Thomas Eakins was a very different teacher from William Merritt Chase. Although she was one of his most famous and successful students, Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) could perhaps foresee the trouble that was coming, and in her words “a curious instinct of self-preservation kept me outside the magic circle.”

Eliza Cecilia Beaux was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a prosperous family, but her mother died shortly afterwards. She was raised by her grandmother and aunts, in the same city, and her father returned to his native France. She started art lessons with a relative, Catherine Ann Drinker, then with Francis Adolf Van der Wielen. When only 18, she became drawing teacher at a private school, taking over there from Catherine Ann Drinker.

She was introduced to lithography in 1873 and started undertaking illustration work, but in her quest for art began to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1876, when Eakins started voluntarily assisting its then director, Christian Schussele. She won the Mary Smith Prize at the Academy’s exhibitions in 1885, 1887, 1891, and 1892.

She started studying with William Sartain, a friend of Eakins, in 1881, preferring his more gentle style and his belief in phrenology.

Her The Last Days of Infancy (Les Derniers Jours d’Enfance) (1883-85) is a portrait of her sister (Etta Beaux Drinker) and her son Henry, which won the Mary Smith Prize in 1885, and was exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1887.

Beaux quickly established herself as a successful portraitist. She still used some family members as models, though, as in her portrait of Mrs. John Wheeler Leavitt (the artist’s grandmother Mrs. John Wheeler Leavitt, née Cecilia Kent) (1885). Although she could command similar fees for her portraits to those of Eakins, Beaux recognised her need for further study, and in 1887 went to Paris, accompanied by her cousin May Whitlock.

In Paris, Beaux trained at the Académies Julian and Colarossi, mainly with Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Those academies were popular with American students, although Bouguereau in particular was notorious in representing the old Salon style which was being displaced by Impressionism.

In the summer of 1888, Beaux went to the fishing village of Concarneau, in the far west of Brittany, together with two other American students. She there tried her hand at painting en plein air, in the manner of the Impressionists. One of the results, Landscape with Farm Building (1888) shows her limitations with the technique and genre, and the experience increased her resolution to concentrate on a realist approach using figurative motifs.

Her Twilight Confidences (1888) shows her developing style during this time in France.

Beaux returned to Philadelphia in 1889, where she resumed her successful portraiture practice, her paintings now lighter and higher in chroma, but still thoroughly realist. She decided that, in order to pursue her career as an artist, she would remain unmarried; there is speculation that this did not stop her from having a succession of lovers, though.

Her portraits continued to be very well received – and lucrative. She exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1890, and was awarded the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club and the Dodge Prize of the National Academy of Design.

Sita and Sarita (Young Woman with Cat) (c 1893-94) is a portrait of Beaux’s cousin, Sarah Allibone Leavitt, with a black kitten on her left shoulder. Including the kitten was apparently a decision made on the spur of the moment, and transforms what would otherwise have been a skilful and perceptive portrait into one of the finest of the late nineteenth century. The kitten’s and model’s eyes echo one another in position and in colour, with the kitten looking directly at the viewer.

This contrasts markedly with the smouldering sensuality of the portraits of women being painted by John Singer Sargent and the ‘Master of Swish’ Giovanni Boldini. Beaux’s models are New Women: well educated, thoughtful, and increasingly in control of their own destiny. They derive more from Whistler and Manet.

This painting was included in the 1895 exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York, and Beaux donated the original to the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris (hence it is now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay); she made a copy for herself, though, before parting with it.

Another of her cousins, Mrs Jedediah H Richards née Julia Leavitt, was the model for Beaux’s New England Woman (1895), which enjoyed similar success. This combines light and lightness with an unusual angle of view to soften impressions of age.

In 1895, Beaux was appointed to the staff of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, instructing in portrait drawing and painting for the next two decades – the first woman to be appointed to the Academy’s regular staff. The following year she exhibited successfully at the Salon in Paris, where she received critical acclaim.

Despite her busy schedule of portraits for the rich and successful along the entire East Coast, she still found time for less formal and more intimate paintings, such as Dorothea in the Woods (1897), and Dorothea and Francesca, or The Dancing Lesson (1898) (below). These are the daughters of her close friends Helena de Kay and Richard Watson Gilder, leaders of an influential artistic circle in New York. Although these look fresh and informal, Beaux worked on the painting below for two months before she was satisfied with it.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Having established herself as the leading portrait painter to the wealthy and influential on the East Coast, Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) could only continue to rise in status.

Man with a Cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker) (1898) is a portrait of Beaux’s brother-in-law, who at this time was a railroad executive, and went on to become President of Lehigh University. Here, the cat was probably a sign, together with its loose brushwork, that this was intended as a personal, rather than corporate, portrait – a painting to adorn the home, not the boardroom.

Mother and Daughter (Mrs. Clement Acton Griscom and Frances C. Griscom) (1898) shows the family of Clement Griscom (1841-1912), a prominent shipping magnate and Quaker.

In 1899, William Merritt Chase himself presented Beaux with a gold medal from the Carnegie Institute. He poured lavish praise on her, saying that “Miss Beaux is not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived. Miss Beaux has done away entirely with sex in art.” At that time, sex meant gender, of course.

Bertha Hallowell Vaughan (1901), who commissioned this portrait, lived from 1866-1948, and was a resident of and benefactor to Hallowell in Maine. Hallowell is named for Benjamin Hallowell, an ancestor of Bertha Vaughan, Boston merchant, and one of the Kennebec Proprietors, who held land which had originally been granted to the Plymouth Company by the British monarch in the 1620s. Her family home in Hallowell is now designated a Historic Homestead.

In 1902, Beaux was honoured to be invited to the White House, to paint a double portrait of the President’s wife and daughter, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and Daughter Ethel (1902). This shows President Theodore Roosevelt’s second wife Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt (1861-1948), and their daughter Ethel Carow Roosevelt (1891-1977), who was then about eleven years old. Thirty years later Eleanor Roosevelt (who was first cousin to Ethel) stated that Beaux was “the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world”. That year Beaux became a member of the National Academy of Design.

She seems to have painted a few landscapes again, perhaps experimenting with plein air techniques in her leisure; these do not appear to be well-documented. Half-Tide, Annisquam River (c 1905) shows the tidal estuary which connects Annisquam Harbour to Gloucester Harbour, Massachusetts.

She increasingly sought solace from the pressures of New York, living among her friends and clients in an affluent neighbourhood. However, the rise of urban and social themes in art, and the altogether rougher styles of Robert Henri and the Ashcan School, saw taste changing from the more traditional approach she had espoused, together with the likes of William Merritt Chase.

Beaux’s wonderful portrait of Mrs. Stedman Buttrick and Son John (1909) shows the latest member of this Concord, Massachusetts family, and his doting mother.

This portrait of Bessie Vance Brooks (1911) shows a fellow artist and future patron of the arts. Brooks studied art at the Clara Conway Institute in Memphis, Tennessee, and later married Samuel Hamilton Brooks, who died the year after this painting was made. Her husband’s estate established the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, which was dedicated by Bessie Brooks in 1916. She then moved to Florida, where she died in 1943.

In 1912, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, held a major solo show of her work, but the following year tastes began to shift more violently, with the (in)famous Armory Show in New York.

After the Meeting (1914) has all the makings of a ‘problem picture’. The woman in the foreground is in discussion with an unseen companion to the left and beside the viewer. Another woman in the distance appears to be in the company of a young girl, and is talking at a counter. We are invited to speculate what might be happening, what interactions there have been, and who the meeting might have been with.

Beaux’s portrait of the French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1920) shows him in his later years – he is nearly eighty here. He had been Prime Minister of France during the First World War, and had only recently resigned from that post and from politics more generally, and was a good friend of Claude Monet.

In 1924, Beaux fell when walking in Paris, and broke her hip. Then nearly 70, this accident left her crippled for the rest of her life, and inevitably slowed her painting. She was invited to paint her Self Portrait (1925) for the Uffizi’s unique Medici Collection.

Dressing Dolls (1928) is one of her later works, harking back to the many wonderful portraits which she had made of children, and perhaps revisiting some of her own childhood memories.

During the 1930s, she was the recipient of a steady stream of honours reflecting her lifetime achievement, culminating in the award of a gold medal by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1942. Later that year, she died in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Cecilia Beaux has not been forgotten, as so many women artists of that era have been. But in her day, her work was matched against John Singer Sargent’s. Although she could not compete with him in other genres, she often seemed to have the upper hand when it came to portraits. Perhaps now that Sargent has been ‘rehabilitated’, it is time to celebrate the superb portraits painted by his rival, Cecilia Beaux.

Reference

Wikipedia.

It’s not unusual for artists to have started off studying medicine, and the French Impressionist Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870) came close to qualifying as a doctor. It has been suggested that the great Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael (c 1629-1682) may have also been a physician, but most would now consider that to have been a case of mistaken identity. Although Thomas Eakins studied anatomy, he did so as an aid to his figurative painting, without any intention of progressing to become a doctor.

The one exception is the remarkable Henry Tonks (1862-1937), who was a fully-qualified surgeon and anatomy teacher, and later became a significant painter and the Slade Professor of Fine Art.

He was born in Solihull, Birmingham, England, and studied medicine from 1882 to 1886. He qualified as a surgeon (completing postgraduate specialist training) in 1888, and worked as a surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in London from that year, additionally teaching anatomy at the London Hospital Medical School from 1892.

Before achieving his surgical qualification, in 1887, he started to study at the Westminster School of Art. By 1891, his paintings were good enough to allow him to exhibit for the first time at the New English Art Club, to which he was admitted as a member in 1895.

He painted A Girl with a Parrot (c 1893) at about the time that he abandoned surgery and became a full-time artist and teacher. A small and intimate glimpse into the private world of a young girl, this shows his very painterly and gestural style, influenced by Whistler and Impressionism, but with his careful draughtsmanship.

The Torn Gown (1890-1900) is one of a series of paintings dominated by white dresses, in which the free brushstrokes he used for fabrics and decor became carefully controlled when he painted the figures themselves. This concern for draughtsmanship skills and adherence to underlying anatomy was reflected in the traditional curriculum at the Slade School at the time.

Matinée Rehearsal (c 1900) is another in this series, here set in the improvised dressing room of an amateur stage production – an ingenious opportunity to explore the interaction between human form and the flounce of fabric.

His Rosamund and the Purple Jar (c 1900) is a simple narrative taken from a popular series of moralising stories for children, written by Maria Edgworth in the early 1820s. Rosamund needed a new pair of shoes, but instead of buying them, she spent her money on a large glass jar filled with purple liquid which she saw in a shop window (in fact, one of the stock symbolic products of a chemist/pharmacist). At first delighted, she then realised that she would be unable to go out, because her old shoes were too uncomfortable to wear.

It is noticeable that this oil painting, little more than a hundred years old, has already suffered from extensive and very visible cracking, suggesting that Tonks’ materials or techniques were less than ideal. I find this puzzling, as he was known for his emphasis on the teaching of technique, and invented the method of ‘Tonking’. This is still used sometimes when excess oil, or a small area of wet oil paint, is to be removed from a painting. Tonks taught how to do this using a piece of newspaper, which will blot away the oil (‘oiling out’) or wet paint. It remained popular into the 1950s, but with the decline in teaching of techniques in art schools, has now largely fallen into disuse.

Summer (1908) is a dazzlingly rich and intricate view of the garden at Arfleet, near Corfe Castle, Dorset, England. Using a real mother and her son as models, the boy’s rocking horse and a cockatoo are unusual objects to see in an English garden in summer.

Crystal Gazers (c 1910) continues his brightly-lit paintings of women. Here the figure in the foreground is staring at a crystal sphere, in the hope of seeing her future in its sparkling reflections.

Walking on Sand (c 1910) is an example of his wonderfully loose watercolour sketches of this period.

With his surgical career in the past, Tonks had the reputation of being quite a formidable teacher. He had great influence on many of his students, some of whom went on to successful careers in art – including Gwen and Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Wyndham Lewis, Spencer Gore, Paul Nash, and Rex Whistler. However he did not get on well with over-confident young men, and was also known for his sarcastic wit.

He was also a skilled pastellist, as shown in his The Toilet (1914), a theme which he painted on other occasions too.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, Tonks returned to medicine, working first at a prisoner of war camp in Dorset, then in Essex. He painted Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, and his wife when they were refugees.

The following year, Tonks served as a medical orderly (a remarkably low role for a former surgeon!) on the Marne, France, where he used his pastels to paint Saline Infusion: An incident in the British Red Cross Hospital, Arc-en-Barrois, 1915. Saline intravenous infusions were still relatively novel at that time, and war surgery was busy re-learning many of the lessons of the past. Tonks preserved the anonymity of his models although his drawing is otherwise anatomically precise.

