Rumplestiltskin by Georgie Burne-Jones

In 1860-1 when Georgiana Burne-Jones and Elizabeth Siddal planned to collaborate on an illustrated book of folk tales, Georgie produced some woodcut designs before the project was abandoned owing to Siddal's death.

One of the surviving designs is this illustration to story of  Rumplestiltskin,  from  what the Burne-Joneses referred to punningly as [W]Holy Grim[m].   The girl stitching is captive while the  grotesque creature on the left spins straw into gold, in exchange for her necklace, ring and finally her firstborn. Eventually she outwits him by discovering his strange name.

At first I didn't identify this as the Rumplestiltskin tale, as the demonic creature looks witchlike, and there's no visible straw.  But there is gold in the basket and Rumplestiltskin is plying a distaff rather than a spinning wheel as in most illustrations.

There is one print of the image, among Georgie's correspondence in the National Art Library with a letter dated December 1897.  And I'm pleased to have found its title at last.

 

Erased and Restored

 

Unknown artist, Frey siblings, 1837 

Circa 1837 painting of 3 Frey children in Louisiana and mystery boy (theadvertiser.com)

This portrait of three children from a family in Louisiana has an interesting and not all that uncommon history.  Painted in 1837, it originally contained four figures - the three white children from the Frey family and a tall African-American boy,  who at first sight looks like an older sibling

but who was in fact an enslaved domestic servant named Belizaire, then aged 15, according to  collector Jeremy Simien who now owns the painting. 

 
 Two decades later, Belizaire left the Frey household when sold on to the owners of Evergreen Plantation.     Some time after that, when the painting remained with the Freys, his image was painted over, presumably because slave owning ancestors had become an embarrassment.  

Belizaire remained invisible  when the picture -  attributed to  the artist J,G, Amans - was donated to the the New Orleans Museum of Art, and when it was de-accessioned.  The figure only returned to view when cleaned by a dealer and then offered for sale.

It's odd really, because the four figures balance the composition, and apart from skin colour, there's no indication that the tall young man is not an eldest brother.

A useful website for MAY MORRIS research

 May Morris Digital Archive | A resource portal for research into the life and work of May Morris (wordpress.com)

Lucy and Cathy

Two significant artists were missing from my recent Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  Omitted owing to an already over-crowded cast-list, their absence was especially regretted as these two were literal not metaphorical sisters.

Half-sisters, to be precise.  Lucy and Catherine were  daughters of Ford Madox Brown, the doyen or daddy of the PRB, who declined to join the band because of its juvenile title, but who provided close support to the Pre-Raphaelite aims.

 

And so I am especially delighted that they feature in dual perspective in the Uncommon Power exhibition at the Watts Gallery Compton opening on 26 September.

Both produced modest but accomplished and original works, which are virtually unknown as they remain in private hands.  Descendants have been proud to retain the sisters’ pictures, according to exhibition curator Ruth Brimacombe.    So the new exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view hitherto unseen works by the ‘lost Pre-Raphaelites’ Lucy Madox Brown and Catherine Madox Brown.  

Lucy’s early work The Duet, (RA 1870) presents an unexpected 18^th century scene with elements of chinoiserie, but her preferred subjects were drawn from drama and history – notably Romeo at the Tomb, Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess from Shakespeare and The Magic Mirror, from a legend about the Earl of Surrey by Thomas Nashe [at top].    All were marked by distinctive imagination and, especially, fine colour effects, they extend the Pre-Raphaelite canon in respect of both style and content.   The Magic Mirror (aka Fair Geraldine) is especially welcome – theme and handling wholly within the PR mode, yet the subject quite original.

Cathy’s companion portraits of her parents deserve wider circulation, although only that of her father is included in the exhibition.  She perhaps had more natural artistic talent, endowing portraits and contemporary genre scenes with visual interest and harmonies, yet more conventional subject choices. The child puzzling over the sum 9+6 on her slate in A Deep Problem (1875, BMAG) combines charm, observation and empathy.   At The Opera (1869) is a stunning take on the usually formulaic half-length female with decorative accessories.  Was Marie Spartali the model? 

