THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY VOLUME TWO

Copyright © Chris Beetles Ltd 2014 8 & 10 Ryder Street St James’s London SW1Y 6QB 020 7839 7551 gallery@chrisbeetles.com www.chrisbeetles.com ISBN 978-1-905738-62-5 Cataloguing in publication data is available from the British Library Researched, written and edited by David Wootton, with contributions from Alexander Beetles, Rebecca Chapman, Edwina Freeman, Giles Huxley-Parlour, Christopher Newall and Sue Selwyn Editorial assistance from Catherine Andrews Design by Jeremy Brook of Graphic Ideas Photography by Julian Huxley-Parlour Reproduction by www.cast2create.com Colour separation and printing by Geoff Neal Litho Limited Front cover: William Walcot, The Royal Exchange, London [149] Front endpaper: Alfred William Hunt, A Bit of Old England Half Asleep [83] Back endpaper: William Lionel Wyllie, Point House Shipyard [93] Back cover: Aubrey Beardsley, Lady Golfers with Pierrot as their Caddie [135]

THE LONG

NINETEENTH CENTURY

TREASURES AND PLEASURES

VO L U ME T WO

TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR CHR IS BEETLES 8 & 10 Ryder Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6QB Telephone 020 7839 7551 Facsimile 020 7839 1603 gallery@chrisbeetles.com www.chrisbeetles.com

Contents

5. Victorian Landscapes at Home | 07 Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (1793-1864) Henry Dixon (1820-1893) & Alfred Henry Bool (1844-1926) George Pyne (1800-1884) George Weatherill (1810-1890) Alfred William Hunt (1830-1896) Edmund George Warren (1834-1909) Helen Allingham (1848-1926) William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931) William Fraser Garden (1856-1921) Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936)

6. Victorian Figures: From Page to Wall | 33 William Edward Frost (1810-1877) John Tenniel (1820-1914) Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901) John Edmund Buckley (1820-1884) Richard Doyle (1824-1883) John Everett Millais (1829-1896) Charles Doyle (1832-1893) John Simmons (1823-1876) Birket Foster (1825-1899) Henry Benjamin Roberts (1831-1915) George Goodwin Kilburne (1839-1924) Francis Sydney Muschamp (1851-1929) Charles Green (1840-1898) Mary Gow (1851-1929) George Samuel Elgood (1851-1943) John Henry Henshall (1856-1928) St George Hare (1857-1933)

7. Aestheticism | 59 George Du Maurier (1834-1896) William John Hennessy (1839-1917) Walter Crane (1845-1915) Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) Mortimer Menpes (1855-1938) Laurence Housman (1865-1959) Henry Ospovat (1877-1909) Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898)

8. London: Imperial Capital | 81 James Tissot (CoĂŻdĂŠ) (1836-1902) Leslie Ward (Spy) (1851-1922) Edward Tennyson Reed (1860-1933) Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) Phil May (1864-1903) Herbert Menzies Marshall (1841-1913) William Walcot (1874-1943)

9. Edwardian Dreams: Landscapes and Gardens | 97 James Orrock (1829-1913) John William North (1842-1924) George Samuel Elgood (1851-1943) Beatrice Parsons (1869-1955) Algernon Talmage (1871-1939)

10. Edwardian Dreams: From Book Illustration to Interior Decoration | 107 Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) Florence Harrison (1877-1955) George Sheringham (1884-1937)

11. The First World War | 123 Louis Raemaekers (1869-1956) Harry Van Der Weyden (1868-1952) Edward Handley-Read (1870-1935) William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) William Rothenstein (1872-1945) Alfred Bastien (1873-1917) Fernand Lantoine (1876-1917) Muirhead Bone (1876-1953) Charles Walter Simpson (1878-1942)

Index | 135

5.

VICTORIAN LANDSCAPES AT HOME

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During the Victorian period, landscape painting became the subject of significant interest and debate. In taking up the cause of J M W Turner in the five volumes of Modern Painters (1843-60), the young critic, John Ruskin, explored many aspects of the genre and of the natural world that it sought to represent. His emphasis on ‘truth to nature’ influenced more than one generation of artists towards a meticulously mimetic approach; and they included many for whom landscape was often a setting for narrative, as with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Some were perplexed at Ruskin’s admiration for such seemingly opposed tropes as Turnerian atmospherics and Pre-Raphaelite precision. However, such others as Albert Goodwin and Alfred William Hunt attempted to understand and synthesise the two, and so develop a vision that they could apply to an ambitious range of places.

Most absorbed Ruskin’s teaching in a partial way and chose to specialise, whether on a locale, as did George Weatherill as the ‘Turner of the North’, or on a feature, as did Edmund George Warren in depicting woodland. Few excluded human presence altogether, and many made a virtue of it, as did Helen Allingham in presenting the charm of Surrey cottages and gardens, or William Lionel Wyllie in commemorating Britons’ involvement with the sea.

As industrialisation and urbanisation increased through the century, the built environment became as much a focus as the natural one, and draughtsmen and photographers engaged in imaging the complex fabric of the city, whether as a record of loss or a celebration of achievement.

T HOMAS H OSMER S HEPHERD Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (1793-1864) Thomas Hosmer Shepherd was probably the most talented member of a family of London topographers, his once famous images outstanding in their vivacious detail.

Thomas Hosmer Shepherd was born in France on 16 January 1793, the son of a watchcase maker.

On returning to England, the Shepherd family settled in a neighbourhood close to the City Road, and Thomas was baptised at St Luke Old Street, on 24 February.

Throughout his career, from 1809 to 1859, Shepherd was patronised by the celebrated interior designer, Frederick Crace, who became equally famous as a collector of views and maps of London. Crace commissioned him to produce watercolours of specific London buildings and locations, and also bought others from him. The fame of the Crace Collection then acted as a springboard for Shepherd’s career, as he began to receive commissions from others, including Rudolph Ackermann. From around the time of its foundation in 1809, until its demise in 1828, Shepherd produced a series of street views for Ackermann’s magazine, The Repository of Arts, sometimes in collaboration with his elder brother, George Sidney Shepherd.

Though he became virtually synonymous with the modern city, Shepherd was equally skilful in representing the countryside. To this end, he made a number of sketching tours, the first in 1810.

Eight years later, Shepherd visited France, probably on his honeymoon, an event apparently commemorated in the naming of the first of his seven children, Frederick

Napoleon Shepherd, who was born in June 1819. By 1820, the family had settled at 26 Chapman Street (now Batchelor Street), Islington, one of the new streets on the west side of the Liverpool Road, on the edge of the built up area of the city. He used his home address when advertising as a drawing master.

From this time, Shepherd established himself as a book illustrator, with contributions to the part work, Londina Illustrata (1819-25), again in collaboration with his brother, George, among others. Security and success soon arrived, with his first commission from the publisher, Jones & Co, based at the Temple of the Muses, Finsbury Square. The first part of Metropolitan Improvements appeared in 1827, and comprised numerous steel engravings after drawings by Shepherd, with a commentary by the architect, James Elmes.

Its popularity not only ensured further commissions for Shepherd from Jones but ‘induced many publishers to embark on similar works’ (an unsigned review in the Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1829, cited by J F C Phillips, Shepherd’s London, London: Cassell 1976, page 11).

The sequel to Metropolitan Improvements, entitled London and its Environs, would begin to appear in 1828.

During 1827, Shepherd made sketching tours of the West Country and Scotland in order to prepare his drawings for Modern Athens! (1829) and Bath and Bristol (1829-31), published by Jones with commentaries by the well-known antiquarian, John Britton. Yet, while Jones and Shepherd planned other

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volumes about parts of Great Britain (and Shepherd responded by travelling to Ireland in 1828), no further such publication materialised.

Shepherd, who carried on the family tradition of topography, and Valentine Claude Shepherd, a wood engraver.

Shepherd began to work with other publishers, often reworking the images of London that he had drawn for Jones, while also broadening his horizons. So he exhibited four watercolours of Scotland at the Society of British Artists, in 1831 and 1832, and produced illustrations of Westmorland and the Rhine, by 1832 (though not necessarily on location).

The Crace Collection in the British Museum contains nearly 500 images by Shepherd, including 38 views of Edinburgh for Modern Athens!

A decade later, Shepherd moved to 2 Bird’s Buildings (now part of Colebrooke Row), north of Camden Passage, Islington – probably to better accommodate his growing family. From that time, he provided some images for the Illustrated London News, but became very poor, and was sustained only by the continuing patronage of Crace, who died in 1859.

