John Everett Millais (1829–1896) was a child prodigy and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). He started his studies at the Royal Academy Schools in London when he was only eleven years old. It was there that he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, with whom he formed the PRB in 1848.

During the 1850s his style changed, and it is generally accepted that he ceased painting according to Pre-Raphaelite principles. This article is a survey of a selection of his works to examine what happened and when.

Millais completed one of the earliest examples of PRB painting when he was only nineteen, in his Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) (1848-49). When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, it was accompanied by the following lines from verses 1 and 21 of John Keats’ poem Isabella or the Pot of Basil:
Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
…
These brethren having found by many signs
What love Lorenzo for their sister had,
And how she lov’d him too, each unconfines
His bitter thoughts to other, well nigh mad
That he, the servant of their trade designs
Should in their sister’s love be blithe and glad
When t’was their plan to coax her by degrees
To some high noble and his olive trees.

These refer the the story in Boccaccio’s Decameron of the ill-fated love of Isabella for Lorenzo, the household steward. Her brothers murder Lorenzo, and bury his body in a forest. The location of his grave is revealed in a dream to Isabella, who disinters his head and hides it in a pot of basil.

The painting shows Lorenzo sharing a blood orange with Isabella, white roses and passion flowers climbing from behind their heads. The dog, acting as a surrogate for Lorenzo, is being petted by Isabella, but one of her brothers aims a kick at it. Various other symbols are shown of the plot to kill Lorenzo: a brother staring at a glass of red wine, spilt salt on the table, and a hawk pecking at a white feather. The pot of basil is already on the balcony, awaiting Lorenzo’s head.

Christ in the House of His Parents (also known as The Carpenter’s Shop) (1849–50) was shown at the Royal Academy in 1850 without a title, but with this quotation from the Old Testament book of Zechariah 13:6:
And one shall say unto him, What are those wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.

The young Jesus is shown being comforted by his kneeling mother, after he has cut the palm of his left hand on a nail. The figures and objects are depicted with great and meticulous realism, and were painted from nature. Nevertheless the composition abounds with symbols of Christ’s life and future crucifixion: the cut on his palm is one of the stigmata, and blood dripped from that onto his left foot is another. The young Saint John the Baptist has fetched a bowl of water, indicating his future baptismal role. A triangle above Christ’s head symbolises the Trinity, and a white dove perched on the ladder is the Holy Spirit. A flock of sheep outside represents the Christian flock.

Another PRB classic, it was vilified by the critics of the day, including Charles Dickens.

Just the next year, though, his Mariana (1851) shows early signs of change. Shown at the Royal Academy in the same year, it was accompanied by lines 9-12 of Tennyson’s poem Mariana (1830):
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’ richly-coloured painting is still full of detail and a profusion 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’), the snowdrop flower in the glass meaning consolation, and the distant candle burning its lonely vigil for her love. Mariana’s posture is intended to indicate her yearning for Angelo, her betrothed.

Millais has here moved from the complex multi-person narrative of his early PRB paintings to a simple, static view of a lone woman in isolated despondency – the subject of Tennyson’s poem, rather than that of Shakespeare’s play.

This was followed by Ophelia (1851-2), in which Millais shows a climax in Shakespeare’s narrative from Hamlet: Ophelia drowning herself in the “weeping brook”. In this, one of the most famous of all Pre-Raphaelite paintings, there is still rich symbolism in its flowers: roses for love, possibly also alluding to her brother calling her the ‘rose of May’; willow, nettle and daisy for forsaken love, suffering, and innocence, respectively; pansies for love in vain; violets (in her necklace chain) for faithfulness, chastity, or young death; poppies for death; forget-me-nots for remembrance.

Millais remained true to nature, painting its background en plein air near Ewell, Surrey, England, and putting his model, Elizabeth Siddal (who later married Rossetti), in a bath full of water. But his complex, multi-person narratives were gone.

Autumn Leaves (1856) is generally accepted as being the first good example of what might best be termed post-Pre-Raphaelite painting. It retains some principles, such as truth to nature and great detail, but is evocative and unashamedly sensual.

Prettejohn and Barringer devote long discussion to Millais’ influences and intent, but there can be little doubt that it is inspired by Aestheticism to evoke the sounds, smells, and feel of an autumn dusk. It has not a shred of narrative, and its only possible symbol is the single apple, held by the girl in the right foreground, which is more likely to be seasonal than symbolic.

The Eve of St Agnes (1863) is one of the few paintings by Pre-Raphaelites to have been purchased by the British Royal Collection: despite the great achievements of the movement, their works were not favoured by Queen Victoria.

Millais took as his theme the popular poem by John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes, written in 1819. This tells the eventful story of the elopement of Madeline and her lover Porphyro on Saint Agnes’ Eve, the night when virgins are supposed to be able to enjoy sweet dreams of their husbands-to-be.

The painting shows Madeline completing the rituals prescribed for the night, as she prepares to undress for bed (verses 25-26):
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
…her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

This curiously static scene from an action-packed narrative was painted from life: Millais used the King’s Bedroom in the Jacobean house at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks in Kent, with his wife Effie as his model. The special bull’s eye lantern producing the eerie lighting effect was another detail over which he took meticulous care. The end result is another evocative, sensual painting which is almost devoid of narrative.

It contrasts with Holman Hunt’s earlier study (below), showing the eloping couple creeping past drunken bodies as they leave the house, later in the story.

The Martyr of the Solway (c 1871) shows a shameful episode in the persecution of Scottish Presbyterians under Kings Charles II and James II. The woman seen here chained to a stake – reminiscent of Andromeda in classical myth – is Margaret Wilson of Wigtown, who was an extreme Presbyterian who opposed the authority of bishops. She was fixed to this stake in the Solway Firth, on the south-west coast of Scotland, and left to drown as the tide came in.

Her dress, the open-neck blouse in particular, aroused suspicions more recently, and X-ray studies have now shown that Millais’ original version of the painting showed her nude, just as Andromeda should have been. He added her clothing later, presumably to avoid critical (and public) outrage. Not only has Millais now painted a three-quarter length portrait of a woman deep in thought, but he has finally abandoned the last vestige of the Pre-Raphaelite, with his painterly brushstrokes.

The North-West Passage (1874) apparently coincided with the departure of a British expedition in futile quest of the rumoured north-west passage round the north of Canada to the Pacific, which had brought a succession of failures since the total loss of Sir John Franklin’s expedition of 1845. Millais addresses this topical issue in his version of a ‘problem picture‘; rather than the symbolic richness of the Pre-Raphaelite, it contains numerous clues to guide the viewer to a reading.

The old man is clearly an experienced mariner, who knows the risks and futility, which are expressed in his body-language. The young woman, probably his daughter, is presumably the wife of one of those on the expedition. The man stares hard and cold, the woman reads anxiously. Behind them a chart shows the limited knowledge of the area of the north-west passage at the time. Flags declare an affinity with the nation, and its Navy. A painting on the wall shows a ship negotiating ice in the far north.

The view through the window shows that this is set on the coast, and there is a sailing vessel in sight. A telescope rests on the table, by a glass presumably containing rum. Below the table are old ships’ logs and other papers.

Millais’ account of Cinderella (1881) is a portrait of her sat in her working dress, clutching a broomstick with her left hand, and with a peacock feather (also a hallmark of the Aesthetic movement) in her right. She has a wistful expression, staring into the distance almost – but not quite – in the direction of the viewer. The only other cue to the narrative is a mouse, seen at the bottom left of the painting. Cinderella wears a small red skull-cap which could be an odd part of her ball outfit, but her feet are bare, and there is no sign of any glass slipper. Narrative is almost absent.

The Captive (Ruby) (1882) is another three-quarter length portrait of a woman lost in thought, presumably being held captive. Beyond its orientalist influence, there are few clues as to its reading, and it may have referred to contemporary events.

Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind (1892) is something of a ‘problem picture’. It is a bitter day in the British winter, snow already on the ground and more snow on its way. An icy wind is blowing, and there is little shelter. In the foreground, a destitute mother sits, cradling her young baby inside an inadequate shawl, her few worldly possessions in a small bundle beside her. Behind a dog bays into the air, and a man walks into the distance.

The viewer is invited to speculate on the relationship, if any, between the man and the woman, and the circumstances by which she and her baby find themselves in such straits. Inevitably, at the time, it would have evoked the theme of the ‘fallen woman’ in its variations.

One of Millais’ last paintings, before his death from throat cancer the following year, was Speak! Speak! (1895), which is also one of his most enigmatic. At this stage, he spent much of his time in Scotland, either in his home near Bowerswell where this was painted, or in the castle and estate at Murthly in Perthshire, where he went shooting and fishing. He bought this huge four-poster bed from Perth for this painting, and had the lamp copied from one he had seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Millais’ son reported that this scene was intended to be in ancient Rome. The young man had spent much of the night reading through the letters of his lost love. At dawn, the curtains were parted to reveal her, dressed as for her bridal night, gazing upon him with sad but loving eyes. The title of the painting is therefore the words that he said to her spectre. The woman’s figure is intentionally ambiguous, Millais himself being unsure as to whether she was real, or just a spectre.

So ended Millais’ journey from crisp, bright, detailed realism with the profuse symbols of the Pre-Raphaelite, through the increasingly Aesthetic, to ‘problem pictures’ so popular with the Victorian public by the end of the century.

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.

The year that William Merritt Chase and Thomas Eakins died, 1916, was an eclectic year for painting, as the Masters of the nineteenth century handed over to the tigers of the twentieth century. Here is a selection of some of my favourite paintings of that year, which perhaps give a better feel for what was happening than any words. I’ll start with artists working from the East Coast of America.

USA, East Coast – Frank Duveneck (1848–1919)

USA, East Coast – William Merritt Chase (1849–1916)

USA, East Coast – Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937)

USA, East Coast – Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935)

USA, East Coast – George Bellows (1882–1925)

USA, East Coast – Charles Demuth (1883–1935)

USA, South – Julian Onderdonk (1882–1922)

USA, West Coast – Anna Althea Hills (1882-1930)

France – Georges Rochegrosse (1859–1938)

Belgium & France – Théo van Rysselberghe (1862–1926)

Belgium – Émile Claus (1849-1924)

Britain – John William Waterhouse (1849–1917)

Britain – Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919)

Poland – Jacek Malczewski (1854–1929)

Other Deaths

Sadly, several other artists died that year. Among those covered in articles on this blog are the following.

Marie Bracquemond, born on 1 December 1840, died on 17 January 1916 in Sèvres, Paris.

Léon François Comerre, born on 10 October 1850, died on 20 February 1916 in Paris.

Odilon Redon, born on 20 April 1840, died on 6 July 1916 in Paris.

Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench, born on 11 January 1849, died on 18 October 1916 in Godella.

Tina Blau, later known as Tina Blau-Lang, born on 15 November 1845, died on 31 October 1916 in Vienna.

Births

I am sure that several other famous painters were born in 1916, but one who I commend to your attention is the wonderful Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) who was born on 8 May 1916, in Llandudno, North Wales.

This is the fourth and last 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 1901 to his death in 1916, during which he taught at Summer Schools in Europe and tried to come to terms with art of the future.

By 1901, the Chase family was growing steadily, and spent their summers at Shinnecock on Long Island, while William Merritt Chase taught at the plein air Summer School there. His other teaching commitments were substantial, particularly at the New York School of Art, where he was teaching Edward Hopper among others.

