The painting has now been subjected to an export deferral by the Secretary of State to allow time for a UK gallery or institution to acquire the painting. Here's hoping!
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| Rebecca Solomon, The Young Teacher |
Photo shows the unframed canvas in NPG conservation studio prior to Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition in 2019.
it will join another image of Eaton in the Princeton collection, head study by otherwise unknown Walter Stocks.
Suzanne Fagence Cooper previously chronicled the adept manner in which Effie Gray extricated herself from an unhappy, unconsummated marriage to John Ruskin in order to become the wife and artistic partner of John Millais. In ‘How We Might Live: at Home with Jane and William Morris’ she traces the Morrises’ shared and separate lives with clarity and judicious assessment.
The marriage of William Morris, designer-businessman, and Jane Burden, stableman’s uneducated daughter, has always been the subject of curiosity. Not so much for its cross-class features, which were relatively common in the Victorian age, but for its sequel. Eight years after the wedding and the birth of two children, Jane began a love affair with artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris’s friend and business partner – with the agreement if not approval of her husband.
No letters from Jane to Morris or his family survive, so we don’t know what she called him at home. In the group, he was ‘Topsy’ or ‘Top’; outside it would always be ‘Mr Morris’.
In its focus on personal lives, biography like this is not ‘history from below’ so much as what Phyllis Rose called ‘higher gossip’. It draws readers along engaging narratives to which we can relate. Morris, whose achievements are so various in poetry, design, manufacturing, politics, calligraphy, translation and publishing, also wrote of his ‘disappointments and tacenda’ – about which to keep silent. These include his failure as a lover, and most painfully, the awfulness of Jenny’s epilepsy, which struck when she was fifteen, blighting both her own days and those of the family. Jane grieved acutely and had her own ‘unspoken’ list of regrets.
The strength of Cooper’s storytelling, signalled in the book’s subtitle, is its attention to how wife and husband created each of their homes, with comfort and fine objects but no luxurious superfluity. If we can believe it, nothing that was not either beautiful or useful.
Their relationship, too, was a shared construction, mortared with tact, which weathered the storms. When Rossetti’s guilt for ‘stealing’ his friend’s wife drove him to a paranoid breakdown, Morris allowed him to convalesce at Kelmscott until Jane acknowledged the affair was at its end. Morris did not gloat over this outcome, and the subsequent affection between the couple was noted by all observers. Jane devoted her widowhood to securing Morris’s memory through books and buildings – his lifelong pleasures.
When is
public art offensive and what should be
done with it?
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| Cecil Rhodes by Henry Alfred Pegram, Oriel College Oxford |
To be
removed: Historical statues that celebrate those who should not be honoured,
even for their philanthropy, as that effectively camouflages their execrable
careers, as in the cases of slave trader Edward Colston and imperialist Cecil
Rhodes. Removal amplifies rather than
erasing history, as re-valuation.
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| [censored detail] in Pursuit of Rare Meats by Rex Whistler, restaurant, Tate Britain |
To be
debated: Sculptures that offend or distress members of the public, typically
images of nudity or violence. Is the
classical naked woman reclining for (male) visual pleasure so engrained in high
art that objections are pointless? Many
communities find it indecent. What of
more explicit works like Courbet’s ‘L’origine du monde’? would that be on display in the National
Gallery as it is in the muse d’Orsay?
Full male
nudity is often worse and has been so since decorous figleaves were added to Renaissance
statuary. Often, the intention to shock
and offend, as in work by Robert Mapplethorpe, the Chapman brothers, Gilbert
& George, is recognised by being carefully curated within museums, rather
than openly in public spaces.
Matthias Grunewald, Crucifixion, Isenheim altarpiece, Colmar
Curiously, ubiquitous figures of torture and crucifixion do not prompt much concern, even though paintings and sculptures of Christ hanging on the cross seem very horrific. Should they attract warning signs?
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| Laura Knight Self with Ella Napper 1913 NPG |
Several MK speakers alluded to Knight's famous and famously popular Self-Portrait painting Ella Napper as a standing life model, noting the double back views, so that both the egocentric artist's face and the erotic display of the female nude are obscured. But also, that the artist claims for herself the traditional male role.
Once more, I was struck by her hat - surely a version of the bohemian artist's wideawake? rather like a beard a sort of emblem signifying 'Edwardian painter'. And then the scarlet top, joined with the other assertive reds. Where have we seen these before?
In G. F. Watts' Self-Portraits [of which he did many] Both the black hat and the red gown
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| William Mulready, 1854, Leeds Art Gallery |
the children look as if they belong in a family portrait, or a conversation piece, but missing their parents and pets. The landscape view and masonry pillar indicate a substantial country house, as also do the adult employees.
is the location generic or verifiable? to what family does this group belong? Or is it a scene from literature or drama?
The infant in the nursemaid's arms resembles that in Mulready's Toyseller. Does the boy's drum invoke the Crimean war? is this part of a pictorial narrative?
i've been wanting to know more about this painting for years.
Conference – Janet Axten, Linda Bassett, Ella Nixon, Lily Ford, Catherine Wallace, Hannah Starkey, Annette Wickham, Alice Strickland, Hester Wetley, Damian Le Bas