Tonks was finally commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1916, and then worked with the pioneer plastic and reconstructive surgeon Harold Gillies, documenting mutilating facial injuries in a unique and often harrowing series of pastels and sketches.

It was not until 1918 that Tonks became an official war artist, painting a cellar being used to receive and assess the wounded in his An Underground Casualty Clearing Station, Arras (1918).

Perhaps his most important painting is that of An Advanced Dressing Station in France, 1918, which compares with John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1919) in its near-documentary depiction of an ad hoc medical facility not far from the front line, and the apocalyptic vision of war.

For much of the final phase of the war, Sargent and Tonks travelled and worked alongside one another. Gassed is a studio painting which Sargent composed from his notes and sketches made at this dressing station, and Tonks’ painting is a more literal depiction of conditions in the dressing station itself. Both paintings were commissioned by the British government.

After this, Tonks was appointed the Slade Professor of Fine Art, but only after he had given Walter Sickert the opportunity of the post. Before the war he had opposed Roger Fry’s promotion of Post-Impressionism; after it he settled into his own war against Fry and the rising tide of modernism which Fry represented and promoted.

Tonks was apparently never entirely happy with his Spring Days (1926-8), and repainted it several times using different models. Gone is his overall lightness, narrowed into the shafts of sunlight coming through the window.

Several of his post-war works show groups of ageing artists who seem to be whiling away their later years. Saturday Night in the Vale (An Evening in the Vale) (1928-9) shows the Irish author George Augustus Moore (seated in the foreground) reading from the manuscript of his latest novel to a gathering in Tonks’ studio, The Vale, in Chelsea, London.

Seated at the far left is St John Hutchinson (barrister and politician), dozing in the armchair is Philip Wilson Steer (painter and teacher at the Slade), Tonks is stood by the fireplace, and Mrs Mary St John Hutchinson is seated at the right. Mrs St John Hutchinson was the mistress of Clive Bell, a friend and ardent supporter of Roger Fry and modernism. Inevitably Tonks’ friends were critical of their depictions, and the artist took a year to complete this version, only to paint another attempt after his retirement as Slade Professor in 1930.

Sodales – Mr Steer and Mr Sickert (1930) is in a similar vein, this time showing Philip Wilson Steer dozing when Walter Sickert was visiting him at home in Cheyne Walk, London.

Tonks continued his fight against Fry and modernism, and in 1936 the Tate Gallery honoured him with an exhibition of his work – only the second such retrospective for a living British artist. Tonks died the following year.

Reference

Wikipedia.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of great change throughout Europe and America. Cities grew, became heavily industrialised, bred squalor among the poor, and offered grandeur to the rich.

Landscape painting became increasingly popular, and with it depiction of the urban landscape. Manet and the French Impressionists documented the transformation of Paris, and those American painters who trained in France often painted its landmarks, and favourite views of the bridges over the River Seine, for example.

This article, and its sequel, look at how a succession of major artists – Eakins, Chase, Henri, Cooper, and Bellows – painted the cities of the East Coast, between 1870 and 1914.

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)

Trained in Paris in the Salon tradition, Eakins painted and taught in the cities of Philadelphia, Washington, and New York.

Eakins’ most frequent early depictions of Philadelphia appear confined to the Schuylkill River, as it passes through the city, in his series showing rowing on that river.

A little later, he painted this scene of Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. (1877). Originally intended as part of the pleasure grounds around the Executive Mansion (the White House), Eakins allows only small fragments of buildings to peep through its dense trees.

His A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand) (1879-1880) shows Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, without giving the slightest glimpse of the city at all.

Although Eakins made copious oil sketches and photographs, and painted many scenes set in landscapes, he does not appear to have shown any interest in depicting the urban landscapes in which he lived and worked.

William Merritt Chase (1849–1916)

Chase did not train in Paris, but in Munich. On his return to the US in 1878, he moved to New York, where he kept a studio for most of the rest of his life. From about 1886, he started painting outdoor scenes around Brooklyn and other parts of New York City, but ceased these by the time that he started teaching plein air painting at Shinnecock, Long Island, in 1891.

Over this period, Chase’s favourite scenes were those of the huge Prospect Park in Brooklyn. This was the next project for Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux after they had completed Manhattan’s Central Park. It was partially opened in 1867, but not completed until 1873.

Brooklyn Landscape (c 1886) shows a few buildings in the distance, which could as easily have been a more rural setting. The rough land in the foreground does at least have the appearance of urban waste ground, before the area became more densely developed.

In his waterfront view of The East River (c 1886), Chase avoids getting too close to the factories and warehouses seen on the skyline.

In Harbor Scene, Brooklyn Docks (1886), he follows the same compositional principle, even bringing in some grass and trees on the left.

Woman on a Dock (1886) appears to be the closest that Chase comes to a ‘real’ urban waterside, one dominated by manmade structures, although the buildings are here obscured by large ships.

Summertime (Pulling for Shore) (c 1886) returns to the security of trees and grass.

The buildings which Chase did paint were seldom those typical of cities: Boat House, Prospect Park (1887) is far from urban, and the scene almost empty of people.

A City Park (c 1887) shows the edge of a park, where there are more people, and some distant buildings, but like his earler waterfront views, they are kept sufficiently small as to avoid their dominance.

This view of Prospect Park, Park in Brooklyn (c 1887), follows the same rules.

Chase also painted a few works which take us into the backyards, including his Washing Day – A Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn (c 1887). Apart from the dominating washing, and the shrouded woman hanging it out, all we are shown are trees and grass.

In his The Open Air Breakfast (c 1888), the house in the background is cunningly disguised, so as to show some disembodied steps and a doorway.

Painted towards the end of this phase of his landscapes, his View from Central Park (1889) relegates the large buildings of Manhattan to its distant skyline.

Chase’s paintings of New York City are remarkable for his skill in turning each into a patch of green countryside, and carefully avoiding any passages which might look in the least bit urban.

In the last article – before macOS Sierra was upon us – I had been building the spine of a hypertext document ported from a series of WordPress articles. Since then, I have completed building that spine, and this article looks at how I have integrated an alternative account with it.

Before I get started with that, four words about Storyspace 3.2 and Sierra: they’re very happy together. I haven’t tried out any of Sierra’s new features with Storyspace, largely because they are superfluous. The app’s interface is a very comfortable and productive balance which I do not wish to disturb, therefore I’ll let Eastgate decide how it might accommodate any of the additional features of Sierra. Storyspace already makes excellent use of tabs, for example, so the new tabbed views just lets lesser apps catch up with Storyspace.

So after a bit more work, I now have a spine of Milestones, forming the narrative thread for the history of oil painting, linked together in time sequence using plain links. There’s a container for all the paintings, named Gallery, and a container for my prototypes.

The Gallery is quite rich now, with all the small and large versions of paintings used in the writing spaces which make up the spine. For the moment I have just laid them out roughly, so that I can access them as I need during the writing process. I’ll come back later and tidy them up.

With these busy layouts in Map view, it is worth adjusting the scale of the view to suit the work that you are doing. The View menu contains three commands for this: Magnify (zoom in), Shrink (zoom out), and Standard Scale (equivalent to 1:1 if you wish).

The first alternative account which I want to integrate with my spine is an old version provided by Vasari, in his still-popular Lives of the Artists. Thankfully there is quite a good translation in Project Gutenberg, so that is what I will use. The relevant section is that devoted to the life of Antonello da Messina, which I locate in the text.

Looking at that text, its paragraphs are quite long, but they are coherent, and splitting paragraphs up between writing spaces seems a bad idea, potentially confusing. Unfortunately the Project Gutenberg text has hard line-breaks, so I need to take those out to get the text to flow properly, and do some other tidying up. I do this using BBEdit again, and separate the text for a reference citation, as a separate item.

Back in Storyspace, I need to create two more prototypes, although these will only differ slightly from the default at this stage: Authority, which I will use for the writing spaces containing Vasari’s text, and Reference, which will contain the citation itself. I give these suitable colours and badges, and ensure that they go into the Prototypes container.

I set a new writing space to use the Reference prototype, paste in the citation, and style it up. This then goes into a new container called References; although it would be wise to draw greater distinction between the names of the container and the prototype, I don’t think that I will get them confused.

Next, I create a new writing space, name it Life of Antonello 1, as the first in the thread, and set it to use the Authority prototype. Into that I paste the text of the first paragraph of Vasari’s account.

I have looked in other articles at different ways of dealing with references. Now that Storyspace supports stretchtext so well, it is an obvious choice here, so I use that to offer the reader the full citation, which they can access on any of the pages containing Vasari’s text.

The only pain here is ensuring that the quotation marks are ‘plain text’ “” and not ‘smart’ quotations – using Control-Shift-“. With ‘smart’ quotation marks enabled, editing the text around ordinary quotation marks can quickly lead to their being transformed, and breaking the stretchtext insertion.

Once I have added all the writing spaces for Vasari’s thread, I link them up using plain links so that they will be read, by default, in the correct sequence.

Next I need to add text links to enable the reader to break out of the appropriate writing spaces in the spine, to link to Vasari’s account. These are quick and simple: select the text which will form the link anchor, then drag down from the parking space Ⓣ at the top, to the destination writing space.

There is a slight interface issue here. These text links use the same blue text styling as stretchtext, which could be confusing. Although a reader may be able to work out whether any given blue text is a text link (which will take them out of their current writing space) or stretchtext (which will keep them in the same writing space), they shouldn’t have to think much about that.

So I need to choose my anchor words carefully to make the distinction clear. It might be worth adding a Unicode symbol to help distinguish links, for example with an arrow character like →. I’ll need to keep an eye on that.

The other problem is knowing where to return the reader when they want to go back from Vasari’s account to the main spine. I’ll presume that they will normally want to return to the point in the spine from which they left. The simple and clear approach then is to add a text link, using an anchor starting with Return to…

I also add a default plain link from the last writing space of the alternative account, to the latter writing space in the spine, for convenience. Note that writing space has two different text links, offering the reader a choice.

This leaves a fairly busy mesh of links between the spine and the Life of Antonello series. It is worth making those clear, so I select all the writing spaces in that series, drag them out a bit from those of the spine, and then tidy up the link terminals so that I can see the links more clearly. This doesn’t just look more pretty, but is important if I need to do anything with those links.

That leaves me with the two, integrated narratives, using links to move between writing spaces, and expressions to embed content from other writing spaces, for paintings and references.

You can download my Zipped Storyspace document, which should also work fine in the free Storyspace Reader app, here: historyofoils1

My next task is to look at how I can start to build more detailed explanations of each item in the spine, and the subject of the next article in this series.

Happy hypertexting!

The previous article looked at how Eakins showed little pictorial interest in the city, and how Chase found ingenious ways to bring the countryside into the city, and to draw attention away from the urban.

Robert Henri (1865-1929)

Henri studied in Paris, mainly in conservative Salon style, but was also strongly influenced by Millet and Impressionism. He returned to paint and teach in Philadelphia, revisiting Paris quite frequently, and from 1902 taught in New York City.

His Nocturne Café (c 1900) could have been painted on either side of the Atlantic, but confirmed his fascination for real urban scenes.

In his Cumulus Clouds, East River (1901-02), the buildings frame the clouds in repoussoir, just as was commonly done with trees in rural landscapes.

Then on 5 March 1902, he painted Snow in New York (1902), a true cityscape devoid of trees or green, its streets properly populated. At about the same time, he painted Street Scene with Snow (c 1902).

His later Morning Reflections (1910) is dominated by its buildings, and thoroughly urban.

As one of the founders of the Ashcan School, Henri showed how successful the cityscape could be, but does not appear to have developed the sub-genre any further.

Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937)

Cooper initially trained with Eakins in Philadelphia, then studied in Paris. He moved to New York City in 1904, by which time he had already started to paint urban landscapes. Once he was among the growing skyscrapers of New York City, they became something of an obsession, together with the crowded streets below. He was probably the first American specialist in cityscapes.

His Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, in the Rain (c 1905) records both the rising buildings and the people below.

Cooper’s cityscapes are some of the most distinctively American paintings of this period. His focus, though, was on the enormity of the buildings; the people seldom seem to have been of much significance, either in their size or in their lives and social issues.

George Bellows (1882–1925)

Bellows trained with Robert Henri in New York, and worked from his own studio in New York City for much of his career. As Cooper was busy painting skyscrapers, Bellows concentrated on the lives of working class migrants living in the tenements of Lower East Side.