In 1901, he exhibited a self-portrait at the Venice Biennale.

Chase taught his last Shinnecock Summer School in 1902. In subsequent years, he spent the summer teaching in Europe: in 1903, this was mainly in Haarlem, The Netherlands, but he also visited London, Paris, Kassel, Munich, Dresden, and Berlin.

In 1902, he invited Robert Henri to join him teaching at the New York School of Art; Henri accepted.

Chase’s still lifes had become an integral part of his teaching performance. He was known for bringing fresh fish for painting, completing his demonstration work within a couple of hours, and returning the fish, still fresh for sale, at the end.

In the summer of 1904, he taught in London and the Netherlands, then in the following year he toured together with his wife in England, France, and Spain.

In 1905, following the death of John Henry Twachtman in 1902, the Ten American Painters elected Chase as his replacement. He also became more active in Philadelphia, lecturing on Whistler at the Academy there, and later opening a studio in the city.

In 1906, Chase travelled to London to visit John Singer Sargent and Edwin Austin Abbey, and to Leiden, where he attended celebrations in honour of Rembrandt.

The summer of 1907 saw Chase teaching in Florence, for the first of what became five successive Summer Schools there. Prior to that, he visited London, Paris, and Venice.

However, following his return to New York in the autumn/fall, he was unable to resolve a dispute with Robert Henri over Henri’s philosophy of “art for life’s sake”; as a result, he resigned from the New York School of Art, and started teaching at the Art Students League, where one of his students was Georgia O’Keeffe.

Along with John Singer Sargent, he was invited by the Uffizi in Florence to contribute his self-portrait to their collection.

In 1908, he opened his first studio in New York since 1895, in the Tiffany Building at 333 Fourth Avenue, which remained his primary studio for the rest of his life. He was made a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters.

After visits to London and Paris, Chase spent the summer of 1910 teaching again in Florence, where he bought the Villa Silli, to act as his local base during these Summer Schools. Back in New York, the National Arts Club there held a retrospective exhibition of 142 of his works, and he won the grand prize at the International Exposition in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The summer of 1911 was his last spent teaching in Florence, and he also retired from teaching at the Art Students League in New York.

He visited Europe again in the summer of 1912, where he took his wife and son Dana on tour with him. He taught in Bruges, Belgium, then returned via England. That autumn/fall, he was awarded the Proctor Portrait Prize of the National Academy of Design, and co-founded the National Association of Portrait Painters.

The Armory Show in New York was a major event in 1913, but his works were excluded. He apparently visited the show no less than six times, but was unable to convince himself that there was any future in abstract art.

That summer he took his wife and daughter Dorothy to tour Europe, then travelled on alone to Naples, Rome, Siena, Florence, and to teach his last overseas Summer School in Venice.

Although he visited London in the spring of 1914, he spent the summer teaching and painting in California. There he set up his studio in Monterey, spending time in Carmel-by-the-Sea and living in the Hotel Del Monte. Although these were his largest classes ever, and he had several important meetings, his health was starting to fail because of liver disease. Despite that he still found time to experiment with monotypes.

An entire gallery of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco was devoted to his works.

In 1916, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of law by New York University. However, he became progressively more unwell, and died on 25 October in the family home on Stuyvesant Square, at the age of sixty-six.

References

Wikipedia
William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 1, to 1883
William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 2 1884-1890
William Merritt Chase: a life in painting, 3 1891-1900
Meet the family: William Merritt Chase at home
Family portraits by William Merritt Chase
Students of Chase: his greatest legacy
The spontaneous or methodical: Chase and Eakins at work
Prizes, performance and still life
Robert Henri and the Ashcan School

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.

In the second of my recent articles on Sir Edward Poynter, I included a painting of his titled A Visit to Aesculapius (1880), noting that it showed an unusual motif. Just how unusual?

If you look at classical sculpture, there are probably dozens of statues of Aesculapius – or Asclepius as he is also known. Considering (art) drawings and paintings, there are probably less than a dozen, including Gustav Klimt’s Medicine (1900-07), a ceiling painting in the University of Vienna which was destroyed by fire at the end of the Second World War, in 1945. (Although Klimt definitely included Aesculapius’ daughter Hygieia in that painting, it is not clear whether Aesculapius himself appeared in it.)

The earliest post-classical painting which I have found is Sebastiano Ricci’s The Dream of Aesculapius (c 1718). The unmistakable figure of Aesculapius, clutching his staff with snake in his right hand, appears in a pall of smoke, to an unknown couple in their bed. Because the other narrative references are obscure, it is hard to guess the rest of the story, although I think it’s probable that one or both of those in bed are in need of healing.

Later in that same century, and before his death in 1785, Giovanni Battista Cipriani drew Aesculapius Holding a Staff Encircled by a Snake, following the classical traditions.

Later still, Johannes Zacharias Simon Prey painted the group of Aesculapius, Apollo and Hippocrates (1791). Aesculapius, holding his distinctive staff, is shown in the centre of the trio, with Hippocrates, the rather less legendary ‘father of medicine’, to the right, clutching the basal half of a human skull, and Apollo behind.

They have entered a contemporary pharmacy, where an assistant uses a large mortar and pestle, and another works the bellows of a furnace. There are decorative – and mischievous – putti at play in the foreground.

A drawing attributed to Jacques-Charles Bordier du Bignon, Aesculapius Routing Death (1822) is a more classical fantasy. Aesculapius has two staffs, with which he is despatching the ‘grim reaper’ of Death. The woman to the right of Aesculapius has been thought to be Ceres, as she is pouring out her breast milk to feed the starving.

This is an unusual association: Aesculapius is more commonly seen with one of his daughters, Hygieia, the goddess of health and sanitation, although the woman is here not acting in that role. Again, lacking the context of the drawing makes it very hard to read.

At about the same time, Giovanni Tognolli painted The Finding of Aesculapius (1822-39), offering one version of this curious legend. Aesculapius is normally stated to be a son of Apollo (hence Prey’s association, above) and a mortal woman. His mother died either shortly before or during labour, and Aesculapius was born by Caesarean section. He was then carried by Apollo to be raised by the centaur Chiron, who raised the child and taught him the arts of medicine.

An addition to this brings the association with a snake: when he was young, Aesculapius aided a snake, who returned the favour by licking his ears clean and teaching him secret knowledge. The snake was said to be a non-venomous species, now known as the Aesculapian snake.

Tognolli prefers a different version of events, in which a man discovers the infant Aesculapius being reared by a goat. The snake is present in the immediate foreground.

I suspect that Tognolli’s painting made its way to Britain, and was seen by the unfortunate Richard Dadd, who painted his watercolour of The Infant Aesculapius Discovered by Shepherds on a Mountain (1851) while he was a patient in Bethlem Psychiatric Hospital, after murdering his father. Dadd follows Tognolli’s lead in having Aesculapius raised by a goat, but includes a couple of shepherds and omits the crucial snake.

Edward Poynter’s painting of 1880 thus appears a singular depiction of this particular motif. Below is a lithograph version which shows its details more clearly.

Three years ago, an earlier watercolour version of this painting, signed and dated to 1875, was sold by auction at Christie’s. On its backboard was a label bearing a slightly altered quotation from the Elizabethan author Thomas Watson:
In time long past, when in Diana’s chase
A bramble bush prick’d Venus in the foot,
Old Æsculapius help’d her heavy case
Before the hurt had taken any root:
Wherehence although his beard were crisping hard
She yielded him a kiss for his reward.
(from Hekatompathia number 20, 1582.)
The watercolour also had the suggested title of Venus Aesculapius, although the oil painting has always been known as A Visit to Aesculapius.

Set in his sacred grove, Poynter shows Aesculapius sitting at the left, contemplating the left foot of Venus, who is supported by the three Graces, acting as her handmaidens. The rightmost Grace, who conforms to classical style by turning her back to the viewer, reaches to a young woman, who is drawing water from the fountain at the right. She is most probably Hygieia, daughter of Aesculapius and goddess of health and sanitation (‘hygiene’), although another figure stands to the left of Aesculapius.

Poynter is also unusual in painting Aesculapius’ distinctive staff with its snake in the immediate foreground, although neither the staff nor snake appeared in his earlier watercolour version. It is possible that they were added later to the oil version, to clinch the identification of Aesculapius.

Allen Staley (The New Painting of the 1860s) dismisses this painting as being “slightly absurd” and an example of “soft-core pornography made acceptable by mythical or classical titles”. He ignores the fact that Poynter and many of the critics of the day considered this to be his finest work, making comparison with Titian and Raphael.

In addition to Staley’s reading of the painting as an excuse for four nudes, there are at least two other readings. The most basic is the narrative offered by Watson as source: Venus was out with one of Diana’s hunts, when Venus’ foot was wounded by a thorn from a bramble bush. Venus then visited Aesculapius, with the Graces in attendance, for him to remove the thorn from her foot, in return for which she rewarded him with a kiss.

The remaining reading relies on this perhaps unique conjunction of love (the kiss of Venus) with disease (Aesculapius) – and the thoroughly Victorian concern with the diseases of Venus, or venereal disease. Either way, I think it is a mistake to dismiss this as a feeble excuse for four nudes. It is one of Poynter’s most important paintings, and merits further study.

Reference

Wikipedia on Asclepius/Aesculapius.

William Merrit Chase was an American Modern Master: an accomplished and prolific portraitist, painter of glorious Impressionist landscapes, and a dedicated teacher whose influence extends into the current century.

When offered the opportunity to study in Europe, he reportedly responded: My God, I’d rather go to Europe than go to Heaven.
On his approach to the Old Masters, he is claimed to have uttered the maxim: We are all going to heaven and Van Dyck is of the company.

From the obituary published in the New York Times shortly after his death:
Things that would have been lost he saved for us — unconscious momentary attitudes of children, swift changes of color under angles of light that became different angles in the twinkling of an eye, the rhythms of draperies swung by flickering gust of wind…. The death of William Merritt Chase removes from the ranks of American artists one whose contributions probably will receive a richer measure of applause in the next century.

Biography and work

1, to 1883
2 1884-1890
3 1891-1900

4 1901-1916

A snapshot of 1916 in paintings and painters

Special topics

William Merritt Chase paints history, for a brief moment – student years in Munich

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
City Life: 2 Henri, Cooper, and Bellows

Shinnecock summer: Chase in the country

Meet the family: Chase at home

Family portraits

The spontaneous or methodical: Chase and Eakins at work

Prizes, performance and still life

His colleagues and friends

Carroll Beckwith, the under-age model, and the jealous husband
Robert Henri and the Ashcan School
Frank Duveneck, silent companion

His students

Students of Chase: his greatest legacy – an overview of 20 former students
Louise Upton Brumback (1867-1929)
George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925), up to 1914
George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925), after 1914
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), 1 experiments to 1921
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), 2 mature landscapes
Emma Lampert Cooper (1855-1920), the invisible wife
Edward Charles Volkert (1871-1935), the pastural painter
Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer (1873-1943) and Dora Wheeler Keith (1857-1940)
Charles Demuth (1883–1935), Precisionism, and flowers
Julian Onderdonk – bluebonnets and pseudonyms

Further reading, exhibitions

Books and exhibitions to celebrate his centenary
Wikipedia

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.

