Self-Portraits

I spent yesterday presenting a the first week of a short course on Women Artists at the V&A, starting in the sixteenth century with Sofonisba Anguissola and moving on to Judith Leyster, Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Beale -  not eras or artists I am closely familiar with, though much of their work is well known and as accomplished as that of many male contemporaries.    

Two pictures are new to me:  this enchanting portrait of an unidentified young woman by Antwerp-born Caterina van Hemmesan, painted around 1550 and now to be found in the Bowes Museum – cue for a return visit.  The chaste palette enhances the sitter’s sober yet alert expression.  She is fingering her wedding ring, so this is presumably a wedding portrait?  It’s notable for the pictorial device of the shadow on the wall behind the sitter, endowing the flat image with an illusion of depth and making her seem very immediate to us.

The other picture is Gentileschi’s supposed self-portrait with a lute, from about 1615.   Artists often used themselves as models, so it may not have been intended as a selfie, though it evidently is.  The depiction is beautifully sensuous, with skin on bosom and hands that seems to glow with warmth and touchability. The lutenist's expression is curiously guarded; one can interpret it is quizzical - what does her audience think of the music? or don't look at my tits, listen to my playing.  As it turns out, the work is being sold by Christies in New York on 29 January.

Georgian Absences

Banking, insurance, sugar, rum :  in many respects the long eighteenth century owes all

its economic and cultural history to the profits and products of transatlantic slavery. 
For an excellent analysis of the shortcomings of the current exhibition Georgians Revealed at the British Library ,
see  reviews by Miranda Kaufman
http://lbsatucl.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/georgians-unrevealed/

and Norma Clarke in the TLS 20 December 2013 [link follows]

Morris vs. Rossetti

'They Never Throve Together' said Burne-Jones about  William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

for my account of their friendship and rivalry, see: 

https://www.academia.edu/5431365/Morris_vs_Rossetti

Edmonia Lewis in London

 

While preparing a course on women artists, I’ve recently discovered that Edmonia Lewis, the Black American sculptor of mixed African and Ojibwe descent, spent her last years in London.    No one seems to know why she came to Britain or whom she knew here.  Born in New York in 1844, she had a difficult youth until enrolled at Oberlin College Ohio during the US Civil War.  She studied art and was funded to travel to Rome, where she flourished as a sculptor, mainly with dramatic marble figures.  Some, like Forever Free  and Hagar reference her African-American heritage, others like Indian Combat and Minehaha reference her Native American roots (Longfellow’s Hiawatha being based on Ojibwe tales)  Some were portrait busts, the Death of Cleopatra a full-length reclining figure, which went to the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia and was then lost and damaged before being rescued.  Her last recorded work was an Adoration of the Magi (1883).  It’s not yet known when she relocated to London but in 1901 the Census shows her residence as 37 Store Street, Bloomsbury (age 59; birthplace 'India'!; occupation 'artist / modeller', so she was still working in clay) and  at the time of her death in 1907 she was living in Blythe Road west London.  She was buried in St Mary’s the Catholic part of Kensal Rise cemetery.  Does anyone know any more about her time in Britain?

 

Lizzie Siddal : Her Play

It’s bad enough when dramatisations cast actors in fictional roles who look completely different from one’s mental conception of the character, but  ‘true story’ dramas can have the complication of real life likenesses working against audiences’ visual knowledge – a fact especially true of the main players in the popular Pre-Raphaelite sitcom, which sometimes seems endlessly rehearsed.  So heartfelt compliments to the casting director and cast of the new play at the Arcola Theatre, for their vivification of the chief characters, who vividly resemble the originals and convincingly portray them.  Although Rossetti is rather taller than in life, and Annie Miller too petite, Holman Hunt, John Ruskin (with a smug, half-fixed smile) and jaunty, confident John Millais are acutely rendered and all convey a highly plausible animation, while Emma West the actor playing Lizzie Siddal, with the pearlescent skin that often goes with copper hair,  could be her double.

