Old Master and British Works on Paper | 2024 | Sotheby's (sothebys.com)

 Gloria Cottage group, Rio de Janeiro 1822, attributed to Maria Graham later Calcott

This very small drawing – about 3x4ins – appears to come from a sketchbook or block.  Showing a figure group in an interior space illuminated by a single candle, it was presumably sketched in pencil or crayon and then finished in watercolours with a  fine brush.  Despite its small  size, it is finely worked with a precision akin to that of miniature painting, with especial attention to the fall of light from the candle flame.  Its size and subject suggest a scene from the artist’s travels.

The domestic scene centres on the white child wearing a low-necked white dress.  She seems to hold some red-spotted fabric, which could be needlework or an apron and is seated behind a small table which holds some scraps of paper or pale fabric as well as the candlestick, which throws shadows to either side.  To the left sits an older girl of African ancestry, shown in profile, with her right arm raised as if in animated conversation. She wears an indigo-dyed patterned dress with a white shawl over her shoulder. Across to the right is a young boy of African ancestry, in profile, seated rather awkwardly with hands on his thighs, wearing a blue jacket over an open-necked white shirt and pants of the blue-and-white striped fabric typically sold to plantation owners for slave clothing.   [see for instance striped pants and blue jacket of workers depicted by William Clark in Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, 1823 and the sisters in Emma Jones Soyer picture currently on loan to Tate Britain]

Both Black youngsters look towards the White infant, whose lowered gaze is directed towards the tall doll stood on the opposite side of the table, which appears to make up a quartet of figures, as in a nursery game.  The boy looks up shyly while the older girl appears emphatically engaged.    The room is shown as sparsely furnished, presumably to enhance the pictorial  effect of the intimately and tenderly composed group. 

One’s immediate impression is that, if the drawing has come from a sketchbook, it was executed by a member of the family, or perhaps a visitor, struck by the candle-lit image of the blond child and her dark attendants.  Whoever the artist, s/he had some art training, for the group is skilfully portrayed and rendered, in an accomplished ‘conversation piece’ manner.   One’s impression is certainly of a directly observed scene, of children within an actual household.

The overall feeling is of domestic harmony, but there is no evident affection between the children. The boy indeed looks uncomfortable, even anxious, although the miniature scale and possible limitations of the artist’s skill may be responsible for over-interpretation here.    In any case, the grouping firmly endorses a racialised hierarchy, with the white child and her doll centre stage and the Black attendants, who must be enslaved, as subordinate.

 Where are they?  Intriguingly, the now-detached label gives the date, location and names of the sitters:    1822, Gloria Cottage, and from left to right Maria, Dolly, Emma and ‘Cammondongo’ (or something similar).

Until Gloria Cottage can be satisfactorily located – and assuming the inscription is that of the artist -  what can be deduced from the label?  The handwriting, plus the term ‘cottage’ indicate an Anglophone setting, as do the names Emma and Dolly.  Emma was especially popular in this era, shown in its adoption by Lord Nelson’s paramour Emma Hamilton and in Jane Austen’s choice for a fictional heroine.    So is this the home of an English family?  Taken with the date 1822, the presence of young Black inmates  attending a privileged white infant strongly suggests a colonial setting, where African-ancestry ‘house slaves’ typically made up the domestic workforce.  This could be in the Caribbean or the United States.   The doll appears to point towards the latter,  although toys being portable objects that travelled with a family, it could also be European.  It certainly looks an elite, manufactured item, not homemade.

If the setting is Caribbean, contemporary topographical illustrations of islands there can be invoked.   As Dr Johnson famously said when raising his glass, ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the Negroes in Jamaica!’ because the enslaved population were in regular revolt.  Plantation owners sought to counter this, plus the calls for abolition that were recurrent within Britain, by presenting the Caribbean colonies as peaceful, productive, well-governed.   Clark’s Ten Views of Antigua, was preceded by James Hakewill’s  Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica from Drawings made in the years 1820 and 1821, published as aquatints in London 1824.