The four artists whose reputations bore the brunt of the early twentieth-century rush through Post-Impressionism to Modernism were John Singer Sargent, Frederick, Lord Leighton, Sir Edward Poynter, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The high priest of that modernisation, Roger Fry, reserved his most damning and personal attacks for Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) – particularly in his savage article published in The Nation in January 1913, following Alma-Tadema’s death.

If there is one thing that should make an artist worth looking at, it must be a personal attack by Roger Fry. So this and the following article will do just that, and I will try to understand what changes took place in Alma-Tadema’s paintings.

Born as Lourens Alma Tadema in Dronrijp, in the north of the Netherlands, he was left to draw and paint following crises in his physical and mental health when he was only 15. By the following year, his skills were sufficient for him to enter the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, where he spent four years. During the later years of that training he worked as a studio assistant to one of the professors at the academy, and became fascinated by Merovingian history.

Maria Magdalena (1854) is one of his earliest surviving works, from his student days. The upper half of a painting of a half-length figure of Mary Magdalene, it shows his rapid progress in oils. The other sheet forming the lower half of the painting has also survived, but is somewhat the worse for wear.

The Blind Beggar (1856) is another student painting, this time of a contemporary genre scene with a strong social message. A young woman leans out of her window to drop coins into the hat of a poor young man, who is begging on behalf of an elderly and blind person in an improvised cart. Its composition is simple but effective, and it tells its brief story well. Already Alma-Tadema is showing his eye for painting every little detail, such as the bolt on the window shutter, and the tatty clothing of the young man.

Clotilde at the Tomb of her Grandchildren (1858) is one of his first Merovingian history paintings, which was exhibited in Antwerp at the Salon in 1858, priced at 400 francs. It was painted in his professor’s studio, and shows a scene worthy of Évariste Luminais after the Franco-Prussian War.

Saint Clotilde (c 475-545) was the second wife of King Clovis I, and princess of Burgundy. Frankish rulers of the day were apt to murder and be murdered: after a lifetime of such violence, her eldest son Chlodomer was killed in the Battle of Vézeronce. Although she tried to protect the rights of her three grandsons by Chlodomer, from her son Chlothar, the latter had two of them killed, and the third escaped into a monastery.

Alma-Tadema shows a most unusual situation for a grandmother, of mourning her two grandchildren who had been killed by their uncle, her son. Following this, Clotilde devoted herself to saintly works.

In 1858-9 he moved to work for Baron Jan August Hendrik Leys, who also acted as his mentor. Leys was an avid painter of mediaeval scenes, who was also a major influence on the early work of James Tissot.

Over this period when much of his work centred on Merovingian history, Alma-Tadema painted modern history in his Crossing of the River Berizina: 1812 (c 1859-69), which shows the Battle of Berezina of 26-29 November, 1812. This was one of the catastrophes to befall Napoleon’s army after its failed invasion of Russia, during its long and agonising retreat through the frozen wastes of eastern Europe. The site is near Barysaw (Borisov) in modern Belarus, where Napoleon’s army had to cross this tributary to the River Dnieper, on its retreat towards Poland.

Alma-Tadema shows sappers working in freezing water to build improvised bridges across the river, which they had expected to be frozen. The two bridges which they completed allowed most of the army to cross, although the French lost around 20,000 personnel out of a total of over 80,000 (including stragglers and supporters), in this single action. The word Bérézina entered the French language as a synonym for a disaster.

The Education of the Children of Clovis (also known as The School of Vengeance, or The Training of Clotilde’s Sons) (1861) returns to tales from Merovingian history, showing Saint Clotilde watching her young sons being taught the royal art of axe-throwing. It is no wonder that later one of them was to murder two of her grandchildren.

In 1862, Alma-Tadema set up his own studio, and the following year he married, honeymooning in Florence, Rome, Naples, and in the excavated ruins of Pompeii, nearby. Following the death of his wife from smallpox in 1869, his own health faltered, and he went to London for further medical opinion. There he befriended Ford Madox Brown, and met the young woman who was to be his second wife.

With the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Alma-Tadema fled again to London, where he settled in the September, marrying his second wife the following year. He quickly became friends with the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and his palette brightened. He enjoyed rapid commercial success, and in 1873 Queen Victoria made him an official ‘Denizen’, which gave him most of the rights of citizenship.

Sunday Morning (c 1871) shows the interior of a house in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The mistress of the house has just had a baby, and her midwife is holding that baby as she looks out into the daylight. This is a smaller version of a previous painting by Alma-Tadema titled A Birth Chamber, Seventeenth Century (1868), which extended the view to include the mother in bed.

Both paintings show influence from the genre scenes of Pieter de Hooch, Nicholaes Maes, and Gerrit Dou, in the seventeenth century, probably transmitted to Alma-Tadema by Joseph Dyckmans (1811-88).

The Vintage Festival (1871) is one of two very similar versions of the same scene, painted using the much brighter and lighter palette which he developed as he settled in England. It marks the start of his mature style, using classical Greek and Roman themes, which he depicts in intricate detail. These details were researched extensively, sometimes taking as long as two years for a single painting. Following early criticism of his initial attempts to depict the surface properties of marble, Alma-Tadema devoted a great deal of effort to painting marble better than any previous artist, so becoming the master of marble.

The meticulous detail in his paintings often gives the impression that these are large canvases and panels, although many are quite small. He was obsessive with what he saw as accuracy, and repeatedly repainted passages until he felt they were perfect.

This painting shows Alma-Tadema’s vision of a Bacchanal being celebrated by musical Bacchantes in a private villa. Its tame nature may surprise those accustomed to thinking of such festivals as rampage, but gives scope for fine details such as the leather straps on the faces of those playing wind instruments. It also has a strong sense of Aestheticism, with its evocation of sound and music, as well as the heady aromas from burning incense.

Alma-Tadema was also a skilled painter of portraits; his most touching, though, must be This is Our Corner (1873), a double portrait of his daughters (from his first marriage) Anna Alma Tadema (1864-1940) in front, and Laurense Alma Tadema (1865-1940) behind. They both remained unmarried through adult life: Anna became an accomplished artist (I will write an article about her soon), and Laurense or Laurence a prolific novelist and poet.

References

Wikipedia

Barrow RJ (2001) Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 4358 2.

In the previous article, I looked at a selection of paintings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) up to 1873, by which time he had settled in England and established himself as a successful painter, and was becoming well-known for his exquisitely detailed and thoroughly-researched paintings of classical Greece and Rome.

Sunny Days (1874) may come as a surprise to those who know Alma-Tadema for his Salon-style works, but during the 1870s he started painting small landscapes, typically of his family when they were on holiday. This shows his daughter Anna in what could be seen as the closest that he came to Impressionism, and was perhaps modelled after one of Monet’s paintings of the time. On this occasion, the landscape is only in Surrey, but he also painted these when in mainland Europe.

They were not intended for sale, although this was exhibited in the Dudley Gallery, then given as a present to the young painter John Collier. Several have come onto the market in recent years, and may bring revisions in accounts of his work.

Alma-Tadema was made a full member of the Royal Academy in 1879, and travelled repeatedly to Italy and other parts of continental Europe to research subjects for his paintings.

Sappho (and Alcaeus) (1881) is one of his finest and best-known classical paintings, and shows this famous Greek poet. Although now associated popularly with lesbian love, in fact very little is known about her life, and only fragments remain of her poetry. She was probably born around 630 BCE, may have fallen in love with Alcaeus, a contemporary poet, and according to legend killed herself by jumping off the Leucadian Cliffs because of her love for a ferryman. Given the shortage of evidence, there is ample room for speculation and fantasy.

Alma-Tadema shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She is supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her (female) lovers. Alma-Tadema also invokes two additional arts, poetry and music, in a setting which is only very lightly narrative, and thus appears to conform to the aims of the Aesthetic movement.

A Reading from Homer (1885) was painted by Alma-Tadema for the music room of banker Henry Marquand’s mansion in New York, a project on which Alma-Tadema worked with Frederic, Lord Leighton, between 1884 and 1887. Homer sits at the right, under the truncated Greek letters of his name, apparently reading from a scroll. His audience consists of four young people in an odd medley of dress. The couple just left of centre, who are holding hands and have a bunch of red roses to reinforce their affection, also hold musical instruments: a lyre and tambourine.

Although these instruments might be very appropriate for a music room, once again Alma-Tadema has referenced two other arts, literature and music, and supplied very thin narrative.

A Foregone Conclusion (1885) was commissioned as a wedding gift to the second wife of Sir Henry Tate (founder of the London gallery), Amy Hislop, by Tate himself. It is one a series painted by Alma-Tadema on the theme of courtship and marriage: this shows a suitor (left) bringing an engagement ring to his girlfriend ready for his proposal of marriage to her. She hides behind a marble wall with her attendant, their attitude suggesting that his proposal will be successful.

A Priestess of Apollo (c 1888) shows one of the priestesses devoted to the god of the sun, who rode the chariot of the sun across the sky each day. Alma-Tadema signed this painting in the inscription under the arch, dedicating it to Sir Charles Hallé (1819-1895), the famous conductor who founded the Hallé Orchestra in 1858, and his second wife, the widowed violinist Wilma Neruda; they married in 1888, and this appears to have been another wedding gift.

A Silent Greeting (1889) was a further commission by Sir Henry Tate, as a companion to A Foregone Conclusion (1885). Its story is even simpler: a young woman has fallen asleep, exhausted, a bouquet of red roses on her lap. Her right hand holds a needle, with which she had presumably been sewing the garment on which the roses rest. Her partner gestures silently towards her – perhaps having just put the roses on her lap – as he steps outdoors.

Spring (1894) is one of Alma-Tadema’s largest and most complex paintings, which took him four years to complete. It shows the spring celebrations in honour of the goddess Flora, the April Florialia.

Hidden in its extravaganza of flowers, marble, pretty girls and young women, are some rather ruder references. The banner at the back of the procession, hung from a balcony, contains verse addressed to Priapus, the god of fertility. This was amplified by attached lines from the contemporary poet Swinburne, which continued by referring to the budding of sexual love in the spring, although those lines remained unquoted here. Finer details on some of the instruments and other objects in the painting show couples frolicking in a state of undress, and there are herms concealed in other parts. The painting was purchased by Robert Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.

In 1899, Alma-Tadema was knighted, and in 1900 was awarded the Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition Universelle.

A Favourite Custom (1909) is perhaps Alma-Tadema’s lushest marble spectacular, with its ingenious immersive trick for rendering its two nudes more acceptable. The artist based this on the Stabian baths he had seen and photographed in the ruins of Pompeii, dressing them with extensive marble to make them far more imperial and luxurious than they actually were.

In the distance, the main entrance opens out onto the street, through which there is a steady stream of women coming to bathe. The two bathers in the foreground are standing immersed in the frigidarium, a cold bath, in which they playfully splash one another.

When first exhibited, this small painting was very well received, and was immediately purchased for the National Gallery of British Art, now known as Tate Britain.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema died in 1912, and was buried in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London.

During his career, his paintings (complete with lucrative reproduction rights for prints) fetched as much as £10,000. By the 1920s, they were only worth a few hundred pounds at best, and some could not be sold at all, even as late at 1960. By 1995, his better paintings were selling for more than £1 million, and in 2010 one of his paintings set a record price of $35 million in New York.