Further reading: Brian Reginald Curle and Patricia Meara, Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, 1793-1864: a descriptive catalogue of watercolours and drawings in the local collections of Kensington and Chelsea libraries, London: Kensington and Chelsea Public Libraries, 1973; Lucy Peltz, ‘Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (1784-1862)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 50, page 245; J F C Phillips, Shepherd’s London, London: Cassell 1976

Shepherd himself died in Islington on 4 July 1864. His wife, Jane Maria, and at least three of his children survived him. They included Frederick Napoleon

77 Pump Court, Vine Yard, Southwark Signed Watercolour, 7 x 9 1⁄2 inches Pump Court, Vine Yard, Southwark Vine Yard ran from Tooley Street to Pickleherring Stairs on the River Thames, between London Bridge and Tower Bridge. The street pattern in the area has greatly changed as the result of

His work is also represented in numerous other public collections, including Kensington & Chelsea Library and the V&A.

fire, wartime bombing and property development, though a cul-de-sac called Vine Lane remains.

The British Museum owns a similar watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd of the same subject but with fewer figures, dated 1854, which was once owned by the interior designer, Frederick Crace, as part of his collection of London topography.

Both seem to be based on a watercolour of 1828 by John Chessell Buckler (1793-1894) in the collections of the City of London.

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‘… cases, bearing in their symptoms so strong an analogy to the disease termed Cholera, as to leave no doubt of their belonging to that affection, have occurred in Silver-street, Vane-street, and Gleen-alley, a district thickly inhabited by the lowest class of Irish, who are in a state of destitution and poverty which baffles description. This district is in the parish of St Olave, Southwark, and the cases consequently fell under the care of Mr. Clark, the surgeon of the parish.’ (‘Mr Millard’s Report of Cases of Cholera in Southwark’, published in the Cholera Gazette, London: S Highley, 1832, page 148)

78 Glean Alley and Vane Street, Southwark Signed Watercolour 7 x 9 3⁄4 inches

Glean Alley and Vane Street, Southwark Running south from Tooley Street, Glean Alley lay very close to London Bridge. As is indicated in a medical report of 1832, it was one of a network of streets inhabited by the very poor, and highly susceptible to cholera.

The British Museum owns a similar watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd of the same subject but with a greater number of figures, which was once in the collection of London topography owned by the interior designer, Frederick Crace, who has dated it to 1840.

Both seem to be based on a watercolour of 1827 by John Chessell Buckler (1793-1894) in the collections of the City of London.

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D IXON & B OOL Henry Dixon (1820-1893) and Alfred Henry Bool (1844-1926) Dixon & Bool are best known for their series of photographs taken in the 1870s and 1880s for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London, a fine series of early documentation of old buildings about to be destroyed.

Henry Dixon was born in St Pancras, London, on 14 April 1820, the son of Thomas Dixon, a master copperplate printer. Between 1836 and 1843, he was apprenticed as a copperplate printer to his elder brother, Thomas Dixon (died 1875), and his partner, Thomas Ross, at St James’s Place, Hampstead Road.

And by the time of his marriage in 1848, he too was working as a copperplate printer, possibly with his brother. While living at Church Road, Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1859, he set up a photography studio in London at 11 Sussex Terrace, Westbourne Grove, Bayswater. Thomas Ross had also turned from copperplate printing to photography and, following his bankruptcy in 1863, Dixon took over his studio at 56 Albany Street, Regent’s Park, St Pancras. This would remain the firm’s premises until as late as 1942 (though the address was renumbered as 112 Albany Street in 1866). His wife, Sophia, and at least two of his nine children joined him in the business. His one surviving son, Thomas James Dixon (1857-1943), became a partner in 1885, from which time the studio was known as ‘Henry Dixon & Son’. Henry had been a member of the Photographic Society of Great Britain from 1875, and the firm contributed to its exhibitions. He died at home, at 117 Chetwynd Road, Kentish Town, on 20 January 1893.

His work for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London was just one of a number of wide-ranging commissions, including photographing animals for the

Society for Photographing Relics of Old London The Society for Photographing Relics of Old London was established in 1874 by a group of friends in response to the threatened demolition of The Oxford Arms, a seventeenthcentury galleried coaching inn, which stood off Warwick Lane, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. In 1875, the society’s Honorary Secretary, Alfred Marks (1833-1912), commissioned Alfred and John James Bool to photograph this building, a task that proved urgent as it was soon torn down. Six of the resulting negatives were specially developed by Henry Dixon as carbon prints and comprised Series I of the project.

Zoological Society of London (1879-85) and the City Sewers for the Corporation of London (1889-93).

Alfred Bool was born in Pimlico, Westminster, in 1844, and was possibly the son of John Bool, a sculptor who, in 1860, gave his address as 86 Warwick Street, Pimlico (now Warwick Way). From 1867, Alfred had a photographic studio at that address, and was joined there two years later by his younger brother, John James (1850-1933). They also had another studio nearby at 14 Stockbridge Terrace (now the western end of Victoria Street), and maintained both addresses until 1877. From 1871, they were joint members of the Photographic Society of London (which became the Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1874). After 1877, John James stayed on in Pimlico, while Alfred moved to Walham Green, in Fulham. Settling at 115 Harwood Road by 1881, Alfred worked as a photographer, artist and teacher of painting, and published books, including The Art of Photographic Painting (1887). By 1891, he was living at 93 Harwood Road, and working with William Samuel Bool (18721943), a son by his second marriage. He died in Wimbledon on 9 December 1926.

Further reading: Graham Bush, Old London. Photographed by Henry Dixon and John & Alfred Bool for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London, London: Academy Editions, 1975; John Hannavy, ‘Dixon, Henry (18201893) and Thomas James (d. 1942)’, John Hannavy (ed), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Abingdon: Routledge, page 442; David Webb, ‘Bool, Alfred (1844-1926) and John (1850-1933)’, John Hannavy (ed), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Abingdon: Routledge, page 193

From Series 5, 1879, ‘both negatives and prints were made by Dixon alone. Each series was increased to 12 prints, and from 1881 brief texts were included with subscribers’ copies’ (Webb 2008, page 193).

‘A valuable documentation was undertaken by the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London, established in 1874 to record, for posterity, picturesque or historic buildings which had been condemned for destruction. [Dixon & Bool] ... did for London what Charles Marville had done for Paris in Haussmann’s time.’

The negatives of the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London survive in the National Monument Record and the Guildhall Library.

(Gernsheim & Gernsheim, The History of Photography, London: Thames & Hudson, page 282)

The Bool Brothers also worked on Series 2, 1876, views of Lincoln’s Inn; Series 3, 1877, views in the Smithfield area; and Series 4, 1878, views of Temple Bar & Gray’s Inn Lane.

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79 Alfred Bool & Henry Dixon St Bartholomew the Great, and Cloth Fair, London, 1877 Carbon print, mounted on board, printed 1877 9 x 7 inches Taken for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London St Bartholomew the Great, and Cloth Fair, London, 1877 In the early twentieth century, the Corporation of London demolished these old houses of brick, plaster and wood as part of its sanitary scheme for the area.

‘No.16 shows a Window at the east end of the Church and the Boys’ School, built over the north aisle of the choir.’

(Alfred Marks, Photographs of Old London, circa 1881)

‘The Dock appears in the very earliest maps ...

It was generally neglected and a nuisance, and must have been very much larger than we have known it to be’ (William Rendle, Old Southwark and Its People, 1878, page 203)

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80 Henry Dixon St Mary Overy’s Dock, Southwark, London, 1881 Carbon print, mounted on board, printed 1881 9 x 7 inches Taken for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London St Mary Overy’s Dock, Southwark, London, 1881 Although the area has been re-built and the dockyards have gone, St Mary Overy’s Dock still exists in name as a mooring for a replica of The Golden Hind.

‘None of the houses in this photograph are of any great age, but altogether this is a quaint and interesting nook of Old London. The flat-headed doorway to the spectator’s left, adjoining one with a round head, is, little as it looks like it, a busy public thoroughfare for pedestrians, unless a low swing-door is to be understood as reserving private rights. The passage, turning to the left through the houses, leads to Clink Street. In a granary close by is a large pointed arch, not visible from the outside, the last relic of what was once one of the most magnificent palaces in the land – Winchester House – originally built early in the twelfth century for the residence of the Bishops of Winchester. In Wilkinson’s Londina Illustrata are plates giving representations of the ruins of the Palace as they existed about the beginning of this century.’

(Alfred Marks, Photographs of Old London, circa 1881)

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G EORGE P YNE George Pyne, AOWS (1800-1884) Though overshadowed in his early career by the artistic achievements of his father and father-inlaw, George Pyne came into his own as a precise, and sometimes intense, architectural draughtsman.

London-born George Pyne developed as an artist under the influence of his father, William Henry Pyne, and his father-in-law, John Varley, both of whom were founder members of the Society of Painters in Water Colours. He exhibited landscapes, particularly of Kent, at the Society of British Artists and the Society of Painters in Water Colours, becoming an associate member of the latter in 1827. He gradually widened the range of his subject matter, by contributing, with his father and his younger brother, Charles Claude Pyne, to Lancashire Illustrated (1831), and by living and working in Tavistock, Devon (1837-39).