As Miles Ogborn has noted, these colonialist images ‘present Jamaica in terms of a Georgic landscape of agricultural labour: a sublime landscape of mountains, rivers and forests or a picturesque landscape of ordered settlement’. [British Library online].  Enslaved Jamaicans working this idyllic land are presented as pictorial staffage, which visually occludes the actuality of European owners and African-ancestry human livestock.

(Curiously, at Montego Bay in Jamaica today is an air bnb named ‘Glory Cottage’, sited in the grounds of  a mansion named ‘Victory’.  The names surely allude to the post-Napoleonic era, though on googlemaps the ‘cottage’ is new built and despite its well-wooded surroundings the mansion is not much older.)

Another plausible location for the present work is indicated by the names identifying the subsidiary sitters and in particular the boy called ‘Cammondongo’.  This can hardly be a proper name, even for an enslaved person.    It must be a phonetic rendering of the Portuguese word camundongo, for a house-mouse of the Beatrice Potter kind.   It is in familiar use in Brazil, and seems apt to the presentation of the timid boy in this group, whom we may suppose was nicknamed ‘mouse’.

A Brazilian location for Gloria Cottage sets the inquiry in a new direction, which proves unexpectedly promising.   In Rio de Janeiro is the old-established district of Gloria, named after the cathedral there.  The wonders of internet searching reveal references to this in the travel book  Journal of a voyage to Brazil and residence there during part of the years 1821, 1822, 1823 composed by Maria  Graham  and published in London in 1824 by Longmans and Murray.   Mrs Graham (later Lady Calcott) was the wife of a British naval commander who accompanied her husband en route for his posting in Chile.   Her voyage there and back [minus husband who died at sea] involved two visits to Brazil. On the return journey she stayed at Rio for several weeks.    Her book is illustrated with twenty topographical engravings based on her own sketches,  for as her narrative makes clear, Mrs Graham was always on the lookout for scenic views and local colour. Plate VII is ‘a view of Rio from the Gloria Hill’; vignette III shows ‘slaves dragging a hogshead through the streets’.

Maria Graham was well-educated and resourceful, her journal being chiefly devoted to political personalities and events in Brazil at the moment when the colony was detaching itself from Portuguese control.  Like other Britons of the time, she opposed slavery in principle, but regarded it benignly in Brazil, believing that it was in slave-owners’ self-interest to treat their workers well.  Like other Britons, she deplored the trade that brought Africans to Brazil from other Portuguese territories; her book includes figures for slaves ‘imported’ from Angola, Cabinda. Mozambique and Quelimane in 1821 (21,199) and 1822 (24,934). Elsewhere she remarks that ‘new negroes’ were ‘docile from fear’, having suffered in the slave ships and markets.

‘We then came to the hill called the Gloria, from the name of the church dedicated to N.S.da Gloria, on the eminence immediately overlooking the sea’, Graham recorded in her journal for 31 December 1822. ‘The hill is green and wooded and studded with countryhouses’ [sic]  [p.167]   Shortly afterwards she met one William May,  a long-term resident in Brazil whom she had known in Britain, and with whose wife she became good friends. Later, she became a neighbour of the Mays on the Gloria hill.  She also met Augustus Erle, ‘an ingenious young artist’  who spent seven years in Brazil painting portraits and landscapes, before being marooned on Tristan da Cunha and travelling on to Australia and New Zealand.   

My best guess, therefore, is that the present watercolour scene was drawn by Maria Graham Calcott and depicts a European family home in the Gloria district of Rio da Janeiro.  More research into the residents of Rio at this date may yield more information about the May family – or another neighbouring one with an infant daughter.   Equally, further research into the life of Maria Calcott could confirm or disprove this conjecture. 