Such are the vagaries of taste.

Did the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, like those of Frederic, Lord Leighton, pass from historical narratives to the Aesthetic movement? I don’t think that this is as clear cut, but many of his paintings made after he settled in Britain in 1870 show most of the hallmarks of Aestheticism. He certainly moved in artistic circles which had strong Aesthetic influences, and met and collaborated with Frederic, Lord Leighton, and others now considered to have ‘joined’ the Aesthetic movement.

Yet Barrow’s superbly-researched and -illustrated monograph on Alma-Tadema’s life and work does not even mention the term.

References

Wikipedia

Barrow RJ (2001) Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 4358 2.

Some artists are known for just one or two of their works which happen to have been added to public collections. Anna Massey Lea Merritt (1844–1930) is a good example of a prolific woman painter who is known for a single painting, in the Tate in London, most of whose other paintings seem to have vanished without trace.

Born and brought up in Philadelphia, opportunities for women to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were still severely limited at the time, so she appears to have been largely self-taught. She took anatomy classes at the recently-founded Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. When she was just twenty, she moved with her family to Europe, and by 1870 they were living in London. There she met Henry Merritt (1822-1877), a minor painter, restorer, and writer on art, who acted as her mentor.

In 1877, she married Henry Merritt, but he died only three months later. She therefore had no choice but to continue painting professionally, in order to make a living.

Portrait of a Young Lady (1881) is one of her earliest surviving paintings, and one of her most exciting. Its brushwork is so painterly as to suggest that it might have been a sketch, but the flesh is well finished, and it is both signed and dated.

Eve (also known as Eve Overcome with Remorse) (1885) is probably more representative of her exhibited works, and a striking depiction of Eve, her head resting on her knees and turned away, a partly-eaten apple resting on the ground beside her outstretched legs. This won a medal when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885, but attracted censure because of her use of a nude model.

Merritt had a long and successful career painting portraits, such as this delightful Portrait Of Miss Ethel D’Arcy Aged 6 (1888), surrounded by pigeons feeding from a spilt basket of grain. Several of her adult portraits are now in the regional galleries of the UK.

She also appears to have been an active print-maker, with her unusual version of Ophelia (1889) one of her etchings. This was most probably made from a painting which has since been lost.

Love Locked Out (1890) is the painting which brought her greatest fame. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890, it was so well received that it was purchased for the British national collection, which soon became the National Gallery of British Art, then the Tate Gallery, where it has remained ever since. It was the first painting by a woman artist to be acquired for the collection through the funding of the Chantrey Bequest.

Merritt intended this as a memorial to her husband, and hoped one day that she would be able to afford to have its figure cast in bronze as a monument to him. In her later autobiography, she explained that her Love was waiting for the door of death to open and reunite the couple. However, it was more generally interpreted as a symbol of forbidden love. Another reading is that the figure represents Cupid, god of love, who is trying to open the door of a mausoleum, and for love to conquer death.

Its popularity – and escape from the censure of her earlier Eve – casts interesting light on Victorian attitudes to nudity and sexuality. That she as a woman artist had painted a male nude was dangerous ground. However this work did not generate any protest over decency, because the nude is a child, who was assumed to be less conscious of nudity and its connotations, and had ‘no sense of shame before artists’.

Today, such a painting of a nude child would raise the spectre of paedophilia, but an explicit painting of an adult – male or female – would be much more acceptable, even commonplace.

Piping Shepherd (1896) is another much more loosely-painted work, based on the (then) morally safer figure of a nude boy. He plays his Pan pipes while out watching his flock of sheep.

We are badly in need of more images and information about the life and work of Anna Lea Merritt – an all-too-common problem of the woman artist.

Reference

Wikipedia.

When writing about Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, I mentioned that one of his daughters also became a professional artist, and promised to give an account of her life and work. Here it is.

Anna Alma-Tadema (1867–1943) was the younger of the two daughters of Sir Lawrence, by his first wife. She was born in Brussels, Belgium, and moved with the family to London at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, just a year after her mother’s death. She seems to have been schooled at home, and was probably taught to paint by her father and step-mother (who was also an accomplished artist, and will be covered in a future article too).

Anna was a precocious and brilliant painter in watercolours, and her earliest surviving works, made when she was only seventeen or eighteen, document the interior of the family home near Regent’s Park, London. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Library in Townshend House, London (1884) is a meticulously-detailed account of that room, even down to the details of its stained glass.

Her small watercolour of The Drawing Room, Townshend House (1885), painted the following year, shows her improved skills at depicting surface light and texture. This painting was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, a remarkable achievement for someone who was only eighteen at the time that it was painted.

The following year, she painted this view of the exterior of Eton College Chapel (c 1886), again in watercolour, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy that summer.

This Self-portrait was one of her early oil paintings, and probably dates from around 1887, or perhaps slightly later. Its rather puzzling background is another part of the family home, by then in Saint John’s Wood, to which they moved in 1886. It is believed that this too was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893.

She appears to have painted more in oils towards the end of the nineteenth century, and to have undergone a dramatic change in genre and style.

The Idler’s Harvest (1900), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1900 (although some sources claim it was 1898), is radically different from her previous work. A landscape painting in oils, it adopts a more Impressionist approach, showing a valley and distant hills, but retaining her fine detail in the weeds in the foreground.

Girl in a Bonnet with her Head on a Blue Pillow (1902) is a touching watercolour which explores the sadness of a woman’s face and hands, as she rests her head on a blue cushion.

That is the latest painting of hers which I have been able to locate, although it is known that she continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy until 1928. Following the death of her father in 1912, the value of his paintings collapsed, plunging both daughters into poverty. Neither ever married, but Anna continued to make a frugal livelihood from her paintings, which all seem to have vanished.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Plenty of artists have found themselves at the wrong end of a partner’s fury, but once in a while, a painter manages to get the better of the situation. This is the story of two paintings of Anne Françoise Élisabeth Lange (1772-1816), a beautiful actress and model for the French painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824), whose name I will abbreviate to Girodet, as is traditional.

Girodet was very talented, had trained in Jacques-Louis David’s studio, and won the coveted Prix de Rome (for history painting) when he was only twenty-two. From 1789 to 1793, he painted in Italy, and produced a series of highly successful paintings which had been praised when shown at the Salons in Paris.

He returned to Paris just as the Reign of Terror was getting underway, during the French Revolution. However, his relationship with David – a key figure in the Revolution who was adept at protecting himself against all the odds – and his popular following, ensured his safety. When the rule of the Directory (Directoire) was established in 1795, Girodet continued to flourish.

Mademoiselle Lange, as she was known to the public, made her official debut as an actress at the Comédie-Française in 1788, and by 1793 had risen to take the title role in the popular Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, by Nicolas-Louis François de Neufchâteau. Unfortunately that play fell foul of the revolutionaries, and the Committee of Public Safety shut it down and arrested the actors and author.

Mlle Lange had a tense few months afterwards, spending some time in prison, but friends in high places kept her well away from the guillotine, and she was eventually released to return to work at the Théâtre Feydeau. With coming to power of the Directory, she started an affair with the supplier to the French army, who kept her in style in one of his houses. She was also the mistress of a banker, by whom she had a daughter. There were rumours of an affair with Paul Barras, a Director of the Directory, but those may not have been true.

In 1798, Girodet painted Mlle Lange’s portrait as Venus, but his model decided afterwards that his painting was unflattering. She refused to pay the artist, and demanded that the painting should be removed from view at the Salon where it was being exhibited in 1799.

It is hard to understand her case. Perhaps Girodet had been a little too obviously ingenious in not showing her face in the mirror being held by the putto, but the rest of the portrait is surely as flattering as possible, and free of any critical elements.

Girodet’s revenge was swift and sweet. In a matter of a few days, he had painted a second portrait which, the story says, was hung in the Salon in place of the original. It shows Mlle Lange as a money-grabbing prostitute, unable to see her own faults.

Mlle Lange’s new role as Danaë was perhaps not as biting as it might have been. Danaë was the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and Queen Eurydice, whose father wanted a male heir. To keep Danaë childless, he locked her up in an underground chamber. But Zeus wanted her, so he impregnated her in the form of golden rain which fell from the roof of her cell. The resulting son was Perseus.

As a motif in painting, Danaë had come to be represented as a reclining, beautiful, nude woman, on whom a stream of golden coins was falling, and it was that stream which Girodet wanted to exploit. It could have only one reading in this context: that Mlle Lange sold her body in return for money. And Girodet was happy to go into even fuller details too.

At the lower left of the tondo is a turkey, representing Michel-Jean Simons, her final lover by whom she had a son in 1797, and who married her – hence the ring on the turkey’s foot. A scroll by that is apparently the script for the play Asinaria, by the Roman Titus Maccius Plautus, whose title means the one with the asses. It is a comedy about mistresses, lovers, and money.

At the lower right is the severed head of one of Mlle Lange’s previous lovers, and a white dove, wounded on one wing by one of the falling coins, and being strangled by a gold collar bearing the word Fidelitas, meaning fidelity.

In its upper reaches, there is a spider in its web, catching some of the coins. Mlle Lange herself wears peacock feathers, symbolic of vanity. But most barbed of all, she holds up a mirror which is cracked, and in which there is no reflection at all. With her gaze concentrated on the falling coins, she has no interest in looking at what she has become.

Mlle Lange, now Madame Simons, lived in his Château de Bossey in Switzerland, her stage career over. Her husband died a decade later, a ruined man, and she died in solitary obscurity six years afterwards.

Girodet went on to paint some of the most famous portraits of Napoleon and his family, and to teach many pupils, including Alexandre-Marie Colin and Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, who were to be influential in painting in the nineteenth century. I don’t think that anyone tried to mess with Girodet again.

If you have enjoyed Lawrence Alma-Tadema‘s paintings, you will be delighted to know that there is currently an exhibition of them touring in Europe. It started on 1 October 2016 in the Fries Museum in the Netherlands, and is a wonderful excuse to go and enjoy some real Dutch hospitality, and some superb art.

Alma-Tadema: Classical Charm is an extensive survey of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings, and a unique opportunity to see so many together. It is open now at Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, until 7 February 2017. It then moves to the Belvedere in Vienna, Austria, where it runs from 23 February to 18 June 2017. It finally moves to Leighton House Museum in London (Frederick, Lord Leighton’s house and collection), where it runs from 7 July to 29 October 2017.

I have added these details to my two articles about the artist.

Many thanks to @MaryLouFischer for kindly drawing my attention to this.

Coming from a medical family, it was only appropriate that the three daughters of Dr George Napoleon Epps should have learned to paint – a social skill which would have helped each secure a good marriage.

The oldest, Emily (c 1842-1912) was taught by the leading Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter John Brett, and married to become Mrs Emily Williams. The middle daughter, Ellen (1850-1929) was taught by Ford Madox Brown, and married the poet Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849-1928). After their husbands died, Emily and Ellen shared a studio, but neither really achieved fame in their painting. It was the youngest daughter, born Laura Theresa Epps, who was to become the best-known, as Lady Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema (1852–1909).

The year 1869 had been a disaster for the Alma-Tadema family. Although Lawrence’s career as a painter had been starting to flourish, his wife Pauline had not been well for a long time, and died of smallpox. His own health had faltered, but his doctors in Brussels could not agree on a diagnosis. This left him with one option: to go to London to get a second opinion.