In Forty-two Kids (1907), he showed the unruly youths at play by the water, in apparent homage to Eakins’ Swimming (1885), restaged in this urban setting.

He showed the deep excavations required for the contruction of the city’s skyscrapers.

Most memorable of all, though, he showed the people who lived in the city.

It was surely George Bellows who finally brought cityscapes to become human landscapes. In just over thirty years, and five great artists, the focus of attention had been drawn from the countryside to the lives of those in the cities.

We have seen examples before of painted narratives which, at the time, were easily read, but which have since become obscure and sometimes even lost. This one is unusually complex, because of the different levels at which it can be read. Although very American paintings dealing with very American issues, I suspect that most modern Americans would struggle to read them, and most non-Americans would be completely baffled.

This is made all the more complex because the artist, Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), never painted his final version, and only left us with a series of studies and sketches.

Johnson is a major figure in nineteenth-century American art, not only as one of its most important painters, but as co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City – one of the major art galleries and collections in the world.

Born and brought up in Maine, he was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer in 1840, then the family moved to Washington, DC. Eastman Johnson moved back to Boston, then in 1849 went to Düsseldorf, Germany, to study painting. From there he went to The Hague, in the Netherlands, and finished up in Paris, as a pupil of Thomas Couture, in 1855.

During 1856-57, he travelled and painted Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) in Superior, Wisconsin. By 1859, he was established in his own studio in New York City, and painting genre scenes, including the very successful Negro Life at the South (1859), which was set in the urban areas of Washington, DC, and was exhibited at the National Academy of Design. For much of his career he was a successful and sought-after portraitist, but had a particular penchant for painting narrative genre scenes on contemporary themes. I provide a couple of relevant examples.

His The Cranberry Harvest on the Island of Nantucket, 1880 (1880) is a gloriously detailed account of the intensely manual harvesting of cranberries, a very traditional farming activity which kept many communities in the north-east alive. It has parallels in European paintings of agricultural labour, including those of Millet, but does not attempt to glamourise or dramatise in any way. And in the distance are harbingers of social change, in the form of smoking chimneys, and towns.

His earlier Not at Home (c 1873) is almost enigmatic enough to qualify as a ‘problem picture’ in British Victorian style. Without those three words of the title, all you see is a well-lit and empty parlour, and the presumed mistress of the house starting up the stairs, in relative gloom in the foreground.

Those three words, of course, are the classic excuse offered in someone’s absence – “I am sorry, but the Mistress is not at home” – even when they are very much at home, but simply do not want to see the visitor(s). So the title tells us that the woman is ascending the stairs in order not to see visitor(s).

The problem is to decide who is visiting, and why the woman is so resolutely going upstairs, so that she is ‘not at home’.

The paintings

Earlier, during the American Civil War, Eastman Johnson started a major project intended to result in his most important painting to date. Although he continued to work on sketches and studies through that war, and for a few years afterwards, that finished and most important painting was never completed. We therefore have a choice of three (and more) advanced studies which should give an idea of what he was intending.

Sugaring Off at the Camp, Fryeburg, Maine (c 1864-66) shows some sort of festivities being held deep in a forest in winter, centred on a group who are warming themselves over a large cauldron or ‘kettle’, which is heating on an open fire.

A Different Sugaring Off (c 1865) shows a similar scene, with the same basic pictorial elements.

The Maple Sugar Camp: Turning Off (1865-73) is another rearrangement, this time featuring a little rustic dancing too.

Other paintings by Johnson work through detailed sub-scenes from this grand work.

At the Maple Sugar Camp (1870) shows a couple of lads playing cards by a large wooden barrel.

At the Camp: Spinning Yarns and Whittling (c 1861-65) is one of the most complete studies, showing two older men, one well-dressed and clearly a community father, sat on a saw-horse, the large kettle heating behind them.

The Sugar Camp (Making Maple Sugar, or Susan Ray’s Maple Sugaring Kitchen) (c 1861-65) shows a couple of the younger men, with the kettle at the left, and a barrel at the right.

The undated Sugar Camp offers an alternative arrangement for the people around the kettle, this time with a finely-dressed woman stood by it.

Tasting the Sugar (c 1870-73) takes a very different approach, and appears to be the kernel of a more modest event around the kettle, this time predominantly involving women.

The event

If you do not already know, or have deduced from the titles and content of Johnson’s paintings, he intended to show the production of maple sugar from the exuded sap of maple trees, in the forests of Maine and the northern part of New England. This traditionally took place somewhere towards the end of the winter and start of the spring, when the sap started to rise most strongly.

The sap, which drips from holes drilled through the bark of the tree, is collected in a bucket, which is then brought back to a camp for processing. There, the pooled sap is boiled down in a large kettle, as Johnson shows. At the sugaring-off, hot maple syrup is poured into the snow to create a waxy toffee/taffy, which is traditionally served with hot coffee, doughnuts, and sour pickles.

Philip John Bainbridge’s more clinical watercolour of Making Maple Sugar, Lower Canada (c 1837) shows the processes involved even more clearly, as does the photo below showing a festival held in Connecticut in March, 2007.

Readings

At this time, in the late nineteenth century, the processes and events shown by Johnson were already antiquated, and to the city-dwellers of New York would have appeared a quaint reminder of a happier past. There was ample rather sugary sentiment on display here.

Sugaring off also fitted well in Johnson’s world view of traditional agriculture and wholesome society and culture. As he showed later in the harvesting of cranberries, the whole community came together to work for its common good: the sort of moralising which was popular at the time (and there’s nothing wrong with that either). This was all the more important at the time of the Civil War, and afterwards, when there was a lot of communal work to be done, and a lot of communal healing required too.

Maple sugar was also a very topical symbol. Produced by free workers in the north, it had been a mainstay, which remains even today a distinctive foodstuff, often something of a special treat. The urban populations of the US had switched, though, to everyday use of refined cane sugar, which was of southern origin, and still strongly associated with slavery. As an ardent Unionist, Johnson saw the maple versus cane conflict as a reflection of the Civil War itself, and of what he saw as its key issues.

The difficulty that Johnson faced was how to build that narrative into his final painting. Without clear clues to each level of reading, the viewer was left with something as sweet and pleasing as the maple sweets made when sugaring off, but also as ephemeral. Perhaps that is why he eventually abandoned the project.

References

Wikipedia.
Sugaring Off, exhibition of 2004, at the Internet Archive.

As with the French Impressionists, there were many artists who were associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement who are little-known today. Every so often I stumble across one – Marie Spartali Stillman was an example – so I here offer another. Known today for a couple of paintings, there is far more to his art than just those. And unlike many of the Pre-Raphaelites, he specialised in strongly narrative paintings: Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833–1898).

He also happens to be an excellent example of a European migrant in Britain, who became an important figure in a very British institution – a topical issue in this increasingly xenophobic age.

Calderon was born in Poitiers, France, the son of a former Spanish Roman Catholic priest, who converted to Anglicanism and became a professor of Spanish literature at King’s College, London. His mother was French. He studied in London at first, then went to Paris as a pupil in the studio of François-Edouard Picot from 1851.

While still a student, he painted his By the Waters of Babylon (1852), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London the following year, the first of an unbroken series of works of his to be shown there until the year of his death.

The reference is to Psalm 137 of the Old Testament, in which the exiled Jewish people express their yearning for Jerusalem, after it had been conquered by the Babylonians. The opening words are variously translated as By the rivers of Babylon or By the waters of Babylon, and talk of the sadness of the Israelites in exile – the sentiment expressed clearly in Calderon’s painting.

“Lord, Thy Will Be Done” (1855) is one of Calderon’s early ‘problem pictures‘, offering various clues to a narrative which remains open and invites speculation and debate, and typically contains some moralisation. Although the occasional problem picture has appeared in most periods of painting, these did not become popular until after about 1850, making this (and later paintings by Calderon) one of the earliest of the sub-genre.

A young mother cradles her baby on her lap, looking up to the left. She appears to be living in difficult circumstances, but is not destitute. The carpet is badly worn, and the coal scuttle empty, but there is a loaf of bread on the table; she has her ‘daily bread’, in another reference to the Christian Lord’s Prayer (as in the title).

A portrait of a fine young man hangs above the mantlepiece, indicating perhaps that her husband (she wears a wedding ring) and the baby’s father is currently absent, on military service. Several issues of The Times newspaper are scattered on the floor at the right, as if the woman has been following news of a military campaign overseas, for example. Under the table is a letter, most probably from her husband.

Broken Vows (1856) was shown at the Royal Academy the following year, where it was a great success, and it remains his best-known painting today. It is often the only work of his which is included in anthologies of art of that period, usually without mention of his career or other work. It is another problem picture.

A beautiful young woman, wearing a wedding ring, stands, her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, which was probably her aspiration.

A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and affording glimpses of the couple behind.

There are, inevitably, several interpretations, but given the title, the most probable is that the woman’s husband has been unfaithful to her. This was a popular theme for paintings, and a common one for problem pictures too.

French Peasants Finding their Stolen Child (1859) is a more unusual genre painting, drawing on the troubled lives of those who travelled with street entertainment groups. Various characters from a popular street theatre play, loosely inherited now as the Punch and Judy family of plays, are seen at the side of their stage. A couple are embracing a young girl, with the girl’s apparent mother kissing her somewhat reluctant daughter on the cheek.

In the background are the audience, and other stalls of a travelling fair. The entertainers in such fairs were vulnerable to crimes such as child abduction, or it may be that the couple and their daughter are not part of the fair, but local people who had their daughter abducted by travelling performers. Calderon’s narrative seems to be based on the happy ending to such an episode.

Leisure Hours (1863) appears lighter in its narrative than Calderon’s problem pictures. A beautiful young woman sits on a rough wooden bench in what may be the compartment of a railway carriage. She looks out at a deeply rural Italianate landscape with a large building, maybe a monastery. She holds in her hands an open book, and beside her is a guitar, and a folded fan. She thus appears to be travelling by train across Europe, reading and making music. Those references to other arts could be construed as aestheticism.

Half Hours with the Best Authors (‘The Siesta’) (1866) is a watercolour study probably for a larger painting in oils, which is not known. Three young women doze on large benches, the shutters closed to provide some cool from the heat of the day.

In keeping with the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Calderon painted several elaborate mediaeval scenes, of which Home After Victory (1867) is probably his finest. Contemporary notes report that this shows a soldier (or knight) returning to the home of his father, wife, and family. His wife is already tucked within the embrace of his left arm; she looks up at him, her face full of joy at his return.

His mother clasps his right hand, and in front of him his father holds both arms out to greet him. All around are other members of the family, friends, and the servants of the household, including a nurse who stands at a balcony above, with the soldier’s two young children.

This painting was purchased from exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1867 by a wealthy Manchester cotton merchant.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Following the success of his Broken Vows and subsequent work, particularly his mediaeval Home After Victory, Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833–1898) was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1867. He was now an established and successful artist, and had helped found the ‘St John’s Wood Clique’, a group of artists who mainly painted modern genre and historical themes, which had social and artistic inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

As did other painters of the day, Calderon painted several works based on Shakespeare’s plays and characters. The Young Lord Hamlet (1868) is one of the more unusual, in depicting the title role from this great tragedy in happier days before the death of his father. Hamlet plays the fool to entertain a young child, while three female relatives rest under some trees.

With the River (1869) is another mediaeval scene, showing a young man rowing a beautiful young woman, presumably intended to be his bride. She holds a bunch of flowers, one of which she is dragging across the surface of the water. She appears to be noble, as she is seated on an ornate carpet which dangles over the side of the boat. The boat’s stern is also heavily decorated. Behind the man, in the bows, is a lute.

He looks at her, resting the side of his face on the heel of his palm, as if waiting for her to make up her mind. She seems in no hurry, content to just drift with the river.

Letter from Daddy (1873) is a return to his problem pictures of contemporary life: fewer clues this time, and a theme which he previously considered in his “Lord, Thy Will Be Done” (1855).

A young mother, who appears to have just been breast-feeding, leans low over her baby, both resting on a bed. She wears a full and long gown. Clutched in her left hand are the pages of a letter, which the title tells us has come from the baby’s father. Behind, on a shelf, is a model of a square-rigged ship, implying that the absent father is a sailor (probably an officer) on board. Although centred at a very different social level, the message appears similar.

His undated Mariana apparently shows Act IV Scene I from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure. This may appear an unusual selection, but Mariana was popular among the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and featured in works by John Everett Millais (1851), Marie Spartali Stillman (1867), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1868-70), and JW Waterhouse (1897). This is a result of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1830 poem of that title, the theme of which is Mariana’s despondent isolation.

