this week I am contributing to a zoom series on 19th century art by discussing the Pictorial and Political resonances of Rossetti's painting The Beloved. As you know, a favourite of mine.
the course is listed here, and the date/time/details are for 21 JUNE
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/course-stories-of-art-1800-1900
the good news is that Rebecca Solomon's Young Teacher, depicting two white children with their ayah or Indian nanny painted from Fanny Eaton, has finally and formally been acquired as a joint acquisition by Tate Britain and the Museum of the Home in London
Tate and Museum of the Home jointly acquire Rebecca Solomon’s A Young Teacher – Press Release | Tate
as they say, it's a painting 'of enormous significance where the themes of race, class, faith and gender intersect', most notably in respect of the role played by women from India in sustaining the British Raj in the 19th century.
Museum of the Home and Tate jointly acquire Rebecca Solomon's A Young Teacher | Museum of the Home
It'll shortly be on view at Millbank, in re-ordered British art rooms.
Ignore for the moment the familiar but uncorroborated tale of Walter discovering Lizzie working in a milliner’s shop. It dates from the 1880s when all the witnesses were dead, whereas in 1857, Lizzie gave a different account to relatives in Sheffield.
In this, she claimed to have become acquainted with the Deverell family
as a dressmaker and to have shown her own drawings to Walter’s father, who was
principal of the government-funded School of Design in London. Through his encouragement, she met Walter and
the young members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Rossetti and
Holman
This narrative is itself untrustworthy, as it proceeds to claim that Walter proposed marriage to Siddal, and that after his death Hunt introduced her to Ruskin.
But it includes the vital detail of Lizzie’s artistic endeavours before she met the PRBs – aspirations that shaped later events. It glides over another detail, which is her initiative in presenting her work to Mr Deverell, presumably to ask his opinion.
One can’t immediately imagine what her ‘own designs’ depicted. Perhaps they illustrated poetic or biblical texts, like some of her later works. Maybe they were fashion sketches like those printed in the new weekly magazines.
One likely response would be advice to study
formally, in the female classes run under the School of Design’s aegis; aimed
at training artisans in draughtsmanship and basic design, these were
appropriate to those working in the fashion trades, or to women seeking
employment in colouring up engraved prints.
The English Heritage plaque newly installed at the former Spartali family home on Clapham Common, aka 2 Lavender Gardens.
it was called The Shrubbery, but alas lost its extensive grounds as well as entrance drive to suburban building.
I suspect the lost Shrubbery is depicted in Spartali's early work
It
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.
The long-invisible yet frequently invoked painting Women's Work: A Medley by Florence Claxton is being auctioned at Sothebys on 16 March. It has been splendidly cleaned and now looks superb. Here's hoping it will find a new and public home.
In it, Claxton illustrates the many obstacles faced by aspiring female professionals and the few occupations open, all centred around male gender supremacy.
Here's the thing [as we say now] For decades/centuries women's art ambitions were seriously hampered by the dominant [i.e. masculine] belief that no wife should pursue extra-domestic activities, and no husband should permit, let alone assist a wife to do so. In 1782 a satire demanded that Richard Cosway recall Maria to her first duty - 'shirts and shifts be making or be mending'. 'If Madam cannot make a shirt,' this continued; 'Or mend, or from it wash the dirt, Better than paint,' then Richard's stockings would be full of holes and his manhood in shreds. Even when fully capable of managing a household and educating children as well as making and mending, women who had grown up to regard marriage as their first aim - and had no other income - could seldom risk exposing husbands to mockery.
When Effie Gray married Everett Millais [as she chose to call him in reaction to the name John] he delegated to her all domestic responsibilities, including his social and professional diary. Friends and clients were told that she made all such arrangements - a duty that was probably not interrupted by the birth of eight children.
Several mid-20th century artists - a list would be useful - are on record as announcing that there could be only one professional in the house, and he must take precedence in respect of studio space, exhibitions, sales, critical reputation and public esteem. Wikipedia states that when John Bratby did not receive the same recognition as his wife Jean Cooke, he often painted over or slashed her canvases and restricted her painting time to three hours in the morning.
She retaliated with a great portrait of 'the artist as sulky husband'. and years later with a self portrait 'Not Waving but Painting'.
'
As this photo shows, Brian and Mary Eaton identified the spot six years ago after ongoing research and following obstacles and procedures of various kinds including covid they have now succeeded in publicly memorialising Brian's great-grandmother. All welcome to come along.