According to some reports, Pyne put a strain on his marriage to Esther Varley by frequenting ‘the worst sinks of vice’ (Alfred T Story, James Holmes and John

Varley, London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1894, page 278). As a result, his relationship with the Varley family seems to have ended on the death of his father-in-law in 1842. Then, on the death of his own father a year later, he resigned from the Society of Painters in Water Colours. In 1858, Esther would take advantage of a new law in order to divorce Pyne (and in 1859 marry Charles Willesford of Tavistock, Devon).

Pyne worked increasingly as an architectural draughtsman, specialising in depictions of the colleges of Oxford, his home from the 1850s. He also produced images of Cambridge and Eton, and published related drawing manuals: A Rudimentary and Practical Treatise on Perspective for Beginners (1848) and Practical Rules on Drawing for the Operative Builder, and Young Student in Architecture (1854). His last known address, recorded in the 1881 Census, was 7 Christ Church Buildings, Oxford.

His work is represented in the collections of the V&A.

81 Eton College Signed and dated 1871 Watercolour 7 1⁄2 x 20 inches Exhibited: ‘Bliss was it in that Dawn to be Alive, 1750-1850’, October 2008, no 223 Eton College Henry VI founded Eton College, Buckinghamshire, in 1440.

The institution was originally modelled on Winchester, founded in 1387, as a charity school for 70 less privileged boys. A fine grey-stone chapel in the Perpendicular style was constructed between 1449-1483, giving an air of grandeur to the surrounding red brick buildings. The upper school was added in 1694, when the school first became fashionable for sons of the nobility. Further expansion occurred as both the fame of the school and its population grew.

When Pyne painted his view of Eton, in 1871, the Head Master was the highly influential James John Hornby. He increased the number of pupils to 894, doubled the number of schoolrooms and reformed the curriculum. Famous Old Etonians of the 1870s include A C Benson (writer and Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge) and M R James (Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University; Provost of Eton; and writer of spinetingling ghost stories).

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G EORGE W EATHERILL George Weatherill (1810-1890) One of Yorkshire’s finest watercolourists, George Weatherill spent his entire life in the Whitby area.

Though painting only in his spare time until the age of 50, he developed such a reputation as an artist that he became known as the ‘Turner of the North’.

The second son of a Yorkshire farmer, George Weatherill was born in the fishing village of Staithes on 18 September 1810. A delicate, intelligent child, he spent much of his spare time down by the shore sketching in the sand. It was decided that he would be best suited to a clerical career, and he was apprenticed to Garbutt, a solicitor based then in Guisborough and later in Yarm.

During this apprenticeship, he became acquainted with George Haydock Dodgson, a local painter, who discovered and developed his artistic talent. At the age of 20, he moved to Whitby to work for Henry Butcher, later joining the staff of the bankers Simpson and Chapman. Yet he painted whenever possible, exploring the surrounding villages and towns in order to find picturesque compositions, and even rising early to study the sunrise. Once his position of the bank was assured, he was occasionally sent to London on business, and was eventually promoted to Chief Cashier. During his stays in the capital, he would visit the National Gallery, and gradually taught himself Italian so he could read the Italian works on the Florentine, Roman and Venetian Schools. Becoming particularly inspired by the

82 Whitby from Larpool Signed and dated 1876 Watercolour with bodycolour 7 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄4 inches

example of J M W Turner, he made a number of engravings of his work. As if to emphasise both his quality and his status as a resolutely local artist, he was dubbed the ‘Turner of the North’. He exhibited a mere half dozen pictures in metropolitan exhibitions, at the Society of British Artists and the Dudley Gallery, and was mainly patronised by Northern industrialists and merchants.

The pressure of balancing two careers led Weatherill to have a nervous breakdown and, in 1860, at the age of 50, he resigned from the bank. On regaining his health, he returned to his painting and soon earned more from his painting alone than he had from both banking and painting. As a local celebrity, he would certainly have met painters visiting the picturesque Whitby, and probably knew Alfred William Hunt who often painted in the village. He died on 30 August 1890 and is buried in Whitby cemetery. In turn, his application encouraged his children to become artists; his son Richard and his daughters Elizabeth, Mary and Sarah Ellen continued and extended his approach to painting.

Further reading: Chris Beetles, George Weatherill (1810-1890), London: Chris Beetles Limited 1982; Joyce Harland, George Weatherill (1810-1890), Whitby: The Pannett Gallery, 1994

Whitby from Larpool Lying on the River Esk, between the coast to the north and Ruswarp to the south. Larpool provides a fine view of Whitby from its steeply wooded banks.

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A LFRED W ILLIAM H UNT Alfred William Hunt, VPRWS LA (1830-1896) Though they came from very different social backgrounds, Alfred William Hunt may be compared to his friend, Albert Goodwin, as one of the leading landscape painters to follow the principles of John Ruskin. He achieved this by ‘fusing the sweep and atmosphere of Turner with Pre-Raphaelite finish and compositional originality’ (Scott Wilcox 1996, page 24).

Alfred William Hunt was born in Liverpool on 15 November 1830, son of the landscape painter, Andrew Hunt. Taking lessons from his father, and absorbing the influence of both his father’s friend, David Cox, and J M W Turner, he exhibited from the age of 12. Blessed with academic and artistic talents, he studied at Liverpool Collegiate School and Oxford (from 1848) with the intention of entering the Church. He won the Newdigate Prize for English Verse (1851) and became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College (1853). For a while he suspended the necessity of taking holy orders, and pursued academic and artistic careers in tandem; he exhibited at the Royal Academy (from 1854) and was elected to the Liverpool Academy (an associate in 1854, and a member two years later).

During this period, Hunt began to read the work of Ruskin, and became so inspired by its aesthetic of ‘Truth to Nature’ as to develop his art as a synthesis of its Turnerian and Pre-Raphaelite elements. His growing emulation of Turner can clearly be seen in his love of atmospherics, and in the experimental techniques that he employed to achieve them. His loyalty to PreRaphaelitism can be understood through the almost scientifically detailed studies he made in preparation for painting. His membership of the Hogarth Club (1858) also demonstrated Pre-Raphaelite affiliations. As a result of these endeavours, he gained and sustained Ruskin’s praise, and became his friend and correspondent.

Hunt’s dedication to landscape painting also revealed itself in the extensive summer tours that he began to take at this time. He frequently visited the northern counties of England, North Wales and Scotland. He increasingly travelled through Europe – to France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece – and beyond, to Turkey and the Holy Land.

In 1861, Hunt decided to marry and, in so doing, left the university for Durham, his wife’s native town, and devoted himself fully to watercolour painting. A year later he was elected to the Society of Painters in Water Colours (associate 1862, member 1864), soon becoming a prime mover in raising its status in the art world. On settling in London, in 1865, he took over the Campden Hill studio of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman Hunt, who was leaving for the Holy Land. He then exhibited mainly at the OWS, where fellow artists and perceptive connoisseurs appreciated him more properly than did members of the general public. He helped engineer the honorary membership of Ruskin to the society (1873) and served as its Vice-President (1880). (The society was renamed the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1881). His developing reputation was marked, in 1893, by the inclusion of a group of his works in the World Exhibition in Chicago which he attended. He died in London on 3 May 1896.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Tate; and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford).

Further reading: Christopher Newall, ‘Hunt, Alfred William (1830-1896)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 28, page 834; Christopher Newall, The Poetry of Truth. Alfred William Hunt and the Art of Landscape, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2004; Scott Wilcox, ‘Hunt, Alfred William (b Liverpool, 15 Nov 1830; d London, 3 May 1896)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 15, page 24

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83 A Bit of Old England Half Asleep Watercolour 13 1⁄2 x 20 1⁄2 inches Provenance: Robert Stirling Newall and by descent Exhibited: Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1868, no 266; ‘Loan Exhibition of Pictures and Drawings by Alfred W Hunt’, The Fine Art Society, London, 1884, no 19; Royal Mining, Engineering and Industrial Exhibition, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1887, no 913; ‘Memorial Exhibition of Pictures by Alfred W Hunt’, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1897, no 103; ‘Drawings in Water Colour by Alfred William Hunt’, Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1897, no 113; ‘The Poetry of Truth. Alfred William Hunt and The Art of Landscape’: Yale Center for British Art, September-December, 2004, and Ashmolean Museum, January-April, 2005, no 38; Chris Beetles Summer Show 2010, no 292 Literature: Athenaeum, 9 May 1868, page 667; Athenaeum, 27 September 1873, page 408

‘A Bit of Old England Half Asleep was one of the first of Hunt’s south-country views, representing a gentle river flowing through an open landscape. It shows the Thames at Pangbourne, with the White Swan public house in the distance …

Among Hunt’s other Old Water-Colour Society exhibits in 1868 were views at Pangbourne, Goring and Streatley. These are villages on the Thames to the north-west of Reading, and each had previously attracted the attention of Hunt’s friend George Price Boyce.’