Calderon chooses the original play as his source, and shows Mariana sitting, listening to a song sung by her page-boy. Mariana had been betrothed to Angelo, who as deputy to the Duke of Vienna was ruling the city in the Duke’s absence. However, her dowry had been lost at sea, and he had refused to fulfill the betrothal, leaving Mariana as Tennyson’s despondent isolate.

Through trickery, Angelo ends up having sex with Mariana, believing her to be someone else. Eventually, after a series of switches and turns of the plot, Angelo is forced to marry Mariana.

Calderon indicates through the lily that, at this stage, Mariana remains a virgin, and isolates her from even the viewer by showing her facing away, into the painting.

Also undated, A Rose of Provence appears to have a simpler, if rather naïve, reading, without any underlying narrative. It has cracked badly for a painting little more than a century old, across the passages with dark to black colours.

Summer Berries (1883) appears at first sight to be a simple portrait of a pretty woman, but its puzzle may rest in the arabic script around the large bowl into which she appears to be placing the berries which she picks.

By the time that Calderon painted A Woodland Nymph (1883), though, his narratives seem to have faded in favour of a straightforward nude, but for his next and most important role.

In 1887, Calderon was appointed Keeper at the Royal Academy, a senior role in the British art establishment. He held strong opinions on the importance of teaching anatomy using nude life models, and worked to support this in the Royal Academy Schools. This was the time that Thomas Eakins was doing similar in Pennsylvania; however, whilst this has led to the examination of Eakins behaviour and sexuality, for the moment Calderon’s motives have not be questioned.

St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation (1891) was perhaps his last significant painting, and by far his most controversial. It shows Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231) prostrate before an altar, and completely naked, with two nuns and two monks behind her. At present, this painting is so dark that it is hard to see its details. The overlightened image below makes it more clear how shocking Calderon’s painting must have been at the time.

Elizabeth married Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, at the age of just fourteen. She became well-known for her charitable acts, but her husband died of an infection in Italy, when he was on his way to join the sixth crusade, in 1227, when she was still twenty. Elizabeth made solemn vows of celibacy and obedience, and submitted herself to her confessor, a domineering monk named Konrad. Calderon shows Elizabeth at the moment that she vowed that ‘naked and barefoot’ she would follow her ‘naked Lord’, and was drawn from Charles Kingsley’s play The Saint’s Tragedy (1848).

Despite Calderon’s respectable sources, his painting was deemed offensive, particularly to Roman Catholics, who still held Elizabeth in veneration. And not as naked as at one of the Royal Academy Schools’ life classes.

Just as Thomas Eakins’ strong views on painting from life had got him into trouble, so Calderon’s finally brought him problems too.

Reference

Wikipedia.

To commemorate the centenary of the death of the American Master painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), this is the first in a series of articles which outlines his biography, illustrated by some selected portraits of him, and by a selection of his own paintings. This first instalment covers the period up to 1883, including his training, and becoming established in his studio in New York City.

William Merritt Chase was the first of six children, and was born in Williamsburg (now known as Nineveh), Indiana, on 1 November 1849. His father was a local businessman, who in 1861 moved the family to open a shoe store in Indianapolis. William started working in the shoe store, and showing an early interest in art, received lessons from a local self-taught artist, Barton S Hayes, and discussions with another, Jacob Cox.

For three months in 1867, Chase was a naval apprentice on board a ship in Annapolis, Maryland. Further discussions with his painting mentors led him to decide to move to New York for further training, which he did in 1869. He initially studied with Joseph Orial Eaton there, then enrolled in the National Academy of Design under Lemuel Wilmarth (who had been a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris). He also made friends there with J Alden Weir and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Surviving paintings from his early student days are still lifes, which show great promise.

In the spring of 1870, family problems forced him to return to his parents, who were then in St Louis, Missouri. Once there, he shared a studio with James W Pattison, and continued to paint still lifes, as well as portraits.

He exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy of Design, and the exhibition of the St Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association. He was given two awards at the latter show, and aroused the interest of local businessmen, who offered to finance his travel to and study in Europe, in return for his help in securing European paintings for their collections.

With their sponsorship, Chase sailed for Europe in 1872. He arrived in London, then travelled on to Paris, ending at Munich, where he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. He chose Munich in preference to Paris, as it would offer him fewer distractions from his painting. He then shared accommodation with Frank Duveneck and Walter Shirlaw.

By 1874, he had progressed through classes taught by Alexander von Wagner, and started master classes with Karl von Piloty, a traditional history painter. He was awarded silver and bronze medals at the annual exhibition.

Chase sent work home to his patrons, and one, now lost, was exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and sold there.

“Keying Up” – The Court Jester (1875) was also sent to his sponsors, and awarded a medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876.

Another notable success at that time was his The Turkish Page (1876). On the strength of his work, Karl von Piloty commissioned Chase to paint portraits of his children the following year.

Frank Duveneck joined Chase in painting this young model, and Chase painted Duveneck painting his version; Chase could therefore claim to have painted both his own and Duveneck’s paintings.

In late 1877, Chase, Duveneck, and John Henry Twachtman travelled to Venice to paint, and returned to Munich early in 1878.

At the completion of his studies in Munich in 1878, Chase was offered a teaching position there, but turned it down in order to return to New York and to teach there at the new Art Students League. On his way back, he met J Carroll Beckwith, who was also returning to teach there.

Once back in New York, Chase rented a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building, which was to be the centre of his work for the next seventeen years. He joined the Salmagundi Club, and co-founded the Art Club.

In 1879, he was elected to the Society of American Artists, but his nomination as an associate of the National Academy of Design was unsuccessful. He joined the Tile Club, and was inspired to paint landscapes en plein air. In 1880, he was elected President of the Society of American Artists.

In the summer of 1881, he travelled back to Europe, which he was to continue in most years until he became involved with the Shinnecock Summer School. He met Mary Cassatt and Alfred Stevens, and admired the works of Manet.

When in Europe in the summer of 1882, in addition to painting Sunny Spain, he met Giovanni Boldini. He also sought out Old Master paintings in particular.

Chase, Blum, and others established the Society of Painters in Pastel in 1883. Chase then oversaw the admission committee for the Pedestal Art Fund Loan Exhibition, which both introduced American audiences to Manet, Degas, Courbet, and others, and raised funds to pay for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

His Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler (1883) won a gold medal when exhibited in Munich.

His portraiture practice had already established his exceptional skill at painting young children.

References

Wikipedia
William Merritt Chase paints history, for a brief moment
Prizes, performance and still life
Frank Duveneck, silent companion

Hirshler EE (2016) William Merritt Chase, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. ISBN 978 0 87846 839 3.
Longwell AG (2014) William Merritt Chase, A Life in Art, Parrish Art Museum and D Giles. ISBN 978 1 907804 43 4.
Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

Scholars trying to work in the library of the Oxford Union Society in 1856-7 were often disrupted by the antics of a group of young artists, who were active next door in the Union’s new Debating Hall. That noisy group included some of the leading artists of the day: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, John Hungerford Pollen, and Valentine Cameron Prinsep.

Tragically, they were not technically prepared for the task, and their brilliant mural, which was said to glow “with a voluptuous radiance of variegated tints”, had all but vanished by the time it was restored in the 1980s.

Who, then, was this Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904), the least well-known of those members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement?

Val Prinsep, as he was known, was born in Kolkata (then Calcutta), India, to a British colonial family. His aunt was Julia Margaret Cameron, the pioneer photographer who lived near Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. Another aunt was the grandmother of Virginia Woolf, the novelist, and Vanessa Bell, the Bloomsbury painter. The family home back in England was Little Holland House, the dower house to Holland House, Kensington, London, and the focal point of a lively artistic social group.

Prinsep was taught to draw and paint by a close friend, George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), who was the permanent house guest of Prinsep’s parents. Some time after he had assisted in Rossetti’s mural in Oxford, he joined fellow students Whistler, Edward John Poynter, and George du Maurier in Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre’s studio in Paris. From there, he went to Italy with Burne-Jones, where he befriended Robert Browning during 1859-60.

Prinsep first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1862, and from then until his death showed paintings there every year. His early A Girl Carrying Grapes (formerly known as Salome) (1862) shows the strong influence of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, but I cannot fathom how it might ever have become known as Salome.

Although influenced by Rossetti, Prinsep did not remain a member of his circle. By the 1860s, he was a member of the Holland Park circle – which often met in his parents’ house – with Frederic, Lord Leighton as its focal point. George Frederic Watts and Edward John Poynter, with whom Prinsep had trained in Paris, were also members.

The circles were by no means exclusive, and often met together; it was not unusual for artistic arguments to take place between them, over breakfast at Leighton’s house in London, or in Prinsep’s parents’ house.

The Lady of the Tooti-Nameh, or The Legend of the Parrot (c 1865) refers to a popular translation, published in 1858, of a compilation of tales in Persian. These are by Ṭūṭī-nāma of Żiyā’ al-Dīn Naḫšabī, who died around 751/1350-51. This painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, and must have caused quite a sensation, with its fleshly glimpses inside the woman’s blouse. Parrots had somehow become associated with more erotic paintings during the nineteenth century – see for example Gustave Courbet’s almost contemporary Woman with a Parrot (1866) – and here may imply a ‘kept’ woman, perhaps.

This painting is an early and rich example of orientalism, with almost every object and decoration in the view being strongly evocative of the contemporary view of the ‘east’, which included the cultures of North Africa and the Middle East.

Leonora of Mantua (1873) probably refers to the Duchess of Mantua, Leonora or Eleanor of Austria (1498-1558), but that is probably immaterial to this almost monochrome full-length portrait of a high noblewoman in repose.

The subject of his The Artist with his Palette (1874) is sadly obscure now, but it appears to show a young woman painting with oils. By this time, it was entirely socially acceptable for women to paint – Queen Victoria herself was a very competent painter – but mainly in watercolours, and never professionally. One of the strong selling points of tubes of oil paint was that they were less messy and led to less odour, making them particularly suitable for women painters.

À Bientôt (See You Soon) (c 1876) was apparently very well-received at the time, being exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876, and progressing to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878.

In 1876 or 1877, Prinsep returned to India to research what became a huge painting of the Delhi Durbar, completed in 1880. The Durbar of 1877 was an official event marking the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, although she did not attend in person, but was represented by her Viceroy. Unfortunately it coincided with the Great Famine, and came to mark the beginning of the campaign for a free India.

Among the other paintings which he completed during that visit is Martaba, a Kashmiree Nautch Girl (c 1878), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878. Queen Victoria and her court had a particular fondness for portraits of ‘loyal subjects’ of the empire, and many are still on show at her former palace of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where she died.

His View of the Lal Darwaza on the Matwa Road, between the Purana Qila and Old City, Delhi around 1878, is a remarkably loose oil sketch, probably completed en plein air.

Prinsep presented his huge painting of the Delhi Durbar to Queen Victoria, and it was hung in Buckingham Palace. In 1887, he painted a full-length portrait of the Queen.

Fresh Flowers from the Country (c 1881) was a popular theme of the time, one of the many street-sellers of flowers in London. As was usual, she is immaculately clean and idealistically beautiful. This was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881, and that autumn at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

Ayesha (c 1887) is another of his ‘exotic’ oriental paintings. Attempts to determine whether the title refers to any specific source have so far been unsuccessful. Rider Haggard’s very popular novel She, which was published in the same year, contained a Queen Ayesha, and the name is shared with one of the wives of the Prophet Mohammad. There are no pictorial references which might relate to either of those, or to any other Ayesha. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887.

A couple of years later, Prinsep exhibited his best-known nude, The First Awakening of Eve (c 1889). The Royal Academy had seen few nude female paintings between the demise of William Etty in the 1840s, and Frederic, Lord Leighton‘s paintings around 1869, but the gradual switch from Pre-Raphaelite to Aesthetic styles brought more flesh onto the canvas.

Prinsep was surprisingly not elected a full member of the Royal Academy until 1894.

The remaining paintings which I show below are, regrettably, undated.

The Butter Churn shows a young maid making butter using a wooden ‘churn’, a common task in most larger households in the early nineteenth century.

La Festa di Lido shows a feast or festival at the Venice Lido, the long sandbar which protects the city from the Adriatic Sea.

The Green Dress appears to be a straightforward three-quarter length portrait of a young woman.

Home from Gleaning is another almost monochrome painting showing a group of women who have been out salvaging stray cut cereal after the harvest.

The Mandolin Player is a clearly Aesthetic image, showing a young woman playing her lute, thus referring to another artistic modality.