 Curator and Gallery have made the most of the limited space available, with a richness and variety of exhibits, almost all unknown to viewers.  Moreover, the sisters’ relatively small output, together with its relatively high quality, make this first exhibition of their works a great chance to assess and indeed establish their place within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.  How do their pictures compare?  What adjustments to the critical history do they provoke? 

 

Evelyn de Morgan alert

A warning to scholars writing or thinking about Evelyn de Morgan's artworks: 

it appears that two items shown on the website of the De Morgan Foundation [DMF] as works by Evelyn are not and never have been by her, but should correctly be attributed to William de Morgan. 

 Like his wife, William trained as a painter, but fairly soon changed to the decorative arts, designing and firing the ceramic ware for which he is famed.

The first mis-attributed work is a student-style study drawing of part of the famous antique sculpture known as the Laocoon, showing Laoccoon and his sons wrestling  with a giant python.  Every art academy in Europe probably had a cast of this, and it was a   typical challenge to students.   If she did not  draw this study, Evelyn no doubt knew the piece well.  Its graphic style is similar to her careful depiction of e.g. the Discobolous cast, so the DMF error is only surprising if it has documentary info on the drawing which ought to have prevented the mistake.

The second work is the painting of Mercury, messenger of the gods, with winged ankles and helmet, holding s snake-entwined caduceus.  This is more problematic as it certainly resembles Evelyn's work more than William's, and neither its date nor full provenance are securely known. It was apparently acquired in 1910 by Wilhelmina Stirling, Evelyn's sister, when both William and Evelyn were alive, and will have known the correct authorship.

Such emendations to published information are an art historical hazard.

 

Maria Zambaco Sculptor

It felt good some years ago to track down in the storeroom of Georgetown University a delicately accomplished figure sculpture by Maria Zambaco, hitherto known only for a sequence of portrait medals in low relief. See 6 December 2017.

 It’s now clear there are several casts of L’Amour irresistible around the art market, indicating that it proved a relatively popular piece. Also that it dates from 1896, when it was on show at the Beaux Arts in Paris. in fact it’s possible to expand Zambaco’s known oeuvre quite substantially, thanks to now-easily-searchable sources and with the knowledge that from the late 1880s she also used her birth name, exhibiting as M.T.Cassavetti.

 Among the first exhibits at the 1886 RA (as M T Zambaco) she showed a terracotta bust of Alphonse Legros, the professor under whom she studied at the Slade School, and who perhaps encouraged the submission to the RA summer show, together with another work ‘Study of a Head’ that may have been a second bust, or a bas relief, as the medium is not specified. A new bust, listed as ‘Portrait of a Lady’ was at the RA in 1887, the same year as portrait medallion depicting Lily Langtry was executed - wrongly naming her 'Lydia'. 

 Then in 1888 came a bronze bust ‘Medusa’s Horror’, presumably with snake-filled hair and terror-filled expression. In 1889, as M.T.Cassavetti, she submitted two decorative works to the second Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society show at the New Gallery in Regent Street. One was a plaster ‘study for a house decoration’ and the other a ‘Tangerine fireplace’ cast by Enrico Cantoni, a London-based plaster moulder. 

By this date, she had partly relocated to Paris, to study under Auguste Rodin, sculpture doyen, and in 1889 exhibited at the Exposition Universelle a patinated figure entitled ‘Tentation’, which was accompanied by a case of portrait medals – possibly the same group that she asked Rodin to get forwarded to the Salon in 1890. ‘Tentation’ sounds so tantalisingly comparable to L’Amour irresistible that it’s a pity neither it nor most of the other works are located. 

 However, her portrait medal of Auguste Rodin Sculpteur, dated 1888, is to be found in the Musee Rodin, complete with a reversed ‘N’ in his name, which seems a surprising beginner’s error for an artist who was by now well-practised in medal-making.

So  Zambaco's output is shaping up to be more substantial than we thought.