(Christopher Newall, The Poetry of Truth: Alfred William Hunt and the art of the Landscape, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2004, page 38)

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Striding Edge – Helvellyn Alfred William Hunt’s view of Helvellyn in the English Lakes is taken from the mountain’s eastern flank on Patterdale Common. The narrow arête of Striding Edge, which occupies the centre of the composition, consists of a ridge of stone the edge of which is hardly wider than the path that it supports and with near vertical drops on each side. Striding Edge leads in a westerly direction towards the peak, and is the usual approach to the summit for walkers and climbers. Between Striding Edge and the more northerly buttress known as Catstye Cam is Red Tarn, shown in gloomy shadow in the right side of the painting. Flowing out of the tarn is the Red Tarn Beck, which joins Ullswater at Glenridding. Helvellyn rises to 3118 feet, and is second only to Scafell Pike as the highest mountain in England.

Hunt made a long and productive visit to the Lakes in the autumn of 1853. Although not documented in letters, sketchbooks nos 148 and 215 – in the collection of material that remained in the artist’s studio at the time of his death and which is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford – contain pencil studies of Lakeland scenery. Dates attached to these sketches indicate that Hunt was in the Lakes for about a month from mid-September of the year. In addition, the painting Wastdale Head from Styhead Pass (Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston), and the watercolour Easdale, near Grasmere (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), derived from the trip.

A further work to have originated in the autumn of 1853 was Hunt’s oil painting The Little and Great Langdales with Elter Water and Loughrigg Tarn, from Loughrigg Fell (Sotheby’s Belgravia, 25 March 1975, lot 146). These are all locations in the central or Western Lakes.

Alfred Hunt had been a pupil at the Liverpool Collegiate School, the principal of which was the geologist and bible scholar the Revd William John Conybeare. Academically adept, Hunt had proceeded to Oxford to read classics, going up to Exeter College in February 1848 but shortly afterwards being admitted as a scholar to Corpus Christi College. It seems to have been assumed by Hunt and his family that in due course he would take Holy Orders – a career prospect that he regarded with modest enthusiasm. While an undergraduate, he revealed a talent for verse, in 1851 competing for and winning the university poetry competition, the Newdigate Prize. His fondest pleasure was surely the painting and drawing of landscape subjects, to which he had been introduced at a young age by his father Andrew Hunt, who was himself a professional artist and respected Liverpool drawing master.

Although on occasions Hunt travelled as far afield as the West Country, and on one occasion, in 1850, reached mainland Europe, for the most part his early drawings show landscapes which were readily accessible from his home in Liverpool. Thus the works that he exhibited at the Liverpool Academy were mostly of subjects in the Cheshire countryside, north Wales, and the Lakes. In Oxford, where he remained until 1852 (and to which he returned as a Fellow of his old college, Corpus Christi, in 1857), he was encouraged to pursue his artistic interests by the print-seller James Wyatt – who permitted him space in his shop in the High to exhibit and attempt to sell his drawings, and who sponsored a succession of painting trips during university vacations and in the period after Hunt had taken his degree. Correspondence between Wyatt and Hunt refers principally to painting trips to north Wales, but it is likely that he also encouraged Hunt to work in the Lakes. The autumn 1853 tour may well have been made at Wyatt’s behest, and it is likely that works made then were distributed through Wyatt’s shop. The present painting became the property of Alexander MacGregor, the husband of Hunt’s sister Sarah Jane (who was the fourth of six daughters of Andrew and Sarah Hunt, all older than Alfred himself).

In 1853, Alfred Hunt was still some years away from a decision to devote himself exclusively to painting. In a sense his determination to embark upon a professional career was only really made in 1861 when Hunt finally gave up his Fellowship at Corpus Christi, which he had to do so as to be able to get married – he and Margaret Raine were wed on 16 November 1861 – from that time forward depending on his income from sales and commissions of drawings and paintings.

A variety of artistic influences operated upon A W Hunt at the time that he was working as a part-time painter in the 1850s.

Andrew Hunt had encouraged him to work in the established sketching tradition. For this purpose Alfred travelled to remote country regions and made loose drawings and watercolour studies to evoke the local topography. Andrew Hunt had known David Cox, and his style of draughtsmanship, and that which he encouraged in his son, owed much to Cox’s example. In the early 1850s an impetus towards closer attention to detail – in contradistinction to the generalisation and impressionistic quality of artists working under the sway of Cox – was led by the Pre-Raphaelites, and was reinforced in a wider circle of young artists who had read the successive volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters. In the first of these, published as long previously as 1843, a principle of ‘truth to nature’ was explored, meaning the careful – if not laborious – inspection and attempted replication of what lay before the artist, as a preparation for larger scale and imaginative compositions.

By 1853 Hunt had progressed considerably towards a precise description of his chosen landscape subjects. As Ruskin was later to explain, in texts for example such as The Elements of Drawing (1857), minute gradations of tone were required to convey the volumetric character of masses observed in the landscape. Each area of the composition required appropriate colours to be prepared on the palette that corresponded specifically to those observed in the actual setting. In 1856, in Modern Painters IV, subtitled ‘Of Mountain Beauty’, Ruskin insisted that landscape painting depended upon an appreciation of the physical mechanisms that operated upon the natural setting and an understanding of its essential geological character. Hunt arrived at a fulfilment of Ruskin’s landscape principles, as expressed in his various texts published in the 1850s, in works such as the watercolour Cwm Trifaen (private collection, Scotland), of 1856, and the painting Cornel Rhos – Spring (private collection, London), of 1857.

Hunt’s Striding Edge – Helvellyn marks a mid-point in the transition from a generalised and evocative representation of landscape through to something exhaustively observational.

In its compositional drama, it is reminiscent of the sublime representation of spectacular landscape formations of the type that Turner had explored, and which owed something to a long Romantic tradition of mountain painting. Weather seems to sweep over the landscape, with storm showers appearing at the right side and with a glimpse of a rainbow above the Red Tarn.

On the left side of the composition, on the far horizon, is shown a bar of evening light, again conveying a sense of the approaching dusk and the close of the already shortening autumnal day.

Throughout Hunt’s career he remained fond of motifs that tell of qualities of light and atmosphere that are themselves momentary or fugitive, and which stand as symbols of the transience of life itself. At the same time, in the works of 1853, and expressly in the representation of blocks of stone as convincing three-dimensional forms, and with indication of geological type, Hunt looks forward to the obsession with a truthful and informative geological treatment that was to overtake a wider circle of progressive landscape painters in the summer of 1856.

Note by Christopher Newall, author of The Poetry of Truth: Alfred William Hunt and the art of the Landscape, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2004

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84 Striding Edge, Helvellyn Signed and dated 1853 Inscribed with title on label on reverse Oil on canvas 16 1⁄2 x 23 1⁄2 inches Provenance: Alexander MacGregor (husband of Alfred William Hunt’s sister Sarah Jane) Exhibited: ‘Memorial Exhibition of Pictures by Alfred W Hunt RWS’, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1897, no 185 (lent by Alexander MacGregor)

Striding Edge and the Summit of Helvellyn

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E DMUND G EORGE WARREN Edmund George Warren, RI ROI (1834-1909) Edmund George Warren was perhaps the best known of all Victorian watercolourists to specialise in arboreal landscapes and woodland scenes. He painted minutely detailed views of shady glades and the forest floor, and also delighted in describing the effects of sunlight breaking through the canopy of leaves.

Edmund George Warren was probably born at Vine Cottage, Thistle Grove, north of the Fulham Road, in London. He was one of at least four sons – and possibly one daughter – of the painter, Henry Warren, to follow in their father’s footsteps. The others were Albert Henry (1830-1911), Bonomi Edward (active 1860-79) and Henry Clifford (born 1843) – and also Fanny C Warren (active 1865-66), who was a member of the Warren household in 1866. Henry was a genre and landscape painter who specialised in Arabian subjects, and became closely associated with the New Society of Painters in Water Colours, as a member from 1835 and President from 1839. (The society was renamed the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1885.)

E G Warren began to exhibit works in 1852, the year in which he was elected an associate of the New Society of Painters in Water Colours. This was his principal venue for exhibition, and he would become a full member there four years later. He focussed on the southern

85 Berry Pomeroy Castle Signed Watercolour and bodycolour, 21 x 33 3⁄4 inches

counties of England, sometimes in the company of fellow painter, George Vicat Cole. However, from early in his career, he also travelled widely across Britain, going as far as the Isle of Arran in the north and the River Wye in the west in search of rural subjects, and later extending his range to include Ireland.

The Warren family lived at Hortulan House, on the King’s Road, in the 1850s, and at 24 Upper Phillimore Place, on Kensington High Street, in the 1860s. By 1868, Edmund had moved along the road to 29 Upper Phillimore Place and, by 1872, round the corner to 1a Phillimore Gardens. Then, in the 1880s, he lived further north at Flat 6, 1 Colville Mansions, Powis Terrace, Talbot Road, Bayswater. While there, he became a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (1883-1903), though he continued to work in watercolour until the end of his career.