A Venetian Gaming-House in the Sixteenth Century shows a scene of confrontation between two young men at the card table of a gambling den in Venice. The man seated on the left, whose family appear to be backing him, has accumulated substantial winnings, and is reaching across the table for more. The man standing on the right, who seems to be losing badly, has an accusative look, and is clearly unhappy with his opponent’s success.

Both men are armed, and under the table is a large collection of cards which may have been involved in a cheat.

Not as important an artist as his friend, Frederic, Lord Leighton, or Rossetti, Prinsep’s works cover a range of genres and are in need of more systematic survey and study. Some, at least, appear to be of high standard, and merit inclusion in accounts of British painting during the nineteenth century. They are also very relevant to the direction taken by European art in the latter half of that century.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Artists of all periods since have painted characters and scenes from the plays of William Shakespeare. Some – such as Hamlet, King Lear, the witches from Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet – have been generally popular. Less well-known characters from the less popular plays have sometimes appeared in several paintings over a short period. In this article, I will look at paintings of Mariana, from Measure for Measure, who suddenly appeared in 1850, only to vanish again by 1900.

Shakespeare’s play is a comedy, although some consider it as a problem, as its themes are not simple humour. It has the complexity and twists of plot more typical of a farce, but deals with more serious matters.

Set in Vienna, it relates the events which take place when the Duke of Vienna makes it known that he is going away on a diplomatic mission. His deputy, Angelo, assumes control, although the Duke doesn’t actually go away at all, but remains in disguise to observe Angelo’s behaviour in his feigned absence.

Angelo has been betrothed to Mariana, but her dowry was lost at sea, so he has refused to marry her, leaving her isolated and in perpetual sadness, with no promise of any solution. During the Duke’s feigned absence, it becomes clear that Angelo lusts after another, Isabella, a novice nun who is the sister of Claudio, who Angelo has engineered to become sentenced to death for fornication. Angelo offers Isabella a deal to spare her brother’s life, in which she lets him deflower her.

The disguised Duke arranges a ‘bed trick’ in which it is actually Mariana who Angelo has sex with, which could be construed as consummation of their frozen marriage. Angelo then has sex with Mariana, believing her to be Isabella, but reneges on the deal to spare Claudio. The Duke arranges for a similar head to be sent to Angelo to ‘prove’ Claudio’s execution – the ‘head trick’.

The Duke then ‘returns’ to Vienna, and is petitioned by Isabella and Mariana, for their claims against Angelo. Angelo attempts to lay blame against the Duke when he was disguised as a friar, so the Duke reveals his role, and proposes that Angelo be executed. Eventually it is agreed that Angelo is made to marry Mariana, and revealed that Claudio was not executed.

In 1830, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote and published a poem titled Mariana, which focussed solely on her ‘despondent isolation’ before most of the events of Shakespeare’s play. Its 84 lines end with the summary
Then, said she, “I am very dreary,
He will not come,” she said;
She wept, “I am aweary, aweary,
O God, that I were dead!”

A couple of years later, Tennyson rewrote the poem and published his new version under the title Mariana in the South in 1832. That follows more closely the tragic circumstances of The Lady of Shalott, ending in Mariana’s death. This leaves us with a choice of two or even three different Mariana narratives, and a fourth if we include Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth, published in 1853, which was apparently inspired by Millais’ painting below.

Sir John Everett Millais (1851)

Some of Millais’ sketches for this major painting have survived, and show how from early on in its development, the figure’s posture and location had been decided.

The final version of Mariana (1851) was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1851, together with lines 9-12 of Tennyson’s original Mariana:
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!”

Millais’ superb and richly-coloured painting is full of symbols: fallen leaves to indicate the passage of time, her embroidery as a means of passing that time, the Annunciation in the stained glass contrasting her with the Virgin’s fulfilment, the motto ‘in coelo quies’ (in heaven is rest), and the snowdrop flower in the glass meaning consolation. Mariana’s posture is intended to indicate her yearning for Angelo.

There is no doubt that Millais was painting Tennyson’s Mariana, not that of Shakespeare; it is also notable that Tennyson was made Poet Laureate in 1850, when Millais made his initial sketches.

Marie Spartali Stillman (1867)

Marie Spartali Stillman’s highly accomplished watercolour may have been inspired by Millais’ painting, and uses the same basic setting of Mariana gazing out of a window with yearning. However she dispenses with Millais’ complex symbols, and fills her paper with Mariana herself, relying on her facial expression and body language alone.

When first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, it was well-received, but did not sell. It then vanished until re-discovery in the 1980s. It has been suggested that this painting may have been inspiration for Rossetti’s versions, but I am not convinced.

As with Millais, Stillman follows Tennyson’s poem rather than Shakespeare, although the painting’s simplicity allows wider interpretation.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1862-1870)

Rossetti made two quite different studies before painting his finished work of 1870, which are generally accepted as being part of his Aesthetic style rather than the earlier Pre-Raphaelite.

The Heart of the Night (Mariana in the Moated Grange) (1862) is an intriguing watercolour study quite unlike any of the other depictions of Mariana, but clearly referring to Tennyson’s first poem. The figure is obviously yearning deeply, but instead of facing a window, she inhabits the dark. Some symbols are apparent in the distance, including a spinning wheel indicating time, and there are love letters scattered in the foreground.

His next study of 1868 is tranformed by his use of Jane Morris (wife of William Morris) as the model, and this probably developed from a study of her head alone. There is also a link to reality, in that the Morris’s marriage was going through a difficult period, and Jane and Rossetti were becoming increasingly close.

The rest of this study is vaguer in its context and any intended meaning, and the result is probably primarily taken from Tennyson, but broad enough to cover Shakespeare too.

Rossetti’s finished painting of Mariana (1870) strangely reverts to Shakespeare’s play, and depicts the moments in Act IV scene 1 in which a boy sings to Mariana. Rossetti dresses the woman in the same blue as Millais, and uses Jane Morris as his model. Mariana now sits full of yearning, her embroidery on her lap, as she listens to the boy’s song – bringing in the art of music. There appears very little in common with Stillman’s painting, though.

Philip Hermogenes Calderon (undated, probably 1870-85)

Calderon’s fairly sketchy painting is even more obviously linked to the Shakespeare play, and the same events in Act IV scene 1. The boy is not shown in song, though, as he stares at Mariana’s face, which we cannot see, as she is looking into the canvas. Her purity is confirmed by the white lily flowers.

Valentine Cameron Prinsep (c 1888)

Prinsep’s Mariana (c 1888) was intended to serve as an illustration for a printed edition of Shakespeare’s play; this version was printed by Goupil in Paris in 1896. Instead of following Rossetti and Calderon, he uses a very similar composition to Stillman. Mariana is here dressed in white, symbolising her purity, and stares out of anachronistic diamond-pane windows, full of yearning.

Prinsep thus followed Tennyson’s poem, to accompany Shakespeare’s play!

John William Waterhouse (c 1897)

Almost fifty years after Millais’ first painting, Waterhouse chose to use Tennyson’s later reworking of his poem, Mariana in the South.

One study has survived, showing how Waterhouse has moved much closer to the popular images derived from The Lady of Shalott. The moated grange is now kept in permanent darkness, shutters closed. Mariana yearns in front of a large mirror, as if dressing herself in preparation for her death.

Waterhouse’s finished Mariana in the South (c 1897) places her in a posture more closely derived from that of Millais. On the floor are some of her love letters, and there is a large red rose (of love) on her breast. At the left edge, on a distant mantelshelf, a candle burns its vigil for her lost betrothal, and her prayers that she will one day marry.

This matches Tennyson’s words “And in the liquid mirror glowed the clear perfection of her face” from his second version of the poem.

Conclusions

Mariana became quite a popular motif for the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but does not appear to have had any appeal to painters before or since.

Although some of these paintings show the arrangement of figures quoted from Shakespeare’s play, the underlying story shown in each of them is flavoured if not dominated by Tennyson’s poem. The resulting confusion is best exemplified by Prinsep, who uses a Tennysonian motif to accompany Shakespeare’s play, and Rossetti, who switched from Tennyson to Shakespeare when he painted his final version in 1870.

None of the artists included any hints of the eventual, happier outcome which was a central thread in the play – a development which Tennyson also avoided. Instead, the figure of Mariana became a symbol of despondent isolation, leading to death.

References

Wikipedia on Shakespeare’s play.
Wikipedia on Tennyson’s poem.

This is the second in the series of biographical articles to commemorate the centenary of the death of the American Master painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). This instalment covers the period from 1884 to 1890, during which he worked in and from his Tenth Street Studio in New York City.

By 1884, Chase was well-established as a portrait painter, with an international reputation which extended to Germany, Britain, and France. He saw himself as a modern version of the Old Master, and had a particular affinity with Frans Hals and Anthony van Dyck, as well as a great love for the work of Rembrandt and Velázquez. His Tenth Street Studio was becoming much more than just a place of work: it was where he met people, entertained them, and promoted his work.

In the summer of 1884, he travelled in Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands, where he painted views of the coast of Zandvoort in particular. One of his paintings was included in the first exhibition of the Belgian avant garde group Les Vingt (Les XX) in Brussels. Two of his paintings – including his Portrait of Dora Wheeler – were included in the exhibition of the Society of American Artists, of which he was President. The following year, he was re-elected as its President, in continuation until 1895.

The next summer (1885), Chase visited London and the Netherlands again. When in London, he and Whistler painted one another’s portraits.

With his busy studio, there was little time for him to get out into the country and paint rural landscapes. Although those he painted within New York City show signs of the urban setting, he does not appear to have painted any true cityscapes. His favourite locations were the large city parks, particularly Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

In January 1886, he married Alice Gerson, whom he had known since she was thirteen, and later that year used her as a model for a series of paintings in which she posed in Spanish dress and roles. (Some sources claim that they married in 1887, the year of the birth of their first child.) At first, the couple lived with his parents in Brooklyn, but soon moved out to settle in Greenwich Village.

At the end of 1886, the Boston Art Club hosted his first solo show, at which 133 of his works were listed.

In 1887, Chase started to teach at the Brooklyn Art School; Moore’s Gallery in New York auctioned almost a hundred of his paintings.

Alice Dieudonnée Chase (1887-1971), the Chase’s first child, was born in 1887, and acquired the nickname of Cosy.

Hide and Seek (1888) is one of a small number of his works which formally explore form and depth. The surroundings are here shown very flat, with the chair face-on, resulting in a strictly geometric division of the picture plane, which is almost rectilinear. The sense of depth is imparted by the figures: the two girls, who both face away from the viewer and into the painting, echo one another and provide all the visual cues which transform the flatness of the surroundings into overall depth.

He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1888.

In 1889, he attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where one of his portraits won a silver medal. The Chase’s second child, Koto Robertine Chase (1889-1956), was born.

The following year (1890), he was elected a full academician of the National Academy of Design, and the Chase’s third child, William Merritt Chase, Junior, was born (he died the following year).

Both Chase and John Singer Sargent were determined to paint portraits of the celebrated touring Spanish dancer, Carmen Dauset Moreno (1868-1910), better known as Carmencita, who was starring in New York City in 1890. Sargent suggested that they paint her together in Chase’s Tenth Street Studio, and on 1 April, Carmencita danced in private for Chase, Sargent, and the latter’s patron, Isabella Stewart Gardner.

References

Wikipedia
William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 1, to 1883
In William Merritt Chase’s Studio: insights and informal portraits
Dancer: John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and James Carroll Beckwith
City Life: 1 Eakins and Chase
Prizes, performance and still life

Hirshler EE (2016) William Merritt Chase, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. ISBN 978 0 87846 839 3.
Longwell AG (2014) William Merritt Chase, A Life in Art, Parrish Art Museum and D Giles. ISBN 978 1 907804 43 4.
Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

There was a lot happening in European painting in the middle and late nineteenth century, from about 1840 onwards. General accounts focus on France, but there were just as major changes happening in Germany, Italy, Britain, and the rest of Europe too.

With the simplification enforced by major textbooks of art history, accounts of painting in Britain run something like: Constable, Turner, Pre-Raphaelite, then the twentieth century. From about 1860, nothing interesting seems to have happened, maybe it was all just ‘academic’, or various iterations on a Pre-Raphaelite theme.

This article is part of a series in which I try to get better insight into how non-impressionist painting changed from 1840 to 1900, mainly that in Britain. Here I will take one of the most prominent and radical painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), and trace changes across just half a dozen of his more important paintings, to try to get some clearer insight. Subsequent articles will look at his contemporaries.