This he did in December 1869, and was quickly invited to Ford Madox Brown’s house, where he met the two younger Epps girls, then aged nineteen and seventeen. Lawrence fell in love with Laura, the younger, at first sight, although he was nearly thirty-four himself. He returned to his family in Brussels, still infatuated with young Laura. Then in July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and the whole Alma-Tadema family – Lawrence, his two young daughters, and his sister Atje, who acted as housekeeper – fled to London.

This gave Lawrence the ideal opportunity to court Laura Theresa Epps. He first offered to teach her to paint, and then made his proposal of marriage. Her father was unhappy, but relented on condition that they got to know each other better; the couple married in July 1871, and at the age of only nineteen Laura found herself an artist’s wife, step-mother to Laurense and Anna (then seven and four years old), and trying to start her own career as a painter.

As did Lawrence, Laura numbered each of her paintings in sequence as ‘Opus’ with Roman numerals, a robust way of preventing copies and fakes, but of little help in dating her works. In some cases, I think that the dates attributed to her paintings have been mistakenly taken from those numbers, and have tried to arrange the paintings below in order according to the opus number as well as attributed date.

Despite her new and demanding roles, Laura was quick to achieve recognition in her painting. Her first work to be exhibited at the Salon in Paris was in 1873, and that same year she started to exhibit at the Royal Academy in London. I do not know if her early painting The Tea Party (date not known, Opus 7) was one of those. It shows, I believe, Laura’s step-daughter Laurense, playing with her dolls.

Laura developed a particular interest in recreating scenes from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, perhaps out of respect for her husband’s and step-daughters’ origins, as much as for her fascination in Dutch paintings of the period. The Bible Lesson (date not known, Opus 58) is one of her earlier examples, which also shows her love for Dutch painted tiles of that time.

Just as Lawrence researched his classical paintings to achieve great accuracy and authenticity, so Laura did the same for her historical paintings, such as A Carol (date not known, Opus 61), which shows a group of children singing carols outside the entrance to a dwelling.

World of Dreams (1876, Opus 76) introduces another theme which was to be developed in Laura’s mature works: the reflection and transmission of images in mirrors and windows, which adds great depth to what would otherwise be a shallow view. Here a nurse/nanny (or possibly mother) has fallen asleep, exhausted, on a large illustrated family Bible, which is open at the start of the book of Amos.

She was one of only two British women artists to have work accepted for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878.

Almost all her paintings are set indoors. The sole exception that I have found is With a Babe in the Woods (c 1879-80), which explores the popular Victorian (and more enduring) theme of the young, homeless unmarried mother. Its foliage and trunks are painted much more loosely than the backgrounds in her other works, in a Barbizon style.

A Looking out o’Window, Sunshine (?1881, Opus 81) is by far the most outstanding of her paintings that I have found, with its captivating portrayal of childhood, radiant lightness, and its play of reflections on the glass of the window. It is also composed so as to reverse the normal balance in brightness between indoors and out: in reality, of course, outdoor light levels would have been much greater than those indoors, but the artist has managed to ‘cheat’ that by her choice of light colours in the interior wood, clothing, and chair.

The Persistent Reader (date not known, Opus 88) is a more overtly Dutch historical scene, of a young couple: the woman appears bored as she waits for the man to finish poring through books before they can go out together. Just as Lawrence made great play of the period detail in his classical scenes, Laura not only accomplishes the same in every last fixture and fitting, but adds reality in the rather wonky chandelier, for example.

The Pledge (?1904, Opus 89) is another Dutch period scene which may have been intended as a ‘problem picture’. A young man and woman are clearly making some sort of pledge to one another over glasses of white wine. But who is the second man, at the right? Is this a matter of the heart, or perhaps something more sinister? ‘Problem pictures‘ had become very popular by the 1890s when this was most probably painted.

A Knock at the Door (1897, Opus 90) is Laura’s most explicit painting in terms of dates. It is set in 1684, during the period of peace between the Second Treaty of Westminster (1674) and Treaty of Nijmegen (1678), and the crisis in relations with England which arose in 1688. She has also not only provided an Opus number (90), but a date for this painting of 1897.

We see an attractive young woman, apparently checking that she is looking at her best in a mirror, presumably just before she receives a visitor. On either side there are brief glimpses of open windows.

Love’s Beginning (1896, Opus 100) shows a familiar scene of a young couple whose relationship is just starting, with another reflection on the open window.

At the Doorway (1898) is an unusually static scene, in which there is odd ambivalence in the image seen behind the standing woman: it appears to be the reflection on dark, glazed tiles of the garden outside, rather than any image formed by the tiles themselves.

Battledore and Shuttlecock (date not known) shows the predecessor to modern badminton, which was often played by young women in full dresses, indoors, as seen here. Laura also plays with her family monograms in the tiles on the floor.

Girl on Stairs (date not known) appears to be a simple sketch of one of the children in the household.

In Good Hands (date not known) is another period domestic scene, of one of the older daughters keeping watch over a younger brother as he sleeps beside his windmill toy, in a four-poster bed. The girl rests her feet on a foot warmer as she sews to pass the time.

Although her Love’s Curse (date not known) has cracked badly, and this is not a good image, it shows a woman recluse in an apparently similar situation to that of Tennyson’s Mariana.

Laura died – three years before Lawrence – in 1909, and the following year a memorial exhibition of her paintings was held at the Fine Art Society. Although the great majority of her works remain in private collections, a few have entered public collections and thus remain accessible.

I am fascinated by these few paintings out of her total output of well over a hundred, and wish that I could learn more about them.

Exhibition

Alma-Tadema: Classical Charm is an extensive survey of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings, and a unique opportunity to see so many together. It is open now at Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, until 7 February 2017. It then moves to the Belvedere in Vienna, Austria, where it runs from 23 February to 18 June 2017. It finally moves to Leighton House Museum in London (Frederick, Lord Leighton’s house and collection), where it runs from 7 July to 29 October 2017.

Reference

Wikipedia.

In 1843, the following advice was published, anonymously, to aspiring painters:
[They] should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.

What could perhaps have been a manifesto for Impressionism, or the plein air painter’s principles, turns out to have been written by John Ruskin, at the end of his first volume of his book Modern Painters. It ignited the flame of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose landscape paintings had been largely forgotten until recently. This is the first in a series of articles in which I will consider mid- and late-nineteenth century realist landscape painting, from the Pre-Raphaelites on – what and why it was, and what it achieved.

Ruskin assessed the response to that advice in his pamphlet Pre-Raphaelitism, published in 1851. He summarised thus:
Advice, which, whether bad or good, involved infinite labour and humiliation in the following it, and was therefore, for the most part, rejected.
It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the directly false statements which have been made respecting their works; and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute.

Although by 1851, when Ruskin wrote his pamphlet, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) and its followers had produced and exhibited some key works, few (if any, at that stage) were pure landscape paintings. Many of their narrative and other works had landscape backgrounds, but it is always difficult to assess a background when it is subjugate to the figures and the story that they tell.

James Collinson, one of the less well-known members of the PRB, had painted his Mother and Child by a Stile, with Culver Cliff, Isle of Wight, in the Distance in about 1850, and with him was probably Richard Burchett (not a member of the PRB), who painted his View Across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight (below) from nearby, almost certainly during the same visit.

Of the two, it is Burchett’s painting which comes closer to what evolved into the pure Pre-Raphaelite landscape, with its fine detail and high chroma.

After them, the next candidates are both coastal landscapes featuring sheep: Ford Madox Brown‘s Pretty Baa-Lambs, which was first painted in 1851 and modified in 1859, and William Holman Hunt‘s Our English Coasts, 1852 (popular known as Strayed Sheep) of 1852. Holman Hunt was a member of the PRB, but Ford Madox Brown was not.

Despite its insipid title, and the dominance of the mother carrying her infant, Pretty Baa-Lambs contains a wealth of very precise detail, and uses bright, high chroma colours.

Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts, 1852 is pure landscape, with exceptional attention to detail. Authors are keen to point out that he even depicted the backlit blood vessels in the nearest sheep’s ears, and that level of meticulous detail extends throughout the canvas. Again, it is rich in high chroma colour.

These contrast with the plein air sketches which had become popular among painters visiting the Roman campagna during the previous century, and were very different from JMW Turner’s landscapes of that late period. Given that much of Ruskin’s first volume of Modern Painters was aesthetic support for Turner’s work, it is interesting (and perhaps puzzling) that the Pre-Raphaelite response was so different. It was, however, entirely consistent with the more general principles of Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Here lies the first of the problems with Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting: it bears no resemblance to the few landscapes which were painted before Raphael ‘changed the direction of art’ (as was the basis for the PRB), nor does it have any common ideals. Here for instance is Masaccio’s brilliant landscape background to The Tribute Money fresco in the Brancacci Chapel, from 1425-28.

Among the first real landscape paintings was Giorgione’s The Tempest, from eighty years later.

So what emerged as Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting was not derived from the little landscape painting practised before Raphael, nor from its contemporaries such as JMW Turner (despite Ruskin’s extensive praise of Turner’s landscapes), nor even from the hundreds of pages of different truths and principles laid down by Ruskin. It was a meticulously detailed realism attempting to depict what was actually present in nature, usually using high chroma.

The next article will consider how true it was to nature.

References

Barringer T (2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Payne C (2010) John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16575 3.
Prettejohn E (2000) The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 854 37726 5.
Staley A (2001) The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08408 5.

The first article looked at the emergence of the earliest pure landscape paintings among the Pre-Raphaelites, what their characteristics are, and how those arose. Central to the Pre-Raphaelite movement was the quest for ‘truth’, an issue which the critic John Ruskin considered in exhaustive detail in his first volume of Modern Painters, published in 1843.

He was not by any means the first to have addressed this issue, and much of the reaction expressed in Pre-Raphaelitism was in response to the teaching of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who argued against mimesis, the meticulous and slavish copying of (e.g.) a landscape in front of the painter, specifically in matters of detail:
“the usual and most dangerous error is on the side of minuteness; and therefore I think caution most necessary where most have failed. The general idea constitutes real excellence. All smaller things, however perfect in their way, are to be sacrificed without mercy to the greater.”
(Discourse delivered to Students of the Royal Academy on 10 December 1771.)

This had recently been amplified by John Constable, in his second discourse at the Royal Institution on 2 June 1836:
“The works of the truly great men who have shone in art were not mere copies of the productions of Nature, which can never be more than servile imitations. Yet, it should be remembered that the study of Nature in her most minute details is indispensable, and can never be made in vain.”
(John Constable’s Discourses, ed. RB Beckett, Suffolk Records Society, 1970, p. 57.)

So the first and foremost quality which we should expect in a Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting is truth to Nature. Instead of the carefully composed and manicured composite landscapes of Claude and Poussin, or even the gently tweaked and re-arranged views of Reynolds and Constable, we should see in these early Pre-Raphaelite landscapes details which are true to what was actually there.

Fortuitously, although most of the landscapes which I will show in this series are now, a century and a half later, impossible to assess, there are two views whose content has changed relatively little over that time.