In the early 1890s, E G Warren began to have some financial problems, and was listed as a bankrupt in 1895. In that year, he moved to Ridge Cottage, Chudleigh, Devon, on the eastern edge of Dartmoor.

As is evidenced by the present watercolour of Berry Pomeroy Castle, he had been painting the area since the mid 1850s. Still living in Chudleigh in 1908, he died in Edmonton, Middlesex, in August 1909.

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‘In his best works – for they are unequal – he displays great firmness, observation, power of landscape-drawing, and delicacy of detail, partaking of the Pre-Raphaelite spirit.’

(William Michael Rossetti, writing in The Crayon, 23 May 1855)

The Pre-Raphaelitism of E G Warren Warren’s watercolours derive from an adaptation of Pre-Raphaelite bodycolour technique, whereby minute touches of colour were meticulously placed together into vibrant stippled surfaces to represent the forms of nature and the gradations of light and shade. These principles of landscape painting, which had been promulgated by John Ruskin in the five volumes of Modern Painters, published between 1843 and 1860, and, more specifically, in The Elements of Drawing, published in 1857, were adapted and exploited by a circle of artists, including Warren, who had no direct relations with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Ruskin himself. Warren’s method of painting became less rigorously exact as his career proceeded and his early search for information about the landscape gave way to the treatment of more generalised evocations of woodland scenes.

Ruskin, who watched Warren’s early career with interest, wrote of his 1858 New Society of Water Colours exhibit In the Forest of Dean: ‘A very interesting study. The dark side of the

trunk is singularly consistent and right in its gradations; the effect of the whole is as true as it is possible for anything to be which is not delicately coloured, but depends for all its results on mere brown, grey, and green, laid in right chiarascuro’. In the following year Ruskin described Warren’s two exhibits at the New Society of Painters in Water Colours as ‘good instances of deceptive painting – scene-painting on a small scale – the skilfully correspondent with photographic effects’.

Ruskin knew that Warren’s paintings fulfilled a formula of construction rather than satisfying the Pre-Raphaelite precepts of naturalism, but nonetheless he applauded Warren’s technique as an example to ‘the younger Pre-Raphaelite painters, who cannot yet bring their details into true balance of force’ and who should ‘take note how much appearance of truth to Nature has been obtained ... merely by the same consistency to their own truer hues’ (John Ruskin, Academy Notes, Library Edition, vol XIV, 1904, pages 192 and 247-298).

Note by Christopher Newall

H ELEN A LLINGHAM Helen Mary Elizabeth Allingham (née Paterson), RWS (1848-1926) One of the most successful women artists of the Victorian age, Helen Allingham produced archetypal watercolour images of cottages and gardens.

Helen Allingham was born Helen Paterson in Swadlincote, south Derbyshire, on 26 September 1848, the eldest of seven children of a doctor. She was brought up in Altrincham, Cheshire, where she attended the Unitarian school for girls, which had originally been set up by her maternal grandmother, Sarah Smith Herford.

Then, on her father’s death in 1862, the family moved to Birmingham to live with her paternal grandmother.

Helen Paterson studied at the Birmingham School of Design (1862-65), the Royal Female School of Art, Bloomsbury, London (1866-67), the Royal Academy Schools (1868-72) and the Slade School of Art (evening classes, 1872-74). In the spring of 1868, she visited Italy and, on her return, began to support herself by drawing illustrations for Once a Week and other periodicals. This led in 1870 to a permanent position as an artist on the staff of The Graphic. In that year she began to exhibit drawings at the Dudley Gallery. At this time, she was particularly influenced by the work of Fred Walker and Myles Birket Foster, who later became a friend.

In 1874, Helen Paterson married the Irish poet, William Allingham (1824-1889), author of ‘Up the Airy Mountain’, and together they would have three children. Though she gave up her place on The Graphic, she continued to produce occasional illustrations for The Cornhill magazine and other periodicals and books.

Placed by her marriage at the centre of the Cheyne Walk set, she met John Ruskin, who became an admirer of her work. She was, by then, more fully engaged in establishing a career as a watercolourist. She was elected an associate member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1875, and when, in 1890, full membership was opened to ladies, she was immediately promoted. (In 1881, the society had become the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours.)

From 1881, Helen Allingham lived at Sandhills, near Witley, Surrey and specialised increasingly in scenes of rural life. These were exhibited in her first two solo shows at the Fine Art Society: ‘Surrey Cottages’ (1886) and ‘In the Country’ (1887). Following her return to London in 1888, she continued to make regular sketching expeditions into the countryside of Surrey and Middlesex, often accompanied by her close friend, Kate Greenaway. By the end of the 1890s, she was making efforts to expand the range of her subject ☛ page 22

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☛ matter; for instance, she produced a group of harvest scenes in the Kentish countryside near Westerham.

However, an exhibition of Venetian pictures at the Fine Art Society in 1904 was not a success. She died in Haslemere, Surrey, on 28 September 1926.

Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, Burgh House & Hampstead Museum and the V&A.

Further reading: Nancy Clay-Marsteller, ‘Allingham, Helen. British painter and illustrator, 1848-1926’, Delia Gaze (ed), Dictionary of Women Artists, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997, vol 1, pages 176-178; Christopher Newall, ‘Allingham [née Paterson], Helen (b Burton on Trent, Staffs, 26 Sept 1848; d Haslemere, Surrey, 28 Sept 1926)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 1, pages 666-667; Ina Taylor, ‘Allingham [née Paterson], Helen Mary Elizabeth (1848-1926)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 1, pages 861-863

86 Roses in Gertrude Jekyll’s Garden, Surrey Signed Watercolour 16 3⁄4 x 12 1⁄2 inches

‘It is difficult to know precisely when Helen Allingham met Gertrude.

On at least two occasions, in 1900 and again in 1902, she journeyed from Hampstead to paint Munstead Wood for a collection called Happy England.’

(Sally Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, London: Viking, 1991, page 196)

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87 Vine Cottage Signed Watercolour 9 x 7 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: Andrew Clayton-Payne, Victorian Cottages, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993, page 158; Ina Taylor, Helen Allingham’s England, Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1990, page 59 Exhibited: ‘Surrey Cottages’, Fine Art Society, 1886, no 20; ‘Helen Allingham’, Haselmere Museum, 1990

Vine Cottage This stone cottage was part of Lord Tennyson’s Aldworth Estate, in Sussex, during the latter part of the nineteenth century. It consisted of four rooms, a pantry, a coal store and a washhouse at the time that Allingham painted it, in the 1880s, while she was living in nearby Sandhills, in Surrey.

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88 A Wiltshire Cottage Signed Inscribed with title on backboard Watercolour, 10 1⁄4 x 6 3⁄4 inches

89 Hydrangea Cottage Signed Watercolour 10 x 8 inches

90 The Kentish Farmhouse at Crockham Hill Signed Watercolour 12 x 14 3⁄4 inches

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W ILLIAM L IONEL W YLLIE William Lionel Wyllie, RA RBA RE RI NEAC (1851-1931) The leading British marine artist of the late nineteenth century, William Lionel Wyllie captured the sea and shipping in a wide range of images from fresh watercolours of Northern France through etchings of the Thames to largescale canvases of historically significant events.

William Lionel Wyllie was born in London on 5 July 1851, son of the painter William Morrison Wyllie. As a child, he lived at 67 Albany Street, close to Regent’s Park, and spent summers at Wimereux, on the French coast, where he began to sketch, encouraged by his father and his half-brother, Lionel Percy Smythe. He studied art at the Heatherley School of Fine Art (1865) and at the Royal Academy Schools (1866-69), where he won the Turner Medal in his final year. He also made a study of the history of shipbuilding to help him with his paintings.

His notable influences include Henry Moore, Whistler and Turner, of whom he later wrote a study (1905).

Wyllie worked initially as a marine illustrator for The Graphic (1870-90), and from 1883 produced etchings for Robert Dunthorne of the Rembrandt Gallery. In 1884, he published Tidal Thames, the first of a number of books that he both wrote and illustrated. Exhibiting at such leading London venues as the Royal Academy, he had five solo shows at the Fine Art Society (from 1883).

He was elected to the Society of British Artists (1875); the New English Art Club (1887); the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1882, resigning in 1884, but being re-elected in 1917); a Royal Academician (ARA 1889, RA 1907); to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (ARE 1903, RE 1904).

In 1884, Wyllie moved to Gillingham House, near Chatham, settling shortly after at Hoo St Werburgh.

He then formed a close association with the Royal Navy,

which he sealed, in 1907, on moving to Portsmouth, where he lived in the Tower House. He was Marine Painter to the Royal Yacht Squadron and the Royal Victoria Yacht Club, and did much work, including posters, for the Orient Company, White Star Line and Union Castle Line. Often sailing in the barge Ladybird and in yachts, he made painting trips to Holland and Northern France. In 1917 he painted an aerial view of the Battle of Bourlon Wood, for which Air Marshal Trenchard sent maps and aerial photographs. Between 1924 and 1930 he worked on a Panorama of Trafalgar for the Victory Museum, Portsmouth. He died in London on 6 April 1931.