 

 

 

Rossetti and Leighton

One knows both how competitive the Victorian art world was, with painters keeping their new subjects secret lest another should 'steal' or forestall it, and also how sensitive Rossetti was regarding his reputation, to the extent of declining to exhibit for fear of critical reviews.

it must therefore have been distressing when in  1855 the star picture at the Royal Academy was an ambitious multi-figure piece of a procession set in late medieval Florence, centred on Cimabue and Giotto, the heroes of pre-Raphael art.    Whom the PRB had celebrated and elevated by their choice of name.

At the RA to view this marvel, Gabriel and Lizzie ran into Anna Mary Howitt.   Surely this subject belonged to the PRB.  Was this newcomer, young Frederic Leighton,   paying homage or usurping their place ?

  

Everyone praised the piece,  most especially Q Victoria, who wrote in her journal :

'There was a very big picture, by a young man, called Leighton, his 1st attempt  … It is a beautiful painting quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese, so bright & full of lights. Albert was enchanted with it - so much so that he made me buy it. The young man’s father said that his future career in life would depend on the success of this picture’.

DGR was  27 this month, increasingly anxious about his future career.  Leighton's success  at 25 must have really worried him.  Moreover, Leighton had not only taken taken 'his' subject, but  had also filled the canvas with a virtuoso series of brilliantly executed figures, each a variation on the attitudes that gave history painting its harmonious  strengths as pictorial bit-part players in a visual epic.  See, for instance, the masterly depiction of a red-clad musician tuning his violin as he walked.    DGR could never manage such a sophisticated figure.  In addition,  young Leighton had also included a couple of horses, in direct emulation of high art, where  horses' heads and rears were admired accessories. [Holman Hunt   had indeed included a phalanx of equine rumps in his latest picture of Rienzi, to show his skill.]

worst of all, perhaps, on the far right of the canvas Leighton  had placed a figure of Dante Alighieri, leaning as it were on the picture frame to watch the whole procession pass.   Was this to challenge a fellow painter calling himself Dante Rossetti?

 

It raised the question whether Leighton, who had lived  abroad until this startling debut in London, seen  his own picture - a watercolour study for a larger canvas showing Giotto painting Dante's portrait, with Cimabue looking on.  

This had been exhibited in a watercolour show in London in winter 1852.    Had Leighton seen and noted this, then taken the theme  to outdo it? 

Rossetti was in fact as impressed as anyone.  Viewing it again, he admired 'the great richness of arrangement' and agreed that Leighton was destined for greatness.  He himself was busy with other scenes related to Dante, including a sweetly conceived image of two young women by a fountain, figured as Rachel and Leah from the Purgatorio.  He was enjoying Ruskin's patronage.  But public praise was elusive.

And perhaps the episode was one that helped shape his attitude to ambition, when some while later he told poor James Smetham, who could not rouse himself to confidence, that he lacked ambition, which was not envy, but the simple feeling of rage when others did better, followed by self-analysis and renewed determination.   Rossetti had always been competitive, finding in others' achievements a spur to action.

Rossetti spent the next couple of years deep in medievalism, thanks to Ruskin's misconceived but influential notions on the merits of Gothic architecture, his own discovery of Malory's Morte D'Arthur   and enthusiastic new admirers William Morris and Burne Jones. He seized, or proposed, the opportunity to create a fresco sequence on the upper walls of the Oxford Union debating chamber and when this fizzled into failure he disappeared for nearly a year, spent with Lizzie Siddal in Derbyshire.

Where,  I  suggest, he worked principally on the translations that would appear in the volume Early Italian Poetry from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante Alighieri.  This was his literary claim to innovation.  Ruskin promised to subsidise what was a substantial publication.  It may have been well advanced by Rossetti's 30th birthday in May 1858.   One of his father's favourite aphorisms was 'what you don't do at thirty, you never will do'

In autumn 1858, when he returned to London with renewed ambition in visual art, he found the art world had moved on, and Leighton was once more in the vanguard,  of the latest fashion for compelling female portraits in the 'Venetian' courtesan mode.  The new star was a dark-haired Roman model named Anna Risi, or La Nanna.  This was not an entirely new pictorial feature, but it was a departure from  moralising, sentimental and high-minded subjects.