Burchett’s View Across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight was painted from the path which still runs to the west of Saint John’s Church (now known as Saint Blasius’), Shanklin, towards Cliff Copse, and on to the village in which I live.

Collinson’s Mother and Child by a Stile, with Culver Cliff, Isle of Wight, in the Distance was painted further up and west along that path, at the eastern end of Cliff Copse. It is written that either or both the views were made from above or beyond Shanklin Down, which is incorrect: they were both made to the north-east of that down, which towers above those locations.

For some time, I believed that there were two significant discrepancies between the paintings and the views which the artists would have seen: the distant white tower, which is the Earl of Yarborough’s Monument, appeared too far to the left in both, and in Burchett’s painting, Saint John’s Church appeared incorrect. Although I still have doubts about the church, and about the exact site from which Collinson painted his view, I have since discovered that the distant monument is placed correctly, as it was moved from there to its present location in the 1860s.

However, relative to the actual views and photographs of them, both Collinson and Burchett have exaggerated the vertical scale relative to the horizontal, a common adjustment which many landscape painters do unwittingly. I can find no evidence that either took the sorts of liberties in moving, removing, and rearranging features in the landscapes which Constable, for instance, might have done.

Truth in detail is also difficult to assess. Ford Madox Brown’s Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851/9) has some strange passages which cannot represent reality: the flying sheep are probably the most obvious, but I think that reflects his own artistic development and the general lack of understanding of animal movement at the time, more than anything else.

The problem with achieving this truth in detail – indeed, the devil in the detail – was the time and labour required.

Ford Madox Brown took five months to paint Pretty Baa-Lambs during the summer of 1851. It had to be painted almost entirely in full sunlight, with the lambs and sheep being brought each day from Clapham Common, where they grazed, to Brown’s house in Stockwell, south of London.

But that only provided part of the landscape: other sections were painted in from Clapham Common, and the background was composed from two views of the estuary of the River Thames below London, which Brown had painted in 1846 and 1849. Those additions were painted in during the autumn of 1852 and spring of 1853, and later. The figures were also reworked in the spring of 1852, and again later. The landscape that you see in Pretty Baa-Lambs is as synthetic as any of Poussin.

Brown’s next and purer landscape painting was An English Autumn Afternoon, 1852-1853 (1854), painted from his landlady’s bedroom window in Hampstead, looking over Hampstead Heath and the churches of Highgate, London’s suburbs.

This took him a month of painting in October 1852, another month the following autumn, and a further two months before he sold the painting in June 1854, although in this case the view appears relatively natural.

Even this much simpler ‘potboiler’, Carrying Corn, hardly rich in the truth of detail, proved to need more than a month of painting every evening, when the light was reasonably consistent.

It was also becoming clear that the technical difficulties of making such detailed paintings in front of the motif were altering the results in a way that made them appear unreal. Thomas Seddon’s Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany (1853) is another startling example of an early Pre-Raphaelite landscape which shares this same look.

The look is also the result of the prolonged painting time. Early plein air painters quickly learned that capturing a view so that it appeared natural required fast work for short periods – only an hour or two at most – in consistent lighting conditions over one or a very few sessions at the same time each day. To accomplish that, they sketched, and omitted detail.

By setting themselves the requirement of capturing such great detail, true to nature, the early Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters made the painting process so protracted as to lose the specific details of light, shadow, and surface effects which actually make a realist painting appear real.

In the next article I will look at how Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting evolved after the PRB dissolved in about 1853.

References

Truth in (landscape) painting – this blog, short series.

Barringer T (2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Payne C (2010) John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16575 3.
Prettejohn E (2000) The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 854 37726 5.
Staley A (2001) The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08408 5.

Note: PRB = Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the core group within the much broader movement.

In the last article, I considered how early Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings addressed the need to be true to nature, and its consequences. Although the PRB itself was short-lived, its style caught on and spread far beyond those original members. This article looks at those landscapes during the late 1850s.

Ford Madox Brown persisted in his efforts to paint pure landscapes, in spite of earlier difficulties. After his ‘potboiler’ Carrying Corn, which he sold in June 1855, he was back out painting with the harvest on 28 July that year.

It took him until late October to almost complete The Hayfield (1855-56), and even then he had to do some more work on the foreground and some other passages, which he did not finish until that Christmas. But it fetched more than three times as much as had Carrying Corn. Its foreground, though, is noticeably less detailed than in his earlier landscapes, and in parts this painting looks quite sketchy. The moonlight has not dulled its colour, and its look benefits from the unreal lighting effect.

Brown’s next major landscape painting is that of Walton-on-the-Naze (1860). He is believed to have started this when he visited this coastal village in north-east Essex, England, in late August 1859, but cannot have worked long at it en plein air before returning home. It incorporates two unusual features: ephemeral lighting effects by way of the rainbow, rising full moon, and setting sun, and inclusion of the artist and his family as its main figures.

With its flat landscape, distant detail, and complex lighting, it is a very ambitious composition for even a very experienced and adept landscape painter. Although Brown’s painting succeeds in the middle distance and beyond, his attempts at detail in the foreground are at best rather gauche, and at worst plain wrong: the foreground shadows are incorrect for the cut stooks, and absent altogether for the three figures.

The following year, Brown was a founding member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, and most of the rest of his career was devoted to design, rather than landscape painting.

There were others who were close associates of the PRB who continued to paint Pre-Raphaelite landscapes, including Thomas Seddon, whose remarkable Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany I have already shown.

During a tour of the Middle East in the summer of 1854, he painted his most famous and impressive landscape of Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel (1854–5), which remains in accord with Pre-Raphaelite principles. He camped on a hill to the south of the city on 3 June 1854, and made this view from a point just a hundred metres up the slope from his tent. Although interrupted (unsurprisingly, given the conditions) by illness, he continued to work on this painting until his departure on 19 October.

Once back in Dinan and then London, he used photographs and sketches to complete the work, which he did not exhibit until the autumn of 1855, more than a year after he had started on it.

The painting is remarkable in its detail, but is a record of physical fact which looks more like a coloured drawing than other Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings.

William Dyce had not been close to the PRB itself, but painted some landscapes which illustrate an interesting progression.

When he was on the Isle of Wight painting a fresco at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s holiday palace there, he took a few hours off to paint this fine watercolour sketch of a similar view across Sandown Bay to Culver Cliff to that painted about three years later by Collinson and Burchett, but from low down on the beach at Shanklin.

Then in 1858, after the PRB had effectively dissolved, Dyce visited Pegwell Bay on the coast of Kent for a family holiday. He followed that with his most famous painting, which has remained an enigma ever since.

The strata and fine texture of the chalk cliffs are rendered in the close detail specified by John Ruskin, and his colours are strong and clear, just as would be expected of a Pre-Raphaelite landscape. Whether this painting has any deeper meaning or reading remains an interesting issue, but it also conforms to what many would accept as Pre-Raphaelite style.

In the autumn of 1860, Dyce stayed in the Conwy Valley, Wales, for six weeks, where he sketched and painted avidly. He then painted this finely-detailed and richly-coloured view on his return to London.

Frederick Sandys was a close friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti for a decade or so, until the pair fell out over Rossetti’s claim that Sandys had plagiarised his paintings. Primarily a draftsman, he painted a few landscapes in oils.

Whitlingham, Norfolk (1860) is probably his finest painting, and was completed while he was still close to Rossetti. It is also quite unlike anything that the latter ever painted, but would appear to be consistent with the principles of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting.

George Price Boyce was a friend of Thomas Seddon, who painted some landscapes in Pre-Raphaelite style.

Autumn in the Welsh Hills (c 1860) is a finely-detailed Ruskinian watercolour, an example of that style, which he lost in the following few years. There were others, such as John William Inchbold, and Alfred William Hunt, whose paintings became Pre-Raphaelite for a few years, then moved on.

But the most prolific and enduring Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter, John Brett, was then only just starting his career. My next two articles will look at his remarkable paintings.

References

Barringer T (2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Payne C (2010) John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16575 3.
Prettejohn E (2000) The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 854 37726 5.
Staley A (2001) The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08408 5.

Note: PRB = Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the core group within the much broader movement.

A couple of visitors to this site have asked me for advice about how to use images of paintings, etc., without infringing anyone’s copyright. Although I am not a copyright lawyer, this article explains how I tackle this quite complex issue. I hope that it will help others.

Small fish in a big pond

Even when your blog or website becomes well-known and often-visited, we are small fry compared to the many much larger and often prosperous sites, run by media companies, galleries, and others. Although some of them may have some clout, and can afford to employ specialist lawyers and obtain expert advice, we are doing this on a shoestring, and cannot afford to get involved in disputes over copyright. So my aim in using images here is not to do anything which a larger and far richer party might consider infringes on their rights.

Non-commercial, thank you

One very important distinction here is between the commercial and non-commercial. The moment that you start receiving even small donations, income from advertising, or any type of sponsorship in return for what you publish, most will consider your site is commercial. And any commercial undertaking is liable to be asked to pay for the use of images, even though your income may be pitifully small. Some galleries and other organisations make it very clear that, whilst they tolerate or even license images for free use on non-commercial sites, use on commercial sites of any size requires a licence contract and payment – and payments are often surprisingly expensive.

So to keep the use of images simplest, you must remain completely non-commercial. I have been asked to allow ‘contributed editorial’ promotions in return for a financial ‘gift’: I am not particularly keen on the idea anyway, but any such gift would make this blog commercial.

As a non-commercial user, copyright on images of works of art should be very simple: during the lifetime of the artist, and for a period (usually of 70 years) after their death, their work remains in copyright, and any use must be licensed from the copyright holder, or their agent. If only it were that simple.

Which law?

First, copyright law varies in many details between different countries. As a blog author in the UK publishing through a US-based service, any claimed infringement of copyright could be tackled under the national law of the UK (where the author and publisher is resident), the USA (from where the blog is actually served), or that of the country in which the copyright holder is located. Invariably lawyers pick the one which is most advantageous to them.

Even in Europe, there are details which can make life very complex. In most (possibly all) European states, the term of copyright is life + 70 years, except France. In France extensions may be granted to take into account the world wars, so could extend the term to life + 75 years or so.

There are also considerable differences on what might be considered to be ‘fair use’, and not requiring permission from the copyright holder: these tend to be most generous in the US, but are pretty mean and stingy in the UK. The simple answer is to assume that, if you did try to claim ‘fair use’, the other party will deny it.

Copyright on images

So at this stage, you might be thinking that, provided that your site is non-commercial, once an artist has been dead for at least 70 years, you are free to use images of their work on your site. And you might be right, or you could be horribly wrong.

Copyright law arose to protect the interest of creatives, artists and designers, and the like, and concerns itself with works which involve some intellectual effort in their making. It is not there to protect those who make mechanical reproductions of any kind. So, whilst a painting can be covered by copyright, a simple photographic reproduction should not.

Morally that is correct, but many galleries, museums, and collections make a sizeable income from licensing the photographs which they make of paintings and other items in their collections. Consequently they claim copyright – the standard lifetime + 70 years – on all those images.

There has been a longstanding legal argument among copyright lawyers, and protracted disputes over the issue. It has not yet been properly resolved, and no jurisdiction – not even the EU – has been brave enough to make their legislation explicit enough to make the matter clear.

The best galleries have a page which explains how they treat copyright in their images, and the very best provide good resolution images which are explicitly free to use. This is true for most of the major public galleries in the USA, the Netherlands, and many other countries.