His work is represented in the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and the Ministry of Defence Art Collection, and numerous public collections, including the Guildhall Art Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and the National Maritime Museum; and the National Museum of the Royal Navy (Portsmouth), Portsmouth Museums and Records Service and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum.

Further reading: Stephen Deuchar, ‘Wyllie, W(illiam) L(ionel) (b London, 6 July 1851; d London, 6 April 1931)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 33, page 452; H B Grimsditch, rev Roger Quarm, ‘Wyllie, William Lionel (1851-1931)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 60, pages 654-655 Chris Beetles is the publisher of the definitive biography of W L Wyllie entitled W L Wyllie: Marine Artist, 1851-1931, by Roger Quarm, former curator of pictures at the National Maritime Museum, and John Wyllie, the artist’s grandson.

91 Below Sunbury Lock Signed Signed and inscribed ‘70 Carlton Hill St Johns Wood NW’ and ‘No 2 SBA’ Oil on canvas 13 1⁄4 x 21 1⁄2 inches Exhibited: Society of British Artists, 1882/83

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92 L’Entente Cordiale: Arrival of the French Fleet in Cowes Roads Signed and dated 1906 Oil on canvas 60 x 108 inches Provenance: Wyllie Memorial Studio, Portsmouth Literature: M A Wyllie, We Were One. A Life of W L Wyllie, London: G Bell, 1935, pages 184-186, and plate facing page 184 Exhibited: Royal Academy of Arts, 1906, no 442; ‘The Edwardian Era’, Barbican Art Gallery, November 1987-February 1988; ‘W L Wyllie and L’entente Cordiale’, Chris Beetles Ltd, June-July 1988

L’Entente Cordiale The picture is before me as I write. It is the strongest picture that he ever painted. The Entente Cordiale at that moment was complete. God grant it may be so again.

(M A Wyllie, We Were One, London: G Bell, 1935, page 185) At the turn of the nineteenth century, Britain was facing deep hostility from all her European neighbours. The policy of Splendid Isolation which had seen Britain disassociating herself from formal alliances between the major European powers no longer seemed viable as her Empire came increasingly under threat from the imperial aspirations of France, Germany, Austria and Russia. It had always been felt that, as the strongest global power, Britain did not need any defensive aid nor did she want to be dragged into unnecessary wars to defend any one else’s borders. However, after the Boer War (1899-1902), it became particularly apparent that by separating her interests from those of the rest of Europe, Britain was in danger of goading central powers in Europe into putting aside their own quarrels and uniting against her. Most disturbingly, there was growing evidence that Germany, a supposed ally, was designing a navy to rival Britain’s impressive fleet. For Britain this could only mean that Germany was preparing for future combat with the British, as possible disputes with France and Russia could only ever be settled on land.

The result of these growing fears was the restoration of the traditional entente with France. For Britain this would mean support against German threats to her imperial interests, and

the settling of several colonial disputes with France ranging from Siam to Madagascar and West Africa to Newfoundland.

The crux of the agreement was a French acceptance of British control of Egypt in return for British recognition of French predominance in Morocco. The agreement was made in April 1904 and marked the end of Britain’s Splendid Isolation in Europe. It was however, still seen only as a friendly agreement, an Entente Cordiale rather than a formal alliance. Its purpose was to discard Anglo-French tension so that neither country need be reliant on Germany in a crisis. It was not intended to be an alliance against Germany. Nevertheless, by 1905, a series of German challenges to the Entente had already taken place so that, as Wyllie painted the present picture, the Entente was transforming into an alliance and the diplomatic tensions in Europe were preparing the British for the idea of war with Germany.

In the biography of her husband, We Were One, Marian Wyllie described the scene of the painting, when the French fleet came into the English channel, as part of the celebrations to mark the signing of the Entente Cordiale: It is not often that one has the privilege of seeing the sight that Bill and I, in company with thousands, witnessed that day in the summer of 1905 when the French fleet came to England and the Entente Cordiale was complete. Our French brothers were with us, and it was a real joy that filled the souls on board the union Castle liner Armadale Castle.

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As the splendid French squadron came in view, the weather that had been wet and cold cleared – just as a faint ghost of the ships was sighted on the horizon, the thick clouds dispersed. On the squadron came, bringing the sunlight with them from La Belle France pushing from their bows the big white waves of misunderstanding and prejudice as they approached through a band of pale brilliant green sea. Led by the Masséna and keeping perfect station, on they came, belching thick black smoke that hid the hulls of the ships in the rear from sight, only allowing the tall Marconi masts, with their bright waving tricolours to appear above it.

As the flagship came abreast of the Armadale Castle, a ringing cheer burst out, which the Frenchmen returned with interest. The excursion boats heeled sponsors under, with their shouting mass of humanity taking up the tale.

The fleet with its virile workman-like torpedo boats steamed majestically up the Solent. Our splendid Channel fleet of battleships and cruisers dressed with countless fluttering flags and the crews standing with linked hands all round the ships and the tops, was moored in a line from the West Brambles buoy to Off-Brown down point with the destroyers in an inner line to the North and the 1st Cruiser Squadron outside to the south ward.

93 Point House Shipyard Signed and inscribed with title Watercolour with bodycolour 10 3⁄4 x 17 1⁄2inches

Off Osbourne, the Masséna broke out a signal which ran down the whole French Line, the ships bursting into flame and white smoke as the guns roared a salute, which was at once answered from the welcoming English fleet …

We steamed ahead slowly and let go anchor at the head of all with a view looking down the double line of brilliantly lighted battleships. A marvellous sight! About 10 o’clock the fireworks began – the most wonderful I verily believe that were ever seen. The ships were not only outlined, but missiles of fire filled the dark skies and searchlights crossed and re-crossed high in the heaven at one moment, then sweeping along the battleships, picking out every detail at the next.

When all was over, the heavens opened, the rain came down in torrents and with thunder and lightning, the Almighty showed man what He could do in comparison to his feeble efforts! (op cit, pages 184-186) Note by Edwina Freeman

Point House Shipyard Point House Shipyard – or more properly Pointhouse Shipyard – was founded by Thomas B Sneath at the confluence of the Rivers Clyde and Kelvin, in Glasgow, in 1845. The engineers, brothers Anthony and John Inglis, acquired it in 1862, and developed a shipbuilding firm that built ocean liners, paddle steamers, warships and whalers. By the time that W L Wyllie is likely to have painted the yard, in the late 1880s, Anthony’s son, John, had taken charge.

He was particularly responsible for advancing the company’s yacht design.

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W ILLIAM F RASER G ARDEN William Fraser Garden (1856-1921) William Fraser Garden is now the best-known member of the Fraser Family of artists, remembered for their resonant landscape watercolours of the wide, flat Fenlands. He refined his method of painting at an early age in order to produce landscapes that are intensely detailed, scrupulously accurate and sometimes startling in colour.

with their six children. For the remainder of his life, he lived in a room at the Ferry Boat Inn, Holywell, where he continued to paint. He died at the County Hospital, Huntingdon, on 31 January 1921, after fracturing his spine in a fall.

William Fraser Garden was born Garden William Fraser in Gillingham, Kent, on 10 June 1856. Six years after his family’s move to Bedford in 1861, he began to attend the local grammar school and, while there, studied art under Bradford Rudge. In 1872, he took up a position as a clerk in an insurance office, but gave up work there five years later in order to pursue a career as a watercolourist. He showed regularly at the Royal Academy from 1880, and appointed Messrs Dowdeswell, 133 New Bond Street, his agent in 1883. He stopped exhibiting in London in 1890.

The Chris Beetles Gallery has regularly shown a range of works by members of the Fraser Family that has been significant in both number and quality. In 2010, the gallery built on its experience by publishing Charles Lane’s The Fraser Family, the first substantial publication devoted to the artists. The main text comprises a group biography, which is supported by a number of previously unpublished portrait photographs.

This traces their Scottish roots and Bedford childhoods, before charting their artistic careers, and detailing their painting grounds. Many images, maps and topographical photographs illustrate those grounds and the watercolours that resulted. The text also introduces the reader to the fact that three of the brothers were illustrators. A series of monographic appendices then records and analyses the work.

Moving with his parents to Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, in 1887, Fraser Garden married and settled there two years later. However, always bad with money, he was declared bankrupt in 1899, a state of affairs that led, five years later, to his wife leaving him,

His work is represented in the collections of The Norris Museum (St Ives, Huntingdon).

