Emery Walker House, Hammersmith Terrace

which is newly-opened after intensive care.  On SpitalfieldsLife  are some great photos:
the wisteria is wonderful



 

Vanessa Bell

tomorrow  I  am giving a talk at the Whitstable Literary Festival, which is dedicated to the Bloomsbury Group and to Vita Sackville West in particular, whose ancestral home Knole is not far away.

  I intended to talk about Vita and her portraits, and am indeed starting with those. 

Here, for example, is a curious image of the Hon. Vita in 1911,  when she donned fancydress for a 'Shakespeare Ball' on the eve of the coronation of George V.    It took place in the Albert Hall and dozens from high society took part.    Commercial photographers took and published many of the images, which show that many, maybe most of Vita's fellow performers chose Tudorbethan costumes, in keeping with the theme.  Vita evidently did not follow the late-medieval trend,  but which Shakespearean character is she invoking?  it ought to be Rosalind,  but  the hat and particularly the skirt don't seem to fit that role....

 

I am also aiming to look at images of Vanessa Bell, which I have not previously seen.

These two photographs , from one of the many photo albums filled by Vanessa and Virginia, were taken in Rome by a professional studio run by Henri de Lieure. They apparently date from 1904, though I can't find references to Vanessa visiting Rome then.     They seem untypical images of Vanessa  and at first I thought the one with the lattice chair-back was a photo of a painting, given the soft focus that emulates brushstrokes.  But as Vanessa is wearing the same gown in each image, I assume the effect is a bit of  early photoshopping, such as the Stephens sisters' great aunt Julia Margaret would have appreciated had it been available for her pioneering photographs.  

 

I wonder if Vanessa's companions on this trip, whoever they were, also  sat to Lieure.

 

then there is this striking portrait of Vanessa by Roger Fry, which is just published in the British Art Journal by Martin Ferguson Smith, together with a hitherto unknown drawing of Fry's wife Helen and a snapshot of Vanessa standing naked against chalk cliffs in Dorset.

 

The painting, in gouache over pencil outlines, shows dramatically the Post-Impressionist impact on Bloomsbury portraiture.

 

 

 

 

 

 



May Morris Arts & Crafts Designer

the MAY MORRIS book is underway  and available to pre-order from Thames & Hudson

The first fully illustrated introduction to May Morris, a leading contributor to the Arts and Crafts Movement and daughter of famed designer William Morris

May Morris, youngest daughter of influential designer William Morris, was one of the leading female contributors to the Arts and Crafts Movement. She ran the embroidery department of her father’s famous firm Morris & Co., and had a successful freelance career as a designer, maker, and exhibitor, founding the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907 and undertaking a lecture tour in the United States between 1909 and 1910. May’s approach to embroidery was innovative and widely influential in the UK and abroad, yet her important contribution to embroidery is often overshadowed by the accomplishments of her more famous father.

 

 

 

Royal Collection Artists' Portraits

The exhibition Portrait of the Artist at the Queen's Gallery Buckingham Palace  runs until 17 April, but of course all the items are from the Royal Collection and should not vanish from the website after that.  Carefully and cleverly curated by Anna Reynolds and Lucy Peter,  the selection reveals how rich a resource the nation's monarch has, in paintings, drawings, miniatures, prints and ceramics, the diversity of medium and genre allowing a whole history of depictions of artists to emerge, from the Renaissance of da Vinci and Durer to the present of Freud and Hockney.  Not ignoring the current consort, in a pair of works showing Prince Philip's depiction of artist Edward Seago aboard the royal yacht, alongside Seago's reciprocal painting of Philip on deck working at his own folding easel.

Famously, the collection includes Artemisia's self-portrait as and in the act of painting,  a great piece of advertising from the seventeen century.

Other female artists appear in various ways, as in copies after Angelica Kaufmann, Rosalba Carriera and Vigee le Brun.

Plus the very striking and seldom seen self-portrait by Italian-born Emma Gaggiotti Richards, purchased by Queen Victoria as a birthday present for Albert in 1853.  The Queens Gallery's explication:

Richards depicts herself with the attributes of her profession: a palette, a mahlstick, and a selection of brushes. She is dressed in black, a colour not solely associated with mourning, but also favoured by working women. Although by this date it had become acceptable for men to fashion themselves as dishevelled Bohemians in their self-portraits, Richards, as a female artist and therefore on the periphery of artistic acceptability, firmly sets herself within the historic, and therefore safe, tradition of self-portraiture established  by artists during the Renaissance. Her solemn, intense expression and twisted, three-quarter length pose bring to mind the great self-portraitists of the past and thereby associate her with a long and illustrious line of serious and learned artists

 

Lastly, two curiosities, of which I was quite ignorant.  One is a self-portrait in stitches or needle-painting by Mary Knowles, done for Queen Charlotte in the 1770s. 