France and the UK are notable exceptions. Few major French collections make any of their images available, and most collections in the UK require you to license them under their terms – which is why you will see credits here to the Tate and the National Galleries, for example, which reproduce their claimed copyright. However much I may disagree with their claims, I am keen not to offend them or cause any problems over the use of those images here.

Sources

For paintings, Wikimedia Commons offers one of the best collections in terms of size and scope, and the great majority of the images available there are almost certainly free to use, particularly if you are non-commercial. The major exceptions to that are UK galleries like The Tate and the National Gallery, and Wikimedia Commons usually draws attention to the issue where appropriate.

So if I can find a suitable image in Wikimedia Commons (or direct from galleries which license separately, like the Tate, etc.), I prefer to use that.

I still check the metadata of each image to see whether it bears any claim to copyright. Many Wikimedia Commons images are taken from UK aggregating services which – in the UK at least – may require separate licensing. That all starts getting very messy and time-consuming. If an image has metadata which makes it clear that there is an ‘owner’ claiming copyright, I do my utmost to avoid using that.

There are other sites, such as The Athenaeum, which rival Wikimedia Commons in size and scope, but whose images often have embedded copyright notices, so I tend to use them only when I cannot get suitable images from Wikimedia Commons. I have used WikiPaintings and others in the past, but they each have their disadvantages. I very, very seldom use Google’s image search, at least for images which I would like to publish here, as most images of paintings are too low resolution and do not resolve copyright issues.

Still in copyright

I have used some images of paintings which are still in copyright, but only after obtaining full and explicit permission to do so. So far, my experience in obtaining permission is not good: I wanted to show paintings by Paula Rego and Peter Doig, whose work I greatly enjoy, but despite several emails and a few tweets, have not been able to get anyone to respond to my requests. Some artists and galleries not only respond very helpfully, but go out of their way to help you get just the right images. So it is always worth trying, but don’t be surprised if you get a stern ignoring.

I wish that copyright law was more uniform, and more explicit in allowing fair use of images of art still in copyright, provided that the use is non-commercial. The effect is to make coverage of living and fairly recent artists very poor.

This is exemplified by my problem with obtaining images of Picasso’s painting Guernica, which is still in copyright. Picasso himself ceased obtaining any benefit from that painting when he died in 1973, but since then his heirs have done very well from licensing images of his work. If I wanted to use an image of Guernica here, I would have to pay a commercial licence to Picasso’s heirs, and a fee to the ‘owner’ of the image itself. Those would amount to more than the total annual cost of maintaining this blog!

So, as I cannot invoke ‘fair use’, Picasso’s painting cannot be shown here, even when I discuss it. I am not sure that is what was really intended by the law, and I am fairly confident that, wherever he is now, Picasso would rather an image were used at no cost. But using a ‘stolen’ image would not solve anything, and would risk a demand to take down the image, that article, or even the whole blog. That is not a risk that I would wish to take.

Credits and intent

There are two final matters for the sake of completeness. One is that I try to ensure that every image is properly credited to the artist, to its current ownership if in a public collection, and for the source of the image. The other is that I welcome correction if I have got any of those wrong, and want to respect all intellectual property rights, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them.

I hope that this gives a clearer idea as to how I try to ensure that I do not infringe anyone’s copyright. I believe that copyright law is very important as a means of ensuring that creatives of all kinds are properly rewarded for their work. I am less convinced about what might appear to be a copyright payola which rewards those who have nothing to do with creativity or art.

Most artists had abandoned trying to paint Pre-Raphaelite landscapes by about 1862. Perhaps the most persistent painter in Pre-Raphaelite style was John Brett (1831–1902), who by any account continued to produce paintings which conformed to Ruskin’s ideals and had the same ‘look’ until at least 1870. This article and the next look at his work, and how it changed after 1870.

Brett was a relative latecomer to the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Although he, and his older sister Rosa, started painting professionally from about 1850, John Brett was not admitted to the Royal Academy Schools until early 1853, by which time the PRB itself was dissolving. When in London, he made contact with artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and discussed their art and techniques with Holman Hunt in particular. He read Ruskin, and admired the paintings of John Constable.

Having painted portraits to bring in some income, in the summer of 1856, he went to Switzerland, where he ascended to the glacier above the village of Rosenlaui, and painted his first real landscape work.

Glacier of Rosenlaui (1856) is an extraordinarily accomplished initial landscape painting.

Influenced by the fourth volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and the nearby work of John William Inchbold, who was painting about ten kilometres away at the time, it appears to have been painted entirely en plein air, in front of the motif. Despite its great detail, particularly in the foreground, as prescribed by Ruskin, he signed and dated it 23 August 1856.

Brett also painted a few impressive watercolours before returning to England. In December, this painting had impressed Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt, and had even received praise from Ruskin himself. But the painting did not sell.

The following summer, Brett started work on a less technically-challenging and hopefully more marketable painting, which was possibly inspired by Gustave Courbet’s now-lost painting of stonebreakers, which was first shown in 1851.

The Stonebreaker (1857-58) was painted closer to home, at a popular ‘beauty spot’ in the south of England, near Box Hill, which dominates the distance. The milestone at the left shows the distance to London as 23 miles, and David Cordingly considers this places it along a historic track known as Druid’s Walk, which leads from the Pilgrim’s Way, over the Leatherhead Downs to Epsom and London.

This time, perhaps following his experience in Switzerland, Brett made extensive sketches and studies of the motif, and worked on the final oil painting for at least twenty days en plein air, but then completed it in the studio during the following autumn and winter. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1858, where it aroused considerable critical interest.

In the summer of 1858, Brett set off again to the Alps, where he ended up painting a second remarkable mountain view, this time at Val d’Aosta in north-west Italy.

Val d’Aosta (1858) was painted from a hill about a kilometre north-east of where Brett was lodging, according to Christopher Newall. In contrast to Glacier of Rosenlaui, Brett augments the geological details in the foreground with a sleeping woman and a brilliant white goat.

Surprisingly, it omits the fortress of Châtel Argent and the Château de Saint-Pierre, although these appear in sketches which he made at the time. The only buildings which are shown are smaller, more rustic farms and dwellings, set in finely detailed orchards, vineyards, and pastures.

Probably started with a series of studies and sketches, Brett seems to have worked on the oil version in front of the motif, then brought it back to England for completion during the late autumn of that year. He considered it finished by Christmas, and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859. Ruskin’s remarks were uncommitted, and the painting did not even have an offer made for it.

Brett then tried for success with figurative and genre painting, and it was not until 1861 that he returned to attempt any more proper Pre-Raphaelite landscapes. He first visited Florence in November 1861, and a year later left England to work on his next major work, a view encompassing almost the whole of the city which had been the cradle of much of the southern Renaissance.

Florence from Bellosguardo (1863) was probably started in January 1863, and painted without the aid of significant preparatory studies, and entirely from the motif. Even with Brett’s apparent eye for fine detail at a distance, much of it must have been painted with the aid of a telescope, and it has been suggested that he may also have used a camera lucida and/or photographs. Regardless of how he managed to paint such great detail, it is a triumph of painting, both technically and artistically, and it came as a shock when it was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1863.

Thankfully for Brett, the painting was purchased in May 1863 by the National Gallery, and he was acclaimed in the press as ‘head of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school’, although by that time he was probably the last of its practitioners. Brett had also intended the painting as homage to the Brownings, and enjoyed the support of Robert Browning through that difficult period.

Brett did not hang around in England after this, but later that summer was in Italy again working on further paintings.

Near Sorrento (1863) is a watercolour which Christopher Newall believes to have been painted from the Via del Capo, and shows the coastline which is at least five kilometres from that point, making it almost certain that its fine foreground detail was painted with the aid of a telescope. It still conforms to the basic requirement of a Pre-Raphaelite landscape, with that detail, its bright colours, and careful depiction of geology.

Massa, Bay of Naples (1863-64) is perhaps the most spectacular of the oil paintings which Brett completed during this Mediterranean campaign, and appears to have been painted from a vessel on the water.

He had travelled there on board the SS Scotia, although it is unclear whether that ship served as his floating studio, or he may have transferred to another. The Scotia arrived in the Bay of Naples by 9 September, following which he went to stay in Sorrento, then Capri by November. It is therefore likely that he continued to work on this canvas during the winter of 1863-64.

To his delight, Alfred Morrison bought this painting on 6 May 1864, for the substantial sum of £250, although Morrison may actually have paid in guineas. Brett was to benefit further from Morrison’s generous patronage. By August in 1865, Brett could afford to buy his own yacht, and he thereafter concentrated on painting in British waters.

During the winter of 1885-86, Morrison remained on or near the Isle of Wight, where his new boat had been built. He painted two watercolour landscapes of the Island, of which only February in the Isle of Wight (1866) has been traced. Although a superb painting, its style is starting to drift away from the principles laid down by the Pre-Raphaelites.

References

Barringer T (2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Cordingly D (1982) ‘The Stonebreaker’: and examination of the landscape in a painting by John Brett, Burlington Mag. 129, March 1982, pp 141-145.
Newall C (2007) ‘Val d’Aosta’: John Brett and John Ruskin in the Alps, 1858, Burlington Mag. 149, March 2007, pp 165-172.
Newall C (2012) Review of Payne (2010), Burlington Mag. 154, July 2012, pp 498-499.
Payne C (2010) John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16575 3.
Prettejohn E (2000) The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 854 37726 5.
Staley A (2001) The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08408 5.

In the last article, I showed some of the long run of Pre-Raphaelite landscapes painted by John Brett (1831–1902) prior to 1870. This article continues by looking at his paintings from 1871 onwards. Now Brett had the first of his yachts, he concentrated on painting the British coastline in a style which progressively departed from the Pre-Raphaelite.

In the summer of 1870, Brett sailed around the south-west coast, making detailed notes, sketches, and studies as he went. The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs (1871) is a large canvas which Brett apparently painted from those, during the later part of that year. Although not geographically-specific in any way, it is usually thought to have been painted from the cliffs above Lulworth Cove in Dorset. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy, debate was focussed on whether the azure colour used for the sea was appropriate.

A couple of years later, he painted another large maritime canvas of A North-West Gale off the Longships Lighthouse (1873) in which the lighthouse and rocks are the only clues as to its location. Again it was painted in his studio after notes and preparatory sketches. It was well-received when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873.

Southern Coast of Guernsey (1875) was the smaller of two substantial canvases painted following Brett’s cruise around the Channel Isles in the summer of 1874, and shows his returning interest in the coastline. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875, Ruskin wrote a mixed comment, in which he criticised its loss of subtlety and size, but complimented Brett on the atmosphere of its extreme distance, and his “science” in alternations of colour.

Brett’s superb view of Caernarvon (1875) does appear to have been completed in front of the motif, during his summer campaign around the Welsh coast that year, being significantly smaller and dated in October. It conforms more strongly to his earlier Pre-Raphaelite style, with intricate detail in the foreground waterfront, bright colours, and geological passages.

He continued to paint some pure seascapes, such as the highly successful Britannia’s Realm (1880), although by now these were products of his Putney, London, studio and based on earlier notes and sketches. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1880, this was purchased ‘for the nation’ from the Chantry Bequest even before it had been seen by the public. Brett was then able to order an even larger yacht, and spent the summer painting the rugged coast of Cornwall in more Pre-Raphaelite style. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy the following year.