        
     Whether titled as 'A Roman Lady' (she  looked proud, but every Victorian knew this was no lady)  or 'Pavonia', la Nanna was flavour of the season, and a new challenge. 

Rossetti rose to it,  choosing now to paint in oils and aim for the broad, fluent manner the PRB had reviled.  He found Fanny Cornforth as an appropriately sensuous model, and began the sequence of 'Pre-Raphaelite beauties' that would come to define his art.   

    

 At the same time, he returned to  Giotto painting Dante, re-drafting the composition to centre on the poet and his coeval Guido Cavalcanti, whose sonnets were key elements in Rossetti's translations, together with an imagined image of Giotto, who has surely borrowed some aspects (nose and full beard) from his latest successor, the painter Frederic Leighton.

      

 

Ignatius Sancho

The conjectural account of Ignatius Sancho's earliest years offered by Prof Brycchan Carey in his talk for the Equiano Society  is extremely plausible and answers one puzzle, that presented by his name.  while Equiano through and after his years of enslavement acquired several names, as was common for such displaced individuals, Sancho  appears to have had only one from the age of around two years - and one that did not change when he was domiciled in Britain - where Ignatius was an unusual appellation.

Enslaved people - boys especially - were often mocked by being given classical names such as Pompey, Caesar, Hector, presumably as a kind of joke, underscoring their utterly powerless status with a heroic comparison.  Ignatius wouldn't work in quite the same way.  In Britain it was a Papist name, from Ignatius Loyola,  founder of the hated Jesuit order which in the early 18th century was still popularly believed to plot to 'return' Britain to Catholicism.  Attached to a friendless African orphan, it also would have a mocking element, which might explain why it was not changed to a more easily pronounceable name for a household servant.

In the preface to the   Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, it is stated  that Sancho  was 'born A. D. 1729, on board a ship in the Slave-trade, a few days after it had quitted the coast of Guinea for the Spanish West-Indies, and, at Carthagena, he received from the hand of the Bishop, Baptism, and the name of Ignatius.   

Starting here, Brycchan Carey posits that the boy was in a shipment of captives  landed at the slave entrepot of Carthagena [now in Colombia]  where the Jesuit order ran the church  and organised mass  baptism for Africans, in a cathedral dedicated to Loyola.  Hence his 'Christian name'.  

Thence he was transported to Cadiz in Spain, another great trading city,  where ships of the British Navy were then able to anchor, and where he was acquired or bought by a young naval officer.  [If the dates are right, he seems a bit young - under three - for this, but maybe it was comparable to acquiring a puppy]  The midshipman was related to sisters living in Greenwich (conjecturally identified as Elizabeth, Susanna and Barbara Legge)  to whom on his return to Britain it is suggested young Ignatius was presented as a gift   According to the Letters preface, these women ' surnamed him Sancho, from a fancied resemblance to the 'Squire of Don Quixote.'    A fanciful name for a black servant who had apparently come from Spain.

African Hospitality ???

 

African Hospitality, a painting by George Morland from 1790, was companion piece to the artist's Execrable Human Traffic  known as the Slave Trade.    The latter (RA 1788)  shows African captives forced on onto a slaving ship.  African Hospitality depicts local people rescuing shipwrecked Europeans off the African coast, an imagined scene from an actual event.

Both works were engraved for sale within the nascent campaign to abolish the Slave Trade launched in London in 1787.   Both found their way into the collection of Alexander Dennistoun, a Glasgow merchant with family investments in north American cotton production.   African Hospitality was loaned to the 1857 Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester (#136), together with another Morland canvas listed in the Art Treasures catalogue as ‘The Englishman’s Return for African Hospitality’ (#143)

Having vainly searched for an image of 'The Englishman’s Return' I now assume it was in fact Execrable Human Traffic.  Following the death of Alexander Dennistoun’s son, both paintings were sold as 'African Hospitality' and 'Slave Trade', at Christie's, London, 9 June 1894, lot 43 (33.5 x 47 inches) and lot 44 (32 x 47 inches )  [credit to Donato Esposito - see BM database for images of both engravings]

So I am curious as to how and when the extended title was attached to Execrable Human Traffic specifically accusing the 'English'.