PRB

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), the closed group which formed the initial kernel of the whole movement, was established in 1848, and lasted barely five years to 1853. Its founding concept was that art (painting, in particular) since the time of Raphael had become misguided, and had abandoned the ‘simple honesty’ which had prevailed in the fifteenth century (1400s) and before. The aim was therefore to become true to nature again.

Paintings of the Brotherhood (and many of the broader and longer-lasting movement) characteristically used bright colours, had flat surfaces, and included objects and figures which were painted from nature, and not idealised in any way. As Ruskin wrote:
“they will draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture-making.”

This was primarily a revolt against the many artificialities which had arisen in composition, reaching a peak, they felt, in the work and teaching of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

This did not make the Pre-Raphaelites strict realists, who could only paint what they saw. Indeed, many of their paintings feature the elaborate use of symbols, which were sometimes explained in accompanying text, and required decoding in order to ‘read’ the painting – and Pre-Raphaelite paintings almost invariably require careful and detailed reading, sometimes at multiple levels.

Rossetti 1

Two of Rossetti’s early oil paintings are good examples of this strictly Pre-Raphaelite art.

The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9) contains some archaic devices, such as the gilt and lettered halos, and an oddly-proportioned angel, but shows what Rossetti envisaged might have been the pictorial reality of the Virgin Mary during her youth. She works on embroidery with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine.

Those details are shown quite realistically, as are the abundance of symbolic objects. The latter include palm fronds on the floor (the Passion), a thorny briar rose (Christ’s suffering and death), lilies (purity), books (labelled with faith, hope, charity, fortitude, etc.), a dove (the Holy Spirit, the Annunciation), red cloth (the Passion), crosses in trellis (crucifixion), and more.

Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation) (1849–50) is as radical a reinterpretation of the traditional Annunciation painting, as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin was of the life of the Virgin. There are gilt halos again, amid very natural realistic depictions of the figures and objects.

Symbols shown include: white robes (purity), lily (purity, a traditional Annunciation symbol), a dove (the Holy Spirit), red embroidery (Christ’s crucifixion), blue curtain (heaven), and flames at the feet of the Angel Gabriel rather than traditional wings.

Both of these paintings match the profile of the strict Pre-Raphaelite.

Rossetti 2

Less than a decade later, though, Rossetti painted a work which was completely different in almost every respect from those early works: Bocca Baciata (1859).

Bocca Baciata, which means the mouth that has been kissed, is an unashamedly sensuous portrait of Rossetti’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth. It was accompanied by a line from Boccaccio’s Decameron, Bocca baciate non perda ventura, anzi rinova come fa la luna, which translates as
The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its promise, indeed it renews itself just as the moon does.

By modern standards, it may not appear particularly sensuous or shocking. At the time, her loose hair, unbuttoned garments, and the abundance of flowers and jewellery were seen as marks of the temptress. These are reinforced by the one obvious symbol: the apple, harking back to the Fall of Man. Staid viewers such as Holman Hunt were shocked, writing
It impresses me as very remarkable in power of execution – but still more remarkable for the gross sensuality of a revolting kind, peculiar to foreign prints
by which he referred to imported pornographic prints.

Fanny Cornforth appears again in The Blue Bower (1865), a step even further from the PRB. Her eyes now directed at the viewer, her hair is still loose and her clothing open and inviting. Her hands are idly caressing the strings of an instrument which is exotic and oriental: Rossetti probably did not know, but it is a Korean koto, and refers to another sense (hearing) and mode of art (music).

Cornforth is surrounded by passion flowers, the decorative blue background alluding to their heavy scent, and the sense of smell. The delicate light blue cornflowers in the foreground are probably just a visual pun on Fanny’s surname.

The Beloved (‘The Bride’) (1865–6) had been commissioned in 1863, but was not finished until early 1866. Originally intended to show Dante’s Beatrice, a favourite theme of Rossetti and others at the time, it came to be based on the Old Testament’s greatest love poetry, the Song of Solomon. Rossetti inscribed its frame with the quotations:
My beloved is mine and I am his. (Song of Solomon 2:16.)
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. (Song of Solomon 1:2.)
She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework: the virgins her companions that follow her shall be brought unto thee. (Psalm 45 v 14.)

The bride in the centre, modelled on Marie Ford, wears an intricate leather headdress from Peru and a Japanese kimono, although the latter is wrapped around her in an idiosyncratic manner rather than being worn as the Japanese garment would have been. Her attendants crowd around her, making the composition very shallow, and adding exotic touches in their skin colours and appearance. Its symbols are few and simple: roses (love) being offered up by the boy in the front, and red lilies (passion, physical love).

Rossetti’s later Veronica Veronese (1872) returns to the musical theme of The Blue Bower. Commissioned by Frederick Leyland, a shipping magnate from Liverpool, it was destined for his collection of Rossetti’s images of women in the drawing room of his Kensington, London, residence.

Its title refers to the Venetian Master Veronese, who together with Titian was now a greater influence on Rossetti than those prior to Raphael. Rossetti also felt that the name sounded like some sort of musical genius. His model was the beautiful Alexa Wilding, who became Rossetti’s obsession after they met in 1868.

She sits, daydreaming languidly, her hands playing idly with a violin which hangs on the wall in front of her. She has been writing a musical score, which is under her right forearm. Although her body leans slightly forward, her head is tilted back, and her face turned. Behind her, a yellow canary is perched on the door of its cage and singing, its voice inspiring Veronica’s thoughts. The window behind is covered in thick dark green drapes, and Veronica wears a full dark green dress.

Aestheticism and the Aesthetic

Rossetti had changed his art, to the production of idealised sensual images of women, singly or in groups. These new paintings have elements of (weak) narrative, literary illustration, and portraiture, but do not fit any one of those genres.

The best fit for those works is that of the Aesthetic ‘movement’, or Aestheticism, which was developing during the 1860s. Among its architects was Walter Pater, who claimed that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”, in its abstraction, lack of narrative or ‘meaning’, and capability of generating powerful emotions in the listener.

Although some of his claim is debatable with respect to painting in general, and Rossetti’s later paintings in particular, it does fit well in many respects: allusions to non-visual sensation and other artistic modes/media, shallowness in reading and meaning, and overt sensuality, for instance. Failing to draw a distinction between Rossetti’s early PRB paintings and these later works would surely be a fairly gross error.

References

Barringer T (1998, 2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised ed., Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Prettejohn E (2007) Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 13549 7.

Of his contemporaries, there were few artists who contrasted greater with Rossetti than Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896). Trained in Europe for more than twelve years, he studied and worked in Frankfurt, Rome, Florence, and Paris, and did not return to Britain until he was almost thirty, in 1859, after the PRB had dissolved. He became President of the Royal Academy, the bastion of conservatism in British art, in 1878, and remained so until his death eighteen years later. He died the day after he had been made Baron Leighton of Stretton.

Leighton 1

In his early career, Leighton painted intricate accounts of art history, particularly from the Italian Renaissance, and narrative scenes from classical literature.

His 1852 account of the death of the ‘inventor’ of three-dimensional perspective projection, Brunelleschi, is itself an essay on perspective in painting. It contrasts the almost planar image of the dying Brunelleschi with seemingly impossible, but actually meticulously accurate, perspective in depth in the background view of Florence.

For Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, in 1856-58, he shows Juliet apparently dead, laid out at home before being moved to the crypt. She is surrounded by her immediate family, the Capulets, who are highlighted for emphasis. Lord and Lady Capulet are closest, with Juliet’s nurse behind. Count Paris is at the right, with Friar Laurence behind him. A queue of others leads into the background. The window reveals the two prominent towers of Verona, and at the back of the house preparations are still being made for Juliet’s wedding.

His 1868-69 approach to the legend of Electra at her father’s tomb – told in plays by Sophocles and Euripides – shows Electra in funereal black, beside a substantial mausoleum. She is in profound grief, her brows knitted, her eyes closed, their lids puffy from tears. Her arms are thrust up behind her head, where her hands are pressed against the top of her head, in a ritual gesture as if tearing her hair. This follows the ‘rules’ of classical narrative in painting. Its only peculiarity is in not showing Orestes, and it may have been Leighton’s intent to put the viewer in his place.

Leighton 2

Leighton continued to paint occasional narratives, but more of his later works were either weakly narrative, or devoid of story altogether.

Venus Disrobing for the Bath (c 1866-67) was the first life-size female nude shown at the Royal Academy for several decades, when it was exhibited there in 1867. Bought by the same Frederick Leyland who collected Rossetti’s paintings of women, it shows Venus engaged in the trivial act of removing a sandal prior to bathing. It is a skilfully-drawn figure in an unusual position, showing off Leighton’s anatomical knowledge, but is clinical rather than erotic, and almost empty of any story or meaning.

Sadly his Helios and Rhodes (c 1869) has not taken the years well, but sufficient remains to show its embracing male and female nudes, which must have come as a shock when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1869.

Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by the Sea (1871) has been succinctly described by Prettejohn as a painting “in which the subject verges on nonexistence whether the standard is that of traditional History Painting or Victorian narrative painting.” The four women are collecting plain, grey pebbles for no good reason. They act as if the others are absent, and there is no sign of any interaction or other activity involved. The only interesting feature of the painting is the exaggerated billowing of their robes in the otherwise invisible breeze.

The Daphnephoria (1874-76) is a large and intricately-detailed depiction of the festival held every ninth year at Thebes, in honour of Apollo. One of several of Leighton’s works which feature music, it lacks any actor or action which might give it some narrative.

I find his Winding the Skein (c 1878) an intriguing painting. A woman is sat at the left, her hands outstretched to carry the little that remains of a skein of red wool. At the right is a young girl who is winding the wool from that skein into a ball. At her feet are four balls of wool which she has already wound. By the side of the woman, closer to the viewer, is a woven basket containing other skeins of wool in various colours. This takes place on the roof terrace of a house, behind which are distant bays and rocky scenery of the Bay of Lindos on the island of Rhodes, Greece.

There are no references to any external narrative, and it is tempting to see it as just a pleasant view, a superficial confection. I think that Leighton intended it to refer to the immediate passage of ‘momentary’ time within the much bigger scheme of ‘deep’ time, and how the days in our short lives measure up against the much slower progress of centuries and civilisations.

In Leighton’s Idyll (c 1880-81), two diaphonously-dressed women recline and listen to a young man play the flute. The woman on the right is apparently Lillie (Lily) Langtry (1853-1929), who had recently been the Prince of Wales’ mistress, but had a subsequent affair with Prince Louis of Battenberg, and may well have been pregnant by another friend at the time she modelled for this painting.

Clytie (c 1890-92) shows, against a Turnerian sky, the tiny figure of the nymph whose love for Apollo remains unrequited. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Clytie tried to win Apollo (Helios) back from Leucothoe, but that only hardened his heart against her. So she stripped and sat naked, with neither food nor drink, for nine days, staring at the sun. She was then metamorphosed into the heliotrope (or sunflower), which turn their flowers so that they always look at the sun.

The later version, Clytie (1895-96), shows the nymph prostrating herself before the sun, her head thrown back and arms outstretched. Neither painting has any substantial narrative.

Flaming June (c 1895) is probably Leighton’s best-known image, and was one of his last paintings. It is strongly evocative of the thermal and other sensations of a hot summer’s day, and a fine display of Leighton’s figurative painting skills. But it also has to be one of his thinnest works, as it lacks any meaning, narrative, or sophistication in reading. That may well explain its continuing popularity on greetings cards and other mass media.

Aestheticism and the Aesthetic

Although Leighton never abandoned strongly narrative art, from the late 1860s onwards he produced many paintings with elements of weak narrative, sensory allusions, and classical portraits, which do not fit any one of those genres. As with Rossetti’s later works, these fit best with the approach of the Aesthetic movement, and Walter Pater’s claim that they aspire “towards the condition of music”.

When read in terms of his great narrative paintings, they appear superficial and almost trite. But we should look at them in different terms, as art made for its own sake, not for any other purpose such as telling a story.

References

Wikipedia
The Story in Paintings: Frederic, Lord Leighton – Victorian eye candy?

Barringer T & Prettejohn E eds (1999) Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 07937 1.
Prettejohn E (2007) Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 13549 7.

This is the third in the series of biographical articles to commemorate the centenary of the death of the American Master painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). This instalment covers the period from 1891 to 1900, during which the Chase family spent their summers at Shinnecock on Long Island, where the artist taught at the annual plein air Summer Schools.

By 1891, Chase had a highly successful studio in New York City, an international reputation placing him among the world’s leading artists, and a rapidly-growing family living in Greenwich Village. Although he was teaching, that remained a relatively small commitment, and his landscape painting was largely limited to views of the city parks.