On the Welsh Coast (1882) is an example of one of his smaller oil sketches from this time: a fine painting, but by now quite divorced from the Pre-Raphaelite.

A few of his later paintings did, though, hark back to his works showing the Italian coast: Man of War Rocks, Coast of Dorset (1884) is smaller than his large commercial canvases, and once again shows the old Pre-Raphaelite characteristics of foreground detail, meticulous geology, and bright colours.

It is not so clear, though, how much – if any – was painted in front of the motif. Much seems to have been based on notes and a watercolour sketch made back in 1870, before Brett had started producing his lucrative seascapes.

In his later years, Brett painted more coastal views, some of which were as good as before, but generally their quality declined with time. Like his Seascape (1887), they became more formulaic and less inspired, and were far from Pre-Raphaelite. However, Brett was probably the only artist to have built his reputation on Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings, and may well have been the last of that rare breed of artist who continued painting pure landscapes in Pre-Raphaelite style.

References

Barringer T (2012) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, revised edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17733 6.
Newall C (2012) Review of Payne (2010), Burlington Mag. 154, July 2012, pp 498-499.
Payne C (2010) John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16575 3.
Prettejohn E (2000) The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 854 37726 5.
Staley A (2001) The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 2nd edn, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08408 5.

It’s hard to conceive what life – and death – must have been like in the early nineteenth century. With more people crowding into cities, epidemics of cholera and other diseases were commonplace, and could wipe out whole communities in but a few days. Public executions and even mutilation still took place, and anyone living to a ripe old age would have seen many of their kin die long before they did.

Most narrative painters seem to have escaped into classical stories from myth and legend, but Antoine Wiertz (1806–1865) could not flee from the ugly reality of the world he saw around him.

He started his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp when he was only fourteen, and came second in the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1828, winning that at his second attempt four years later. He then studied in Rome until early 1837, completing his first major history painting before he returned to his family home in Liège, Belgium.

Between 1836 and 1844, Wiertz painted several very similar versions of that work, The Greeks and Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus, of which this is the small copy now in Antwerp.

The story of Patroclus is drawn from Homer’s epic Iliad. Patroclus was the Greek hero Achilles’ closest friend, and brother-in-arms. When Trojan forces looked to be threatening the Greek ships, Patroclus persuaded Achilles to let him lead a select force into combat against the Trojans, to try to turn the tide. Achilles lent Patroclus his armour, which then of course made Patroclus appear to be Achilles when in combat.

When Patroclus had beaten the Trojans back from the ships, Achilles ordered him to disengage, but Patroclus ignored that order to pursue the Trojans back to the gates of the city. Apollo then intervened to impair Patroclus’ thinking, which allowed him to be struck by a spear, following which Hector killed Patroclus.

Contrary to all accepted practice and the honour of the warrior, the Trojans did not want to leave Patroclus’ body for the Greeks to take for funeral rites. Hector stripped it of armour, and tried to steal the body. Ajax, assisted by Menelaus, fought off Hector and other Trojans, and put Patroclus’ body in a chariot to take it back to the Greek camp. It is that scene – the fight between Hector and his Trojans on the one hand, and Ajax, Menelaus and supporting Greeks, over the body of Patroclus – which Wiertz shows so vividly.

Wiertz continued to make conventional history paintings, and to paint portraits, but also experimented with his paint medium. Disliking the surface sheen of conventional oil paint, even before it is varnished, he appears to have invented what later became known as peinture à l’essence, as adopted by Degas.

He most probably blotted the oil out of regular oil paint, then mixed it with turpentine and petrol, which he applied to stretched but unprimed ‘Holland’ fabric.

The Homeric Struggle (1853) is one of his largest works painted entirely using this technique, which, in the absence of sufficient drying oil binder, inevitably forms a very weak and powdery paint layer which readily flakes from the support. I suspect that Degas both saw Wiertz’s paintings and read the latter’s account of the technique.

As its title is not normally understood to refer to any specific incident in Homer’s Iliad, this probably shows a composite of different incidents during that epic.

In the mid-1840s, Wiertz painted a pretty model whose name he gives as Rosine, as in his Rosine à sa Toilette (Rosine at her Dressing Table) (c 1847). A traditional excuse for a nude, there is little that is remarkable about this painting. But he also got Rosine to model for his most famous work, which she must have found strange.

For in his Two Young Girls, or The Beautiful Rosine (1847), she stands in a similar state of undress, facing a skeleton slung from a metal eye screwed into the top of its skull. She looks up at the bones of the face, and the vacant eye sockets, a faint wry smile on her face, as we are left to ponder the artist’s meaning.

Wiertz had painted Rosine shortly after his mother’s death, and progressively became more obsessed with death. Premature Burial (1854) visits a not uncommon dread in the nineteenth century: that of being presumed dead, buried, and then recovering to find yourself in a coffin.

This did happen, particularly during cholera epidemics, as indicated by the lettering on the opening coffin. The profound shock resulting from choleric dehydration could make the pulse and breathing so feeble as to escape detection; with hundreds or thousands of dead, many were dumped hurriedly into mass-produced coffins and so into mass graves. And a very few managed to survive.

Coffins were designed with bells which could be rung by a recovered person. Wiertz’s victim is left with the nightmare scenario of trying to make it back to the land of the living.

In other paintings, he shows execution by guillotine, suicide by pistol, a starving mother dismembering and eating her infant, and other gruesome scenes. And when not showing us the facts of death, he is more than happy to moralise.

Of his apparently moralising paintings, I find The Reader of Novels (1853) his most curious. A shapely and completely naked woman lies on her back, a book held above her face, reading avidly. Her bed is in a small compartment, a large mirror hanging above her lower body and legs. Her clothing is hung on the foot of the bed, and a floral garland on the top of the mirror. Beside her on the bed are several other books, and the hand of a horned figure is reaching up to those books from below and behind a curtain.

This has all the elements of what later became the ‘problem picture’, a visual riddle which the viewer was invited to solve by building a narrative which fitted the various clues. It could just be dismissing the reading of novels by women as a morally dangerous activity, but it seems too elaborate for that. I wonder if the woman is part of a ‘live peep show’, and passing the time by reading, perhaps, or just a prostitute in her booth in a brothel (although the bed seems rather small to accommodate any partner).

Whatever it meant, it was badly received when exhibited, and deemed pornographic.

The Young Sorceress (1857) is a very late depiction of the long-standing fable of witchcraft: the young woman is here astride her broomstick, being egged on by the spells of the old and wizened witch behind.

In his own life and death, Wiertz seems to have been part of the strange world that he painted: when he died in his studio, his body had to be embalmed according to ancient Egyptian procedures.

If you want to see most of Wiertz’s paintings, he managed to persuade the Belgian government to turn his last studio into a state-owned museum. Strangely, it is almost opposite the European Parliament in Brussels.

References

Wikipedia.
Jeffery Howe’s biography and images of paintings.

Having completed my short survey of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting, its characteristics, and difficulties, in this article I’d like to try to set it in the context of British landscape painting during the nineteenth century.

This necessarily starts with the major works of John Constable. Although he sketched extensively in front of his motifs, Constable’s finished paintings were all made in the studio, and were carefully composed and adjusted according to his aesthetic concepts. Although there was quite a good correspondence between his paintings and what was actually in nature, he did not set out to copy nature with accuracy of detail.

Constable’s approach was an evolution from the teaching of Reynolds and the paintings of Gainsborough, but in continuation, not a step change. His finished works were also rich in fine detail and in some passages quite painterly, although much less so than his sketches and studies.

In his early career, JMW Turner also followed established practice in painting landscapes. But as Constable’s brilliance was fading later in his career, Turner became more experimental, and started to produce radically different paintings in which the effects of light became dominant.

This was most florid in his seascapes, but apparent on land too.

Generally, his paintings retain fine detail in the foreground, but more distant passages and the sky are often more vague and sometimes quite overtly concerned with conveying an impression. Even details are often painted very gesturally.

Like Constable, Turner made many plein air sketches and studies, but those paintings intended for patrons and the public were made completely in the studio.

So the direction of travel in British landscape painting in 1850 was for it to become looser, and more concerned with conveying the overall impression of the landscape and the elements within it, in particular the effects of light and atmosphere more generally. As such, paintings were often relatively light, and often featured high chroma passages.

It was becoming less concerned with the minutiae of detail, and expressed its details in a more gestural, rather than literal, way. Substantial landscape paintings were still being produced in the studio, but based on sketches and studies which started with those painted in front of the motif.

In complete contrast, the Pre-Raphaelite landscape was highly detailed, ideally painted entirely en plein air, and ‘true to nature’ (whatever that could be interpreted as meaning!). It did, though, usually employ high chroma colours.

Paradoxically, many of the Pre-Raphaelite landscapes did not depict a motif which had ever existed, but a composite of passages from different motifs, assembled in a similar way to their figurative works: this is certainly true of Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts, 1852, for example. You can wander around the location in which it was painted – the Lovers’ Seat, overlooking Covehurst Bay, near Hastings, on the south coast of England – and you will not see the view depicted in the painting.

Yet in painting some of its fine details, Hunt went to great lengths to work from nature: one of the last such details to be completed were the butterflies at the lower left, which were painted from a single live specimen which the artist examined indoors after the rest of the painting was all but complete.

Ford Madox Brown and Thomas Seddon also undertook protracted outdoor campaigns to conform as closely as possible to the ‘ideal’, however distant that was from what we now view as the greatest achievements of Turner.

As the pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape were moving on, perhaps its greatest exponent was just getting started, with a view which might have inspired Turner during his earlier Alpine travels. But John Brett was motivated by the Pre-Raphaelite cause, and John Ruskin’s prescriptions.

Even Brett was forced to ‘cheat’ a little, usually completing a view which he had started en plein air over the following months in his studio.

Brett seems to have kept very close to the ideals until about 1870, when he painted more commercially, and returned to the practice of composing in the studio from sketches and notes made in front of the motif.

The Pre-Raphaelite landscape did not vanish entirely, though. Not known for his landscape painting, Sir Edward Poynter made this highly detailed watercolour from his balcony above the town of Funchal in 1877.

A few of Brett’s later landscapes still upheld some of his earlier ideals, too.

But by the last years of the century, even those like Marie Stillman, who had been close to the Pre-Raphaelites, were more influenced by Turner, and the changes which had been happening in mainland Europe, particularly Impressionism.

When JMW Turner died in 1851, there was no subsequent British landscape painter who accomplished as much as he had, or was even as significant and influential as John Constable. The painters of Pre-Raphaelite landscapes may have been engaged in a more modest enterprise, but I find it hard to believe that, when Monet and Pissarro stayed in London during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, those Impressionists did not see their paintings (as they may already have when British works had been exhibited earlier in Paris).

It has been traditional to state that the French refugee artists were most interested in the landscapes of Constable and Turner, and that those paintings inspired their innovations in the use of colour. But at the time, by far the highest-chroma landscape paintings which they would have been likely to encounter in London were surely those of the Pre-Raphaelites, who were also extreme exponents of plein air painting in oils. Whilst the Impressionists were clearly not won over by the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with detail, I wonder if their use of colour made a deeper impression.