 

Henry James on Vernon Lee

 "Receive from me  a word of warning about Vernon Lee.  my reasons are several, and too complicated, some of them, to go into, but one of them is that she has lately, as I am told [in a volume of tales called Vanitas, which I haven't read] directed a sort of satire of a flagrant and markedly 'saucy' kind at me [!!] -  exactly the sort of thing she has done to others [her books - fiction - are a tissue of personalities of the hideous roman-a-clef kind] and of a particularly impudent and blackguardly sort of thing to a friend and one who has treated her with such such particular consideration as I have.

"... she is as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent - which is saying a great deal.  Her vigour and sweep of intellect are most rare and her talk superior altogether,  but I don't agree with you at all about her 'style', which I find insupportable, and I find also that she breaks down in her books.. There is a great second-rateness in her first-rateness.... At any rate, draw it mild with her on the question of friendship. She's a tiger-cat!"

to William James 1893

Henry James on Burne-Jones December 1886

" I see Burne-Jones from time to time but not as often as I should like - I am always so afraid of breaking in on his work.  Whenever he is at home he is working - and when he isn't working he's not at home.  When I do see him, it is one of the best  human pleasures that London has for me.  But I don't understand his life - that is the manner and tenor of his production - a complete studio existence - with doors and windows closed, and no search for impressions outside - no open air, no real daylight and no looking out for it.  The things he does in these conditions have exceeding beauty - but they seem to me to grow colder and colder - pictured abstractions - less and less observed.  Such as he is, however, he is certainly the most distinguished artistic  figure among Englishmen today  - the only one who has escaped vulgarization and on whom claptrap has no hold.  Moreover he is, as you know, exquisite in mind and talk - and we fraternize greatly."

to Charles Eliot Norton

P R Sisters 2

 

ANNIE MILLER  1835-1925

The daughter of a footsoldier, Miller grew up in poverty in the back streets of Chelsea, close to Holman Hunt’s studio.  Aged 18 she posed for the figure of a remorseful ‘fallen woman’ in his The Awakening Conscience.  Hunt then paid for her to be educated in literacy and ladylike manners as a suitable wife.

During Hunt’s travels in Egypt and Syria in 1854-6 she posed for John Millais, D.G.Rossetti. Arthur Hughes, Charles Collins and others. ‘She is a good girl and behaves herself very properly’, Millais reported.

In 1859, Hunt ended their engagement on the grounds of Annie’s ‘wilfulness’ and frivolity.  He offered assisted emigration, which she rejected in favour of modelling. ‘She  looks more beautiful than ever’, noted George Boyce.

When she encountered Rossetti at the International Exhibition in 1862, she was with ‘rather a swell’ and looking very handsome.  Her escort was an officer in the Volunteer reserve forces related to Lord Ranelagh named Thomas Thompson.  He and Annie married in 1863.  With a son and a daughter the couple moved to Richmond and then the south coast, where Annie died at age 90.

PR Sisters 1

Exhibition labels are fugitive texts.  They are also compressed and strictly informative.    It's instructive to see how they read  a few, or many, years later.  There follow those from the 2019-20 NPG exhibition

 ELIZABETH SIDDAL  1829-1862##

The London-born daughter of a Sheffield cutler and shopkeeper, she entered the Pre-Raphaelite world modelling for Walter Deverell, Holman Hunt and John Millais before becoming Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s model and muse.

Tall, slim and pale, with auburn hair, she was not considered beautiful by conventional standards, but appeared so in images like Millais’ Ophelia and Rossetti’s Beatrice.