This changed markedly in 1891, when Janet Hoyt invited him to direct her new plein air painting school in the new Art Village in western Southampton, on Long Island. He accepted, and for the first summer moved out of the city to spend the season teaching and painting in the Shinnecock Hills.

This marked the start of his most productive phase of landscape painting, during which he painted a succession of superb canvases depicting the rough scrub, old tracks, and deserted beaches of the eastern end of Long Island.

His students – here Lydia Field Emmet (1866-1952), who became a leading portraitist in the twentieth century – also proved a steady supply of models for portrait paintings.

Chase seized the opportunity of these Summer Schools to move his family out of the city, and commissioned his friend Stanford White to design a summer home for them. This was completed in time for them to use their new house in the summer of 1892, when he was back in Shinnecock teaching and painting for his second season.

In 1892, he became an instructor to the life class at the Brooklyn Art School, and joined the advisory committee for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition being held in Chicago.

In 1894, the National Academy of Design held an exhibition of Portraits of Women, for which six of Chase’s paintings were accepted, together with some by John Singer Sargent, and other leading artists.

Chase reviewed his commitments and studio facilities in 1895, and decided that it was time to move on. He closed his Tenth Street Studio, stopped teaching at the Brooklyn Art School, and the whole family moved to 234 East Fifteenth Street, on Stuyvesant Square at the northern edge of East Village; that was to remain their city residence until his death.

The contents of the old Tenth Street Studio were auctioned off in 1896, after which Chase, his wife, and two of their daughters took an extended trip to Spain. He taught there in Madrid, and returned in June in time to open the Shinnecock Summer School for another year. While he was busy with that, he accepted an invitation to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in October he opened his own school, the Chase School of Art, at 106-108 East Twenty-Third Street.

His teaching commitments in 1897 included life classes at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Shinnecock Summer School, and the first full year running the Chase School of Art.

In 1898, Douglas John Connah (1871-1941) bought the Chase School of Art, and renamed it the New York School of Art. Connah had studied art in Weimar, at the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf, and at the Académie Julian in Paris. Chase continued to teach there until 1907.

Chase was elected a member of the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1898.

In 1899, Chase served on the national jury for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle.

Chase visited the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, where one of his portraits won a gold medal. He also visited Spain briefly, and taught the usual Shinnecock Summer School.

References

Wikipedia
William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 1, to 1883
William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 2 1884-1890
In William Merritt Chase’s Studio: insights and informal portraits
Meet the family: William Merritt Chase at home
Family portraits by William Merritt Chase
Shinnecock summer: William Merritt Chase in the country
Students of Chase: his greatest legacy
The spontaneous or methodical: Chase and Eakins at work
Prizes, performance and still life

Hirshler EE (2016) William Merritt Chase, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. ISBN 978 0 87846 839 3.
Longwell AG (2014) William Merritt Chase, A Life in Art, Parrish Art Museum and D Giles. ISBN 978 1 907804 43 4.
Smithgall E et al. (2016) William Merritt Chase, A Modern Master, The Phillips Collection and Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20626 5.

Another of the team of artists who painted the murals in the new Debating Hall of the Oxford Union Society was John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829–1908) – a member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement who, like Val Prinsep, has been largely forgotten.

Stanhope’s family had artistic connections: his mother and aunts had been taught to paint by Thomas Gainsborough, and he was the uncle and teacher of Evelyn De Morgan. Like Val Prinsep, he was taught to paint by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), and travelled with him to Italy in 1853, and to Asia Minor in 1856-7.

He suffered badly from asthma, and started wintering in Florence to help his breathing. He bought the Villa Nuti in Bellosguardo, near Florence, in 1873, and moved to live there permanently in 1880. Many members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement spent time in Florence while he was there, and Marie Spartali Stillman‘s studio was next door to his. He died there in 1904.

Thoughts of the Past (1859) was the first of Stanhope’s paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy (in 1859), and remains one of his best-known works. It shows a woman standing by a window which looks out onto the River Thames in London, and is a faithful depiction of the studio below that used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the time, at Chatham Place, London.

The woman and her surroundings contain rich clues as to her status: behind her, a gaudy cloak is hanging, with some white lace. The small dressing table is tatty and covered with cheap, garish jewellery and other items. Potted houseplants straggle up for light from the window, and at their foot is a man’s glove and walking stick. She is dressed for the bedroom, her long red hair let down. A short drop of cheap and dirty net curtain is strung across the lower section of the window.

She looks gaunt, her eyes tired and sunken, and stares in quiet sadness at the viewer. The view looks towards Waterloo Bridge, with the Strand embankment to the right, an area which was a popular haunt for prostitutes. Her thoughts are clearly of remorse at her shameful occupation, and her only means of redemption, that of drowning herself in the river.

Although a classical Victorian moralist painting, Stanhope’s style is Pre-Raphaelite. It has been claimed that his model was Fanny Cornforth, who was just becoming Rossetti’s mistress, but there appears to be little resemblance between the woman seen here and Rossetti’s later paintings of Cornforth.

Robin of Modern Times (1860) is a highly original wide-angle composition, and one of the most visually-arresting paintings made at this time. It is set in the rolling countryside of southern England, during the summer.

The foreground is filled with a young woman, who is asleep on a grassy bank, her legs akimbo. She wears cheap, bright red beads strung on a necklace, and a floral crown fashioned from daisies is in her right hand. She wears a deep blue dress, with a black cape over it, and the white lace of her petticoat appears just above her left knee. On her feet are bright red socks and black working/walking boots. A couple of small birds are by her, one a red-breasted robin, and there are two rosy apples near her face.

In the middle distance, behind the woman’s head, white washing hangs to dry in a small copse. A farm labourer is working with horses in a field, and at the right is a distant farmhouse.

This painting most probably refers to the popular contemporary account of how girls and young women from the country around London were claimed to find their way to the city, to become its prostitutes: an almost identical narrative to that of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731).

It is possible that in this case Stanhope makes the visual suggestion that she may be in post-coital sleep, with her bare legs akimbo, hair loose and tousled, and flushed cheeks. As such it may have been a pendant to Thoughts of the Past, and has two visual links to it, in the necklace and lace, although this woman is not a redhead.

The Wine Press (1864) has been described as Stanhope’s finest work, and was inspired by a visit to Varennes, where the artist saw peasants treading grapes in a winepress. He made an earlier watercolour and gouache study which also survives.

Its frame bears the inscription quoted from the Old Testament book of Isaiah 63:3:
I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.

The figure is most probably that of Christ, who is shown both as the victim and the conqueror. He wears a white undergarment symbolising his spotless humanity, over which is a surplice as worn by a High Priest, and the crown of a king. Although critics drew comparison with Holman Hunt’s famous The Light of the World (1851-3), Stanhope’s niece denied any such influence.

In the late 1870s, Stanhope started to paint in egg tempera, contributing to its revival. Among the works which he painted in tempera is Love and the Maiden (1877), which is also considered to be one of his finest works. Its style shows influence from Burne-Jones and Rossetti, but its content has changed markedly from his previous Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

A winged male bearing a bow kneels over a young woman, who is looking at him. In the distance three young women (possibly Graces) dance, by an androgynous figure. These are all in a grove, in which there are abundant flowers, and the whole scene is thoroughly Grecian in appearance. At the left edge is a glimpse of distant countryside, which includes regular arrangements of standing stones similar to Stonehenge, set on a hilly coast.

This painting was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877.

Stanhope painted two similar versions of The Temptation of Eve (c 1877), this being the less realist; the other, painted in tempera, was first shown in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. Eve is shown holding an apple on the tree in her cupped left hand, her long hair twisted around her body as an echo of the serpent’s coils. The serpent’s human face – a form which harks back to Bosch and before – is next to Eve’s, as it whispers into her ear.

Orpheus and Eurydice on the Banks of the Styx (1878) calls on the popular classical legend of the ill-fated couple. Euridyce died of a snake-bite, and Orpheus was allowed to descend into the Underworld and take her out again. They are seen summoning Charon the boatman to take them back across the rivers Styx and Acheron. Stanhope here shows influence from the later works of Burne-Jones.

His panel showing Flora (1889), the goddess of spring and flowers, is simple apart from its decorative row of angels, and abundant flowers.

Why seek ye the living among the dead? (St Luke, Chapter XIV, verse 5) (1896) refers to the well-known resurrection scene in which Mary Magdalene and companion(s) return to Christ’s tomb, only find its door open and the tomb empty. They are then greeted by two men who inform them that Christ has risen from the dead.

Stanhope depicts this in the style of a frieze, the four figures arranged across the painting in a single parallel plane. Although part of a quite complex Gospel narrative, he depicts only a limited window from the story, and in doing so makes his painting simpler and more direct than his earlier narrative works.

As with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederic, Lord Leighton, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s work changed over time. His early paintings had Pre-Raphaelite qualities, but from the 1870s their narrative became shallow or was lost altogether, as he apparently became increasingly Aestheticist.

Reference

Wikipedia.

It is hard to believe now that, in his day, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was one of the most eminent British artists. But like so many in the later years of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once Fry’s ‘Post-Impressionism’ had taken the art world by storm, his work was reviled and junked. Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, John Singer Sargent, and even Frederic, Lord Leighton and James Tissot, no one has yet moved to ‘rehabilitate’ Poynter.

He first met Frederic, Lord Leighton, when he was only 17, and was immediately inspired to become a painter. Following only a year’s study at the Royal Academy Schools from 1855, he went to Paris, where he studied with Charles Gleyre, alongside James Whistler and George du Maurier. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861.

Orpheus and Eurydice (1862) is a simple narrative painting, showing Orpheus leading his dead wife out of the underworld. Euridyce tragically died when she was bitten by a snake; Orpheus managed to convince the gods to allow him to enter the underworld and bring her back from the dead. His success in persuading them was dependent on his exceptional skills on the lyre, which he carries.

They are here striding past snakes and along a dizzying path on the mountainside, following the warning that at no time must Orpheus look back at Euridyce. Inevitably Orpheus does, and she is lost to him forever.

A Day Dream (1863) is a fascinating painting, and much more closely related to contemporary paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The woman of its title is clearly day-dreaming, and has that slightly forlorn look of deep, wistful thought, as she stares into the distance. But on her lap, carefully pointed at by her left hand, is a volume of poetry, and her right hand is absentmindedly playing the keys of a piano.

Not only are there those pointed references to the arts of poetry and music (and a painting hanging on the wall behind her), but a small vase of flowers on the top of the piano refers to the sense of smell, in addition to sight (painting), and hearing (music). This would therefore appear to be a strongly Aestheticist painting, and a surprisingly early one too. It was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863.

The Siren (c 1864) is also relatively weak as narrative painting, and is not a particularly impressive figurative work either. The lyre being played by the siren is the dominant object, and suggestive of Aesthetic intent.

Israel in Egypt (1867) is one of Poynter’s first grand spectacles, a highly-detailed panorama intended to show the Israelites during their time in bondage in Egypt. Although the popular press appreciated his archaeological basis, archaeologists of the day pointed out how he conflated elements from the temples of Thebes, Edfu, and Philae, together with the Great Pyramid at Giza, and the limestone cliffs of Thebes. That said, it remains a very impressive spectacle.

Catapulta (1868) is a less grandiose depiction of a Roman seige catapult.

Andromeda (1869) is Poynter’s faithful account of Andromeda’s fate, of being chained to a rock to await the arrival of Cetus, the sea monster who is expected to devour her as a sacrifice. Although relatively weak in narrative terms, compared with others, it is a fine figure study.

In 1869, Poynter completed a mosaic of Saint George and the Dragon in the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster, London.

Portrait of Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840-1920) (c 1870) is a delicate and demure portrait of the artist’s sister-in-law, who married Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite, in 1860. A painter and engraver herself, she became one of the last survivors of that era, alongside Marie Spartali Stillman.

The Peacock Fan: Portrait of Elizabeth Courtauld (1871) is an exquisite and very unusual watercolour portrait of one of the members of this family of patrons of the arts. The profusion of peacock feathers is a marker of Aestheticism, I believe.

That year, Poynter was appointed the first Slade Professor at University College, London, a post which he held until 1875.

Paul and Apollos (1872) was a trial of fresco on plaster which Poynter made before tackling full-scale fresco painting in the Church of Saint Stephen in South Dulwich, London. Based on a New Testament quotation from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 3:5-9, it shows two early Christians, Paul (who was previously Jewish) and Apollos (a Greek):
I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

Although only a study, it was exhibited in the Dudley Gallery the following year.

In 1875, Poynter was appointed the principal of the National Art Training School, in South Kensington; that was renamed the Royal College of Art in 1896 or 1897. The following year he was elected a full member of the Royal Academy.