Knowles had previously stitched a portrait of George III for Charlotte, and here showed herself working on that piece, in her own self-advertisement.  

It doesn't photograph very well, being glazed, and embroidered pictures are an acquired taste, but it's nice to see such an example.

Something similar can be said of the bronze self-portrait as bat aka inkwell sculpted by Sarah Bernhardt.  Being in a display case, and bronze being so difficult to photograph without special lighting, the Royal Collection cast is accompanied here by that from the MFA Boston, which shows what a strange piece it is.

 

 

 

 

 

Black Magi occasional sightings

Here the Adoration as central panel in an elaborate altarpiece by W.D.Caroe, better known as an architect, installed 1911 in Christ's Chapel Dulwich College, accessed from the Picture Gallery garden on selected days.

The three Kings are joined by two boy scholars, in Jacobean-style gowns.  I assume the extra man upper right is not a fourth king but St Joseph, hence his halo.

Hew Locke at Runnymede

The recent (2015, to mark 600th anniversary of Magna Carta) installation on a water meadow by the Thames at Runnymede, created by sculptor Hew Locke  features a whole range of less well-commemorated events and individuals from around the world, set in low relief bronze on the upright faces, front and back of 12 chairs. 

 There is a leaflet to identify them  and a website www.artatrunnymede.com
 The leaflet says   'Please do sit on and touch the artwork... The chairs appear to be awaiting a gathering, discussion or debate of some kind: an open invitation to the artist for the audience to sit, to reflect and to discuss the implications of the histories and issues depicted'.   these are: Lillie Lenton, Suffragette; UN Convention on the rights of the Child, initiated in 1923 by Eglantyne Jebb; the Exxon Valdez oil pollution, Alaska 1989; Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol; Magna Carta clause 39 on trial by jury; Cornelia Sorabji, lawyer and women's advocate; UK Blind Persons Act 1920; Amerindian land rights;  Phyllis Wheatley and Mary Prince;  Emancipation of the Serfs, Russia, 1861; Mahatma Gandhi;  Harvey Milk;  citizen interventions to stop shredding of Stasi files, 1989; Nelson Mandela; Tim Berners Lee's call for internet free use; memorials to the 'Disappeared'; the Golden Rule of do as you would be done by; maritime refugee rights; Confucian principles of justice, ritual and humaneness; aboriginal Australian land rights; ancient Egyptian symbols of truth and justice; the murder of 133 enslaved  Africans on the  Zong ship 1781; Aung San Su Kyi's house in Burma;  the legendary Chinese creature xiezhi, symbol of justice. 
Too much information, maybe.  But they looked splendid and intriguing in the March sun. 

Nearby are a couple of American memorials, one celebrating the Charter itself as the origin of western democracy [?], one memorialising JFK.  Atop the hill behind, a major WW2 portico and tower commemorates those from British and Commonwealth air forces who died on active service.

  

Fanny Eaton commemoration

The 93rd anniversary of Fanny Eaton's death on 4 March 1924 was commemorated on Saturday 4 March  2017  at Margravine (Hammersmith) cemetery, London W68RL.

The grave spot is in the South Front section behind Charing Cross Hospital.  A marker has been placed on the plot as indicated in cemetery records, pending the installation of a stone plaque; although burials are all but ended, the cemetery does allow new, small gravestones. 

Mary and Brian Eaton by Fanny's grave 

 

To mark the occasion, below another probable sighting of Fanny in art, as the Widow in Ford Madox Brown's painting of Elijah resurrecting her son (already in his funeral shroud). 
Fanny is not certainly identified as the model here, but given her extensive artistic employment for figures of Middle Eastern appearance, and artists' ideas about historical authenticity,  she is the most likely candidate. 


The earliest version of  Elijah and the Widow's Son was finished in summer 1864; this version was completed by the end of 1868 and shown in Manchester the following year, when the Manchester Guardian critic complained that the 'grave and noble' subject was  ruined by the  'white wool mat' that the prophet had on his head.  However, according to another review,  the 'most perfect figure' was that of the kneeling mother, than which it  was 'hard to conceive anything more impressive than the whole composition or the nobleness of the head'.