94 Shooting in the Snow Signed and dated ’88 Watercolour 7 1⁄4 x 14 1⁄2 inches Literature: Charles Lane, The Fraser Family, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2010, page 53

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95 All Saints Church, Hartford Signed and dated 1908 Watercolour 7 1⁄2 x 11 inches Provenance: The John Cleese Collection

96 The Cattle Pool Signed and dated ’93 Watercolour, 7 3⁄4 x 11 inches Provenance: The John Cleese Collection Literature: Charles Lane, The Fraser Family, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2010, page 97

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P ETER H ENRY E MERSON Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) Peter Henry Emerson promoted photography as an independent art form, rather than one that is dependent on the tradition of painting. He developed a theory of ‘naturalistic photography’ and took photographs of working figures in natural settings, particularly in East Anglia.

Peter Henry Emerson was born Pedro Enrique Emerson in Casa Grande, La Palma, Cuba, on 13 May 1856, to a British mother and an American father of significant means. Following a brief period in the United States, the family went to England, where Peter Henry was sent to Cranleigh, a public school in Surrey. After a short time at King’s College, London (1874), he studied Medicine at Clare College, Cambridge (1874-79), and, embarking then on a career as a gentleman of letters, first bought a camera at the age of 26 to aid him with one of his hobbies, ornithology. However, he became completely devoted to photography, and rose to become one of the most influential photographers in nineteenth-century Britain.

Although Emerson essentially remained an amateur, he did publish eight books during his lifetime such as Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886) and Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888), and exhibited regularly until 1900. Much of his work focused on the rural life of East Anglia, and should be seen as a lifelong anthropological study of the region’s people and traditions. This scientific approach to his photography tallies with his reputation as an academic with a fearsome intellect, and he became a well-known, somewhat notorious figure in the photographic circles at the end of the 1880s.

One of the notable characteristics of Emerson’s work was its simple technique and brutal honesty – it was this that caused ruptures in the photographic industry at the time. British photography had long been trying to achieve an equal academic reputation to painting and in Emerson’s eyes, through the work of pictorialist photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson, had grown complex, derivative, and over-produced – some of Robinson’s images were compilations of up to 20 negatives. Upon his election to the Council of the Photographic Society in 1886, Emerson began a series of public lectures denouncing this method. His book Naturalistic Photography (1889) further expounded his views, celebrating a simpler, one-shot technique that celebrated the photograph for what it was. The effect of the book was described at the time as like ‘dropping a bomb shell at a tea party’ – Emerson was advocating a completely new approach to photography.

The honesty behind Emerson’s work was also reflected in subject matter that featured real, working people rather than staged models in costumes.

Influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, he sought to photograph traditional rural ways that were threatened by the Industrial Revolution. However, Emerson also firmly believed that photography was more than just a mechanical reproduction and had appeal as an artistic pursuit. In particular he taught that any photograph’s focus should be kept to just one focal plane, to mimic the human eye. In this sense he sought to show photography’s impressionistic potential, as long as it was achieved in a simple way. To many this was seen as doubly heretical, as photographers had long celebrated the camera’s unique ability to get everything in focus.

Emerson’s artistic standpoint was in keeping with contemporaneous advancements in camera technology, which made outdoor photography quicker and more practical. It did however cause significant controversy and long-term, heated debate with Henry Peach Robinson and his supporters, dealt out in personal exchanges, books, pamphlets and lectures. An irascible, vitriolic figure, Emerson eventually tired of the endless bickering and dramatically renounced photography a year later in 1890 with the publication of The Death of Naturalistic Photography. For such a successful and highly regarded photographer, it was seen as an unlikely and unnecessary admission of defeat – particularly as his work spoke so clearly for his cause.

From 1900, he ceased exhibiting or publishing his work altogether, although he continued to take photographs for personal pleasure until he died. He also continued to influence the photography world, and in 1925 began awarding ‘Emerson’ medals to photographers that he admired. Amongst the recipients were Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Alfred Stieglitz.

He died at his home in Falmouth, Cornwall, on 12 May 1936.

Emerson has been called the father of ‘art photography’, as he highlighted its potential as an art form in its own right, and he left a significant mark on the history of the medium. He is also seen as an early and much admired pioneer of unsentimental photography, a calling that touched most of the twentieth-century masters that followed him.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Royal Academy of Arts and the V&A; the Musée d’Orsay (Paris); and George Eastman House: International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Biography by Giles Huxley-Parlour

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97 A Reed Boat House, 1886 Platinum print, printed circa 1886 4 3⁄4 x 6 3⁄4 inches Illustrated: P H Emerson and T F Goodall, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, London: Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1886, plate 31

Further reading: John Fuller, ‘Emerson, P(eter) H(enry) (b Cuba, 13 May 1856; d Falmouth, Cornwall, 12 May 1936)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 10, pages 184-185; Nancy Wynne Newhall, P H Emerson: The Fight for Photography as a Fine Art, Millerton (NY): Aperture, 1975; Peter Turner, ‘Emerson, Peter Henry (1856-1936), H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 18, pages 392-394; Peter Turner and Richard Wood, P H Emerson: Photographer of Norfolk, Boston: D R Godine, 1974

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98 Haymaker with Rake, Norfolk, circa 1888 Photogravure, printed circa 1895 11 x 7 3â „4 inches Illustrated: P H Emerson, Pictures of East Anglian Life, Limited Edition, 1888, plate xxxi

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VICTORIAN FIGURES: FROM PAGE TO WALL

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Many of the figure artists of the Victorian period produced work both for publication and exhibition, and did so with equal success, there being a strong coincidence between the two. This is partly because literary authors, from a classic like Cervantes to a contemporary like Dickens, proved popular as sources for paintings, but also because modern social subjects were appearing with increasing frequency in magazines and books.

Ever since John Boydell had established his Shakespeare Gallery, in 1786, images from Shakespeare had appeared frequently on the walls of exhibitions as well illustrating editions of his plays. Though the original intention had been to foster a British school of history painting, to respond to Continental Classicism, the results increasingly tended towards lively, even small-scale, compositions that either reflected particular performances or explored the fantastical elements that were less easy to stage. So William Edward Frost based his painting of the three witches from Macbeth on Charles Kean’s famous production of 1853, while Joseph Noel Paton allowed himself greater flights of fancy in representing the fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. More generally, fairies became a quintessentially Victorian subject for painters and illustrators, allowing them to explore the imaginative and the illicit.

While new generations of figure artists emphasised psychological insights and social issues in both exhibits and illustrations, there remained space on page and wall for subjects that suggested the pleasures and pastimes of everyday life in a light, and sometimes even humorous, tone.

W ILLIAM E DWARD F ROST William Edward Frost, RA (1810-1877) William Edward Frost was one of the most popular Victorian painters of the nude, appreciated for a purity of approach and elegance of execution. His subjects ranged from generalised recreations of the ancient world to representations of specific episodes from classic English poetry.

William Edward Frost was born in Wandsworth, then in Surrey, in September 1810. He showed artistic talent from an early age, and was encouraged in this by his father: first by his arranging drawing lessons with a Miss Evatt, a neighbouring amateur, and then, in 1825, by his introducing him to William Etty, who became his mentor. On Etty’s recommendation, he entered Henry Sass’s School for Drawing and Painting at 6 Charlotte Street, in 1826, and spent three years there, while also studying at the British Museum each winter. He was then accepted into the Royal Academy Schools and gained first medals in every class except the Antique, in which Daniel Maclise was a competitor.

Specialising in portraiture from about 1830, Frost painted more than 300 portraits during a 15-year period, and showed some as his first exhibits from 1836. However, a series of successes with mythological and allegorical subjects, often inspired by Spenser and Milton, led him to change his focus. In December 1839, he received the Academy’s Gold Medal for Prometheus Bound by Force and Strength (exhibited at the RA in 1840). Four years later, he won a third-prize premium for Una Alarmed by the Fauns and Satyrs (V&A), his entry for the competition to decorate the New Palace of Westminster, while his

academy exhibition picture, Christ Crowned with Thorns, was selected by a prize-holder of the Art Union Society. This early development of his reputation culminated in his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts in November 1846.

Frost attracted a ready patronage among middle-class industrialists and aristocrats and, indeed, from Queen Victoria, who paid £420 for Una Among the Fairies and Wood Nymphs (1847), and subsequently commissioned two more pictures. However, his work was popular with all levels of society, as a result of the wide circulation of engravings of his paintings made by Peter Lightfoot, among others.

Frost shared several of his patrons with Etty, and his work was inevitably compared to that of his mentor.

However, some contemporary critics did distinguish between the two, William Sandby writing that Frost differed materially from Etty, ‘in the chastely correct and highly-finished manner in which he depicts the undraped nymphs in his pictures’ (The History of the Royal Academy of Arts, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1862, vol 2, page 221).

As Frost was intimately familiar with Etty’s methods and ideas, he became a principal source for the older artist’s biography. He was also knowledgeable about the work of Thomas Stothard, collecting a large number of engravings of the artist’s work. In addition, he collaborated with Henry Reeve on a catalogue of the art collection of Hugh Munro of Novar, which was privately printed in 1865.