Funchal, Morning Sun (1877) is a startlingly detailed watercolour landscape of Funchal on the island of Madeira, which was probably painted from the verandah of Poynter’s hotel, Hotel Reids Santa Clara. He had been troubled by illness from childhood, and often stayed in Madeira during the winter.

Reference

Wikipedia.

By 1880, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was well-established as one of the leading artists of the day. Although he had painted some spectacular panoramas and some scenes from popular classical narratives, many of his paintings were more typical of the Aesthetic movement, lacking the intricate narratives of Frederic, Lord Leighton’s earlier works. Poynter was also taking leading roles in art education, and was by this time principal of the predecessor to the Royal College of Art in London.

A Visit to Aesculapius (1880) is an unusual motif. Although this image makes it appear to be a nocturne, this is probably darkening because of aged varnish and dirt: contemporary prints suggest it is actually set in normally-lit daytime. Aesculapius, the ancient Greek god of medicine and the healing arts, sits at the left, contemplating the left foot of Venus, which has a thorn in it. She is attended by doves, her attributes, and the three Graces as her handmaidens.

Poynter arrays the Graces in classical manner, with one turning her back to the viewer, and reaching her right arm out to the figure of Hygieia, daughter of Aesculapius and the goddess of health and sanitation, who is drawing water from the fountain at the right. Shown at the lower edge of the painting is the staff of Aesculapius, around which a snake is entwined. That is not to be confused with the caduceus of Hermes (Trismegistus), which has two snakes intertwined.

This is a more complex classical narrative than Poynter’s earlier works, with little evidence of any Aesthetic influence.

Psyche in the Temple of Love (1882) returns to the theme of the contemplative woman, here in the context of a simple classical story. Cupid has fallen in love with Psyche, and takes her to the Temple of Love, where he visits her each night, but never in daylight. Here Psyche is whiling away the daytime, holding a sprig out to attract her attribute, a butterfly. However, Psyche’s enemy Venus is not far away, as shown by the doves in the temple behind her.

Diadumenè (1883) is one of several paintings which Poynter made of the Esquiline Venus statue in Rome, which had only been discovered in 1874. He first saw the statue in about 1881, here ‘restoring’ its form into the figure of a beautiful young woman who is binding her hair with a strip of cloth in preparation for her bath. The title is a reference to Polyclitus’ Diadumenos, meaning ‘diadem bearer’, one of his two famous figural types, the other being Doryphoros, or ‘spear bearer’.

Light in narrative but a classical depiction of the female nude, this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884.

It resulted in correspondence in The Times newspaper which condemned “the indecent pictures that disgrace our exhibitions”, to which Poynter responded with a defence of such classical works. The figure’s nudity may have been enhanced by the presence of her clothing next to her, just as in Thomas Eakins’s William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77). Ten years later, Poynter painted another version in which his Venus is partially clad, although her right breast still shows proud.

Outward Bound (1886) shows two young boys playing in a small rock cave at the coast. They have a bamboo fishing rod with them, and have made a small boat, which appears to be floating out through the rock arch at the left towards the open sea. Although the phrase outward bound is now more usually associated with the movement started in around 1941 by Kurt Hahn, and Baden-Powell’s scouting movement was not founded until 1910, there were contemporary advocates who promoted getting the poor out of cities to a healthier life in the country and at the coast.

Corner of the Marketplace (1887) might have been painted by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), but for its joyous celebration of motherhood. Apparently it shows a maker of wreaths and floral displays at work, while the baby plays with a flower. However, the mother sat on a marble bench has a more pensive and wistful stare.

The Corner of the Villa (1889) may have been painted as a pendant to Corner of the Marketplace. Its ornate classical setting is almost overpowering in fine detail, threatening to outdo both Alma-Tadema and Gérôme. The family here is more patrician, and feeding pigeons from a bowl of seed. One of the birds is bathing and splashing in the drinking fountain at the left, and ripe apples are scattered on the marble floor.

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1890) is another spectacle which might have been worthy of Gérôme: inspired by the growing collections of antiquities from Egypt and the Middle East which had been building in the British Museum and elsewhere, it presents a simple orientalist narrative of the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon.

Poynter again fills the painting with extraordinary detail, which spills over into its heavy, ornate frame. Orientalism was becoming the new classicism.

In a Garden (1891) treats a sub-tropical garden to a similar level of detail, as a small figure sits reading in the shade of a large fan.

In 1894, Poynter became Director of London’s National Gallery, and remains the last practising artist to have run this major collection. During his period as Director, which lasted a decade, he oversaw the opening of the Tate Gallery.

The Ionian Dance: Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos, Matura virgo et fingitur artubus (1895) quotes the ‘Roman’ Odes of Horace, and describes the ‘corruption’ of a young woman who learns the ‘lascivious’ movements of this particular dance. The Latin text may be translated as it pleases the mature virgin to be taught the movements of the Ionian Dance, and shapes her limbs. However, artubus may be a double entendre, as it can also refer to the sexual organs.

Poynter’s painting shows a shapely young woman, wearing nothing but a diaphanous dress, dancing vigorously in front of an audience of eight other women, who seem critically engaged in her performance. The painting appears very strongly Aesthetic, as well as more than a little risqué.

In 1896, Poynter was elected President of the Royal Academy at a time of difficulty: its long-standing President, Frederic, Lord Leighton, had died unexpectedly in January, and his successor, John Everett Millais, then died in August. Poynter was knighted in 1896, and made a Baronet in 1902.

Helena and Hermia (1901) shows two of the young lovers from William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Helena is an aristocrat from the court of Theseus, who was betrothed to Demetrius, to whom she remains devoted. Hermia is an Athenian who is caught in a romantic accident, in that she loves Lysander, but Demetrius loves her. Hermia is named after the Greek god of exchange and dreams, one of the central themes of the play.

Although caught in complex relationships, Helena and Hermia are good friends, and it is their friendship which Poynter depicts, a popular theme for paintings in the nineteenth century. There is, perhaps, a little more symbolism buried in this work, though: a ball of red thread lies partly unwound on the ground at the lower right. This might represent difficulties in the course of love.

At first sight, Cave of the Storm Nymphs (1903) might appear to be another excuse for three superb female nudes, but there is more complex narrative behind this scene. Its literary reference may be to the Naiads of Homer’s Odyssey, book 13, who live in a sea cave, updated to encompass more contemporary references to Wreckers, who lured ships onto the rocks in order to steal their precious cargos – sirens without the socially unacceptable habit of cannibalism.

Here the three Storm Nymphs are seen amid their rich takings, the more distant of them perched on a rock and holding a shell-based lyre, and a wrecked galleon breaking up in the huge sea beyond. The painting is rich in the beauty of the nymphs, the savage waves, and the evoked sounds and sensations associated with each.

Asterié (1904) returns to a more thoroughly classical narrative, taken from Horace’s Odes, books 3 and 7. Asterié is a Greek wife, left behind in Athens while her husband is away in the service of the state. She is being stalked by the god Zeus, who lurks down in the street below, in human form. She looks down at him, pondering what to do: whether to succumb to his desires, or to retain her virtue?

Clutching a carnation (also adorning her hair), a symbol of marital fidelity, she looks to be standing by her absent husband, but the question is left open for the viewer to speculate. This painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904, but remaining unsold, was sent to New Zealand for the 1906 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch, where it was sold.

Lesbia and Her Sparrow (1907) might these days be easily misread from its title. In fact, Lesbia was the literary pseudonym used by Gaius Valerius Catullus, the Roman poet, for his lover, who is traditionally thought to have been another man’s wife. She came to dominate nearly a quarter of Catullus’ surviving poems, and appears in several contemporary paintings: Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted her at least twice, and several of those paintings show her with her devoted pet sparrow. For Poynter, it appears to be another Aesthetic work, which invokes the sparrow’s song, and the taste of grapes.

Poynter appears to have largely retired by the start of the First World War, and died shortly after its end. He was so greatly respected that he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, just as Sir Joshua Reynolds had been.

Edward Poynter was a prolific, highly successful, and very influential artist. For most of his career, he made paintings which appear typical of the Aesthetic Movement, and seems to have been an early innovator in that respect: his A Day Dream (1863) was painted when Dante Gabriel Rossetti was painting his early fleshly women, portraits of Fanny Cornforth.

His work includes classical narratives as sophisticated as Frederic, Lord Leighton’s, spectacles as good as the best of Gérôme, and some of the best paintings to emerge from the Aesthetic movement. Yet he has no catalogue raisonné, no monograph on his paintings, nor have his works been exhibited together since 1920, apart from a small exhibition in Brighton College’s Burstow Gallery in 1995. The time is right to move on from Roger Fry’s personal prejudices of a century ago, and look again at Poynter’s paintings.

References

Wikipedia.
Ten Lectures on Art (1880), by Sir Edward Poynter, at archive.org: an Aesthetic manifesto.

In the last article, I showed how I incorporated an alternative narrative thread in my Storyspace hypertext account of the history of oil painting, and how to incorporate references using stretchtext.

One issue which I did not resolve last time was distinguishing to the reader which passages of blue text are stretchtext, and thus will not change the context, and which are text links, and will change the context when the reader clicks on them. I have had time to think this through, and I believe that in this case it is important, but that changing the colour of the text is not the best way to go about a solution.

Instead, each text link is going to be prefaced by Unicode character HEAVY ROUND-TIPPED RIGHTWARDS ARROW (U+279C), or ➜. Depending on the font and size which you use, you may prefer a different character, but I have looked at emoji and other pointer/arrow characters available, and that seems to work best here. You may well have a different opinion, and other hypertext documents may be even better without this distinction.

I am going to write several of these sidethreads running from the main thread, so to help me keep them separate, I have created two new prototypes: one for a writing space in the story of a sidethread, named Story, and the other for a dated event or period in such a sidethread, named StoryEvent and with key attributes $StartDate and $EndDate. I am also going to tuck each sidethread into its own named container, to keep the top level of the Map view as clean as possible.

This first sidethread is placed in a container named PreRenaissance, as it deals with issues up to the use of oils in the early Northern Renaissance.

Unlike the main thread, which is basically linear through time, these sidethreads will be more complex in structure. This one starts from an indented list, which projects out into details of each of the items in the list: a projection. I first create each of the writing spaces required, and paste in their content from my original WordPress source.

The Meeting the Needs writing space is the hub here, and the entry and exit point with writing spaces in the main thread. Structurally, there are three different types of writing space beyond Meeting the Needs:

• the four items in the indented list – drying oil, pigments, ground, and solvents/diluents – the projection
• the Treatment of oil writing space, which is an extension of Drying oils
• the Technique writing space, which is an extension of Meeting the Needs.

The simplest to deal with are the last two: they have text links into them, and plain links back. They’re each like an appendix or annex.

The projection is more complex, because the reader may wish to enter each item from the indented list and return to that list, or they may wish to enter the first and then step through the series without returning to the indented list. I want to give them that flexibility.

So each is entered via a text link, then has two links to take them on: a plain link steps them on through the sequence of items in the projection, the other (a text link) returns them to the indented list. Of course the last writing space in the projection does not need two links – it has just a single plain link back to the indented list.

Two different writing spaces in the main thread give access to this sidethread, using text links. Because those link into a target writing space in a container, you need to use both the link parking spaces to make those links. Select the anchor text for the link, drag from the parking space at the top of the content view over to the left, to the other parking space (at the top left of the Map view), to park that link. Then open the container, and drag from the parked text above the Map view down to the target writing space.

Meeting the Needs then needs two text links – created using the same two-step process – to return the reader to the selected writing space in the main thread.

I then spend a couple of minutes adjusting the locations of the tiles for the writing spaces, and the links between them, in the Map view of the PreRenaissance container. This is to ensure that the links are laid out well, so that I can see where they go. Storyspace is getting very good at placing links smartly, but I like to leave these sidethreads looking as clean and clear as possible. I might not return to this one for some weeks, and when I do I want to be able to understand its structure quickly.

The remaining adjustments to the content are simple: a single reference, added as stretchtext to Meeting the Needs, and three images added to Technique. These sidethreads will quite often use images which are already called on in the main thread: one of the many benefits of using text includes and stretchtext rather than pasting the image in each writing space is economy when using content repeatedly.

Now that I think that my sidethread is working correctly, I spend some time checking it through properly. As none of its links are conditional in any way, this should be fairly straightforward.

The Storyspace 3 hypertext document is here: historyofoils2

Next I have to write several more sidethreads to accommodate all the material from the original blog articles. If any turn out to be of particular interest, I will write them up for following articles here.

Happy hypertexting!