Clare Mackail

Georgiana Burne-Jones and Clare Mackail, NPG 

  

The Burne-Jones universe knows about the BJs’ children Philip and Margaret.  And Margaret’s elder children, Angela [Thirkell] and Denis Mackail.

But there was a third grand-daughter – Clare Mackail – who isn’t much mentioned in the biographies.   Just a passing reference by Fiona MacCarthy, not surprising since her subject, EBJ, died just a couple of years after Clare’s birth, but raising a slight curiosity, since descendants of famous people often feature in their life stories,  fleetingly or a source of family anecdotes.

I worked out that Clare is the solemn grand-daughter pictured with GBJ in photographs by Emery Walker taken around 1900 and passed to the NPG in 1960 with a whole lot of glass negatives from the Emery Walker archive.

And she was given GBJ’s pen and ink illustration to Thomas Hood’s Bridge of Sighs, according to GBJ’s inscription  on the back.
 
Prompted by his own curiosity, Tim McGee has published a short account of Clare’s life, poignantly titled Barely Clare  ,  which fills the biographical ‘hole’

Born in June 1896, the youngest Mackail started at St Pauls’ School for girls at age 12.  When she left in 1913 her physical and mental health were causing concern.  Through music and art, her friends included the family of Gustav Holst, plus their friends Ralph Vaughan Williams and Myra Hess, and fellow students at the Slade school ‘Pegs’ Ritchie and Reine Ormond, niece of John Singer Sargent.  After war was declared in summer 1914,  Clare volunteered as a VAD or Red Cross nurse, serving first in Balham and then at Moray Lodge in Kensington.

At some unrecorded date, she was ‘attacked’, or possibly sexually assaulted,  by her brother-in-law James MacInnes, composer, baritone and violent alcoholic, who married Angela in 1913 and was divorced by her in 1917. Clare’s comic sketch of ‘Aunt Clare’ with nephews Graham and Colin on the 49 bus, taking them out to tea and rebuking their table manners, is reproduced by McGee.

In 1918 Clare received 'electric treatment' for an unidentified condition. In 1921 she returned to the Slade for one term in the Life class.  After this, there are few sources of information until 1932 when she underwent thyroid surgery.   'I am exceedingly dull by nature', she told artist  Will Rothenstein  in 1933, 'and of course for years now, having been completely out of touch with the world through illness, have lived entirely in my imagination.'  

 By 1934 she was living in Hampstead as an invalid lodging with Louise Orr and her daughter.   Soon, she joined friends in the UK branch of a shadowy theosophical network founded by Eugene Milne Cosgrove known as The Group. Osteopath and astrological healer Bertha Orton led the British offshoot as its ‘archbishop’; Louise Orr, Hilda Field and Hilda Roberts were among the disciples who gathered  monthly, to meditate and allegedly  worship the full moon.  

The meetings, with a deal of occult performativity and costumes to match, took place at Orton’s homes: Four Winds, outside Farnham, and 43 York Terrace, Regents Park.   They adopted Sufi-style names, Clare becoming Roshan or Shining Light.   Members made several transatlantic trips, evidently to visit Cosgrove in Illinois and California.  Angela Thirkell would later characterise the group as Clare’s ‘peculiar female friends and their dotty religion.’  Men were members too, one being an established astrologer from Harrogate.

When World War Two struck, the circle named itself the Group for Sacrifice and Service.  On the night of 11 May 1941, ninety-nine members held a 12 hour vigil at York Terrace to pray for peace.   It proved to be the last night of the Blitz, and at 1.45am an explosive bomb destroyed a neighbouring building, killing 15 members of the Group, including Orton, Louise Orr and Catherine Field.   Clare Mackail was rescued from the debris with a broken arm and vertebrae.  She and Hilda Roberts retired to Four Winds, which later passed to a Sufi group as an inclusive retreat.   By the mid-1960s Clare was living in a small flat in Petersfield, where she died in January 1975, aged 79. 

Georgiana Burne-Jones and Clare Mackail, NPG