An aspiring artist, she was the sole female exhibitor in the 1857 Pre-Raphaelite show that travelled to the US.  Inspired by the poetry of Tennyson and Browning and Scottish ballads, her watercolour works were on a small scale, suitable for illustration.

After a long engagement she and Rossetti married in 1860, becoming friends with Jane and William Morris and the Burne-Joneses.  In 1861 her daughter was stillborn, causing post-natal psychosis, and subsequent death from opiate overdose.    Later, Rossetti retrieved the poems he had placed in her coffin, explaining that ‘art was the only thing for which she felt seriously [and] had it been possible, I should have found the book on my pillow the night she was buried.’ 

Bring Winifred home to Yorkshire

 

Help The De Morgan Museum bring Winifred Home. 

Support the public display of a rare portrait by Evelyn De Morgan.

 

The De Morgan Museum is launching an urgent appeal to bring home and display this captivating portrait by celebrated Victorian female artist, Evelyn De Morgan. Depicting her young cousin, Winifred Bulwer, on one of their family holidays to Cannon Hall, this is a unique example of De Morgan’s seldom-seen portraiture

Championing a female artist

 

‘Portrait of Winifred Bulwer' (1880) is a stunning oil painting by Evelyn De Morgan (1855 - 1919), one of the most prominent female artists of the Victorian period. De Morgan rose to fame despite the challenges of social convention preventing women from becoming artists. At the beginning of her career, De Morgan made no fewer than three intimate portraits of close family members. With an arresting forward gaze and obvious ease with the artist, these intriguing artworks are unlike De Morgan’s historical and mythological subjects for which she is best known.

 

Saving local history

 

This portrait has been acquired for free public display at the De Morgan Museum at Cannon Hall, Barnsley, once a stunning 16th century mansion at which both artist and sitter spent happy summers with extended family. Displaying the painting here would at once enhance the understanding of De Morgan’s full artistic range and add an important piece of local history. The portrait will be displayed alongside scrapbooks of photographs and drawings which depict Winifred playing in the grounds of Cannon Hall, an activity still enjoyed by thousands of families today.

 

With your help, the De Morgan Museum now has the exciting opportunity to ensure this portrait will remain on public display in perpetuity from July 2023, for all to enjoy.

 

Please donate

 

This painting has been purchased with support by Art Fund and the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund who have recognised the importance of this painting for the De Morgan Museum at Cannon Hall, its audiences, and researchers.

 

The De Morgan Museum needs to raise £10,000 to prepare this portrait for display at its museum by Friday 21 July.

 

With just two weeks to reach our target, the De Morgan Foundation needs your help urgently. Please give as generously as you can: all donations, no matter how much, bring us one step closer to displaying this masterpiece for everyone to enjoy.

 

#BringWinifredHome

 

Associated Events

Friday 14 July, 12pm | Online Event

 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/recently-discovered-portrait-by-evelyn-de-morgan-talk-with-jan-marsh-tickets-672888326097?aff=oddtdtcreator

 

Learn more about the history of this beautiful painting and the artist who made it with the Director of the De Morgan Museum, Sarah Hardy, in conversation with renowned art historian and Pre-Raphaelite specialist, Jan March.

 

Sarah and Jan will outline De Morgan’s artistic career with a focus on her other portraits; a rare undertaking for the artist who only painted those closest to her. Sarah will also introduce the sitter, Winifred Bulwer, who was a child when her picture was painted. Much about Winifred’s life is known through scrapbooks which document her childhood family holidays at Cannon Hall, a place of importance to artist and sitter.

 

 

Links

https://www.gofundme.com/manage/help-the-de-morgan-museum-bring-winifred-home

 

 

Annie Miller

 a wonderful portrait drawing of Annie Miller in 1853 by Holman Hunt that's new to public gaze is being sold at Sothebys on 5 July.   the house does not allow capture  of the image, but it opens here 

 https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2023/master-works-on-paper-from-five-centuries-2/annie-miller

Coming next spring

 

Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 | Tate Britain