The playwright Jeremy Green has taken on board recent scholarship on Siddal’s artistic aspirations to give her an active role in the PRB circle.  He resisted the temptation that often makes Rossetti’s charismatic personality dominate the drama, and remarkably has drawn Gabriel as the sexually reluctant partner in the relationship (as I have always thought) albeit without quite explaining this.  The first half of the evening is high-spirited and upbeat, successfully conveying the PRBs’ youthful optimism – I particularly liked how each young man declared himself a genius – and deftly navigates the shoals of period misrepresentation.   I should confess to an offstage ‘appearance’ as a Mrs Marsh, whose grizzling twins have required nearly all the shopkeeper’s supply of laudanum, but an irritating anachronism to show it being glugged directly from the bottle.  
The true pitfall of this type of drama is the perceived need to stick to historical fact, which tends to fill the scenes with narrative, unneeded by those who don’t know the story and annoying to those who do. In Siddal’s case the great obstacle is her now too-familiar death from an overdose while suffering from post-natal depression – a truly sad and pathetic end to her young life, but one that does not contain high-tension drama.   I wished Jeremy Green had departed more vigorously from historical fact, not perhaps to ignore her death but maybe show it differently, less inevitably, less pathetically.  Or to leave the audience guessing as to whether or how far Gabriel was responsible for that fatal dose – a subject on which opinion can still be forceful.

So, a somewhat too faithful re-telling that leaves scope for further episodes in the romance.

Black Bloomsbury

THE Slade School of Art in University College London was from the start renowned for its training in expressive figure drawing and painting.  Currently in the UCL art museum [aka print room] is a small exhibition curated by Gemma Romain that plucks from oblivion a diversity of students and models. who studied or worked at UCL in the inter-war period.  The painting by Ivy MacKusick on the easel [left] is a good example of the works : an unnamed model, whose life story before and after posing for students can only be guessed at; an artist of evident talent named Ivy MacKusick whose post-Slade life and work remain unknown, as do her vital dates ; and a canvas intended only as a study in handling paint that is the sole evidence of their encounter and their lives.  But UCL should be rather ashamed of the display space, which is crowded with tall cabinets and has very limited wall space, which is moreover lit by unscreened windows - all making for unsatisfactory viewing.  A shame, because the material is varied and fragmentary, suggesting further avenues of research.    See also here for one postgraduate response.

http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/category/museum-collections/

Not in the display, but in the UCL Art Collection, are some of the remarkable portrait sketches drawn by Prof. Henry Tonks, widely credited with giving Slade students like MacKusick their rigorous training in observational depiction.  During WWI, Tonks  worked with pioneer plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, in efforts to record and repair facial injuries, Tonks bringing all his draughtsman skill to render what we'd call disfigurement in an aesthetic rather than medical/surgical manner.
Here [right] is Nigerian-born Pte.J.Williams in 1917 before treatment for the loss of half the lower jaw.

Janey Morris @ NPG and PS

well, alas, not quite literally. Even though she did believe in reincarnation, she is unlikely to have been re-born in recognisable  form just as she approaches the centenary of her death in January 1914.
This is to announce a display of drawings and photographs in the National Portrait Gallery's collection, depicting Jane, her husband and daughters, her friends and lovers - and four previously unshown images of Janey in rather funereal aspect, taken by Emery Walker at Kelmscott Manor in 1898  - funereal because it was the occasion when William Morris;' gravestone was installed in the churchyard and because despite the month of  May, it was bitterly cold and wet, the house unheated and the roads too muddy for walking

The display in Room 28  opens on 12 November and runs till 12 March 2014.  It includes two rarely-seen self-portraits by Rossetti, a fine drawing of Rosalind Howard by her husband, and several photos from Jane's own collection, including two of the self-regarding cad Wilfrid Blunt, which came from the estate of her daughter May, via May's executor who, when tasked with the disposal of what was effectively the Morris family archive, presented literary manuscripts and correspondence to the British Library, most drawings and sketches to the British Museum, jewellery and some art works to the V&A  and a mass of portrait photographs to the NPG.  
Link here http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2013/janey-morris-pre-raphaelite-muse.php  




UPDATE
and see here

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2545376/Rival-Lizzie-Siddal-mistress-Rossetti-wife-William-Morris-fascinating-life-Pre-Raphaelite-muse-Jane-Burden-revealed.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490