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After a gap that surprised and irritated him, Frost was elected a full academician in 1870. Yet, at the time of the exhibition of his diploma work, Nymphs and Cupid, two years later, he voluntarily retired from the RA. He had also exhibited regularly at the British Institution.

Never marrying, Frost lived with Elizabeth, his unmarried sister, latterly at 40 Fitzroy Square. On his death on 4 June 1877, she became his sole executor.

Almost a year later, on 14 March 1878, Christie’s held a sale of the remains of Frost’s studio, including a hundred of his works, as well as his copies after old masters.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including The British Museum; and the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge).

Further reading: Robyn Asleson, ‘Frost, William Edward (1810-1877)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 21, pages 70-71; Philip McEvansoneya, ‘Frost, William Edward (b London, Sept 1810; d London, 4 June 1877)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 11, pages 804-805

The Witches Painted by 1854, W E Frost’s oil is apparently based on Charles Kean’s famous production of Macbeth, performed in London in 1853.

In 1850, Kean began to manage the Royal Princess’s Theatre, Oxford Street (where the HMV megastore now stands), and a year later ran a Shakespearean season to coincide with the Great Exhibition. In the season of 1852-53, he chose Macbeth as the play to represent Shakespeare in a mixed repertoire. Following a royal command performance at Windsor Castle on 4 February 1853, it opened on 14 February, and ran until 31 August at the rate of three performances a week.

Performances lasted about four hours.

Kean attempted an archeologically accurate production, explaining on a playbill essay that, as little was known of ‘the dress worn by the inhabitants of Scotland in the eleventh century’, he had ‘borrowed materials from those nations to whom Scotland was constantly opposed in war’, notably England and the Scandinavian countries. Similarly, Kean’s designers drew on pre-Norman architecture to create the interior scenes.

The result was spectacular, though for some spectators overly so with the visual element threatening to overwhelm the action.

Notable among the cast members were Kean himself and his wife, Ellen Tree, as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and eight year-old Kate Terry as Banquo’s son, Fleance. According to custom, men played the three witches: Edward Phillips Addison (circa 1806-1874), Drinkwater Meadows (circa 1793-1869) and Horatio Saker (1824/25-1861). All were notable comic actors, and Meadows and Saker had played the same roles in previous productions, Meadows to William Charles Macready’s Macbeth at Covent Garden in 1838.

99 The Witches Signed and inscribed with title on label on reverse Oil on wood 7 3⁄4 x 5 3⁄4 inches Provenance: Fidelis Morgan Exhibited: Midland Counties Art Museum, Nottingham Castle, 1886, no 119

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J OHN T ENNIEL John Tenniel, RI (1820-1914) While best remembered as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, John Tenniel contributed greatly to the look of Punch during the later nineteenth century. Beautifully drawn and highly allusive, his political cartoons remain startling in presenting fantastic imagery with classical polish.

John Tenniel was born at 22 Gloucester Place, New Road, Bayswater, London, on 28 February 1820, the third son of a fencing and dancing master of Huguenot origins. Brought up in Kensington, he was educated locally and then by his father, before studying at the Royal Academy Schools. Despite being partially blinded by his father in a fencing accident, in 1840, he continued in his ambition to be a history painter and joined the Clipstone Street Artists’ Society (later known as the Langham Sketching Club) to increase his chances of exposure. Together with Charles Keene, a sketching companion at the Clipstone Academy, he created ‘The Book of Beauty’ (circa 1846), an unpublished parody of popular anthologies of engravings and verse. These

were more suggestive of his future career than was his serious work, for he rose to notice through his animal drawings, and attracted the attention of Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, with his illustrations to the Rev Thomas James’s edition of Aesop’s Fables (1848). He joined the magazine as second cartoonist to John Leech in November 1850 and, becoming principal cartoonist in 1864, produced over 2,000 cartoons in 50 years. As the one Conservative member of staff, he defined the cartoon for the Empire through his development of stock types and patriotic symbols, while his early ambitions as an actor and a history painter enriched his imagery, so that political situations were presented within theatrical or artistic contexts.

Tenniel married Julia Giani in 1854, and they settled at 10 Portsdown Road, Maida Hill. However, she died of tuberculosis only two years later and he never remarried. Instead, his mother-in-law lived with him as his housekeeper until her death in 1879.

The Derby, 1867. Dizzy wins with ‘Reform-bill’ Having played a part in defeating the proposed Reform Bill of Prime Minister Earl Russell (17921878) in 1866 and fearing the Conservatives were in danger of being seen as an anti-reform party, Disraeli introduced his own Reform Bill as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1867. The Bill gave the vote to every male adult householder living in a borough constituency, some 1.5 million men. Lord Cranborne (later the Marquess of Salisbury) (1830-1903) resigned in protest at this extension of democracy, but Disraeli was able to persuade his party to vote for the Bill on the basis that the newly enfranchised electorate would be grateful and vote Conservative at the next general election. However, the Bill ultimately aided the Liberals, who returned to power in 1868.

The Epsom Derby had been run three days prior to the publication of this cartoon. It was won by Hermit, a horse owned by Henry Chaplin, who would later become President of the Board of Agriculture under the Marquess of Salisbury.

Note by Alexander Beetles 100 The Derby, 1867. Dizzy wins with ‘Reform-bill’ Mr Punch. ‘Don’t be too sure; wait till he’s weighed!’

Signed with monogram and dated 1867 Inscribed with title and publication details on original mount Pencil, 8 1⁄4 x 6 1⁄2 inches Provenance: Mary Green (née Tenniel), the artist’s sister and thence by descent Illustrated: Punch, 25 May 1867, page 215

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Parallel to his position as a leading cartoonist, Tenniel developed his career as a book illustrator and made best use of his rich vein of fantasy in his work for Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872). He was elected to both the associate and full membership of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1874, and was knighted in 1893. Tenniel’s single most famous cartoon, concerning the dismissal of Bismarck and entitled Dropping the Pilot, appeared in Punch on 29 March 1890. Two years later, he gave up his practice of drawing directly on the engraving block and took to photographic reproduction. He retired from Punch at the age of 80, and died on 25 February 1914.

Punch produced a special commemorative issue on 4 March of that year.

Calling them Home The death of General Charles Gordon (1833-1885) in Khartoum, Sudan in 1885 made Gladstone’s position as Prime Minister untenable, forcing his resignation.

The Conservative Lord Salisbury (18301903) took over the premiership, but because the electoral rolls had not yet been compiled, the general election was postponed until November. As a result, the Liberals still held the most seats in the House of Commons, with the balance of power held by the Irish Nationalists, led by Charles Parnell (1846-1891), who held 63 seats. Rumours circulated in the press that Gladstone had ‘converted’ to supporting Irish Home Rule, a move to win the support of the Irish Nationals in the House of Commons. Although the Liberals failed to win a majority in November 1885, Gladstone’s son, Herbert, confirmed his father’s support of Irish Home Rule in December 1885, in what the press dubbed ‘flying the Hawarden kite’ (so named after Hawarden Castle, Flintshire, the Gladstone family estate). On 27 January 1886, Irish voting defeated Lord Salisbury in the Commons and Gladstone returned to power.

Note by Alexander Beetles 101 Calling them Home Signed with monogram and dated 1885 Inscribed with title and publication details on original mount Pencil 8 1⁄4 x 6 1⁄4 inches Provenance: Mary Green (née Tenniel), the artist’s sister and thence by descent Illustrated: Punch, 21 November 1885, page 247

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum and the V&A; and New York Public Library.

Further reading: L Perry Curtis Jnr, ‘Tenniel, Sir John (1820-1914)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 54, pages 131-134; Rodney Engen, Sir John Tenniel: Alice’s White Knight, London: Scolar Press, 1991

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102 How Don Quixote Made Ready His Armour ‘Instead of a helmet there was only a simple morion or steel cap!

But he dexterously supplied this want by contriving a sort of visor of pasteboard. He looked upon it as a most excellent helmet.’

Inscribed with monogram and dated 1883 Watercolour 17 1⁄4 x 14 3⁄4 inches Exhibited: Institute of Painters in Water Colours, 1883, no 365; Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester 1887

How Don Quixote Made Ready His Armour While his Punch colleagues gave John Tenniel the nickname ‘Don Quixote’ when he reached his fifties, it is possible that he associated himself with Cervantes’ immortal character from much earlier in his life. For instance, when he was just 18 years old, in 1838, he exhibited a watercolour, entitled Don Quixote Preparing His Armour, at the Society of British Artists. Certainly, he grew into the part, in being tall and thin, with a long drooping moustache, and an introspective manner.

It is also appropriate that he should have chosen to represent Quixote in the act of making, and thus not unlike an artist in his studio. So his return to the subject for this beautifully executed watercolour of 1883 is perhaps not surprising.

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J OSEPH N OEL PATON Joseph Noel Paton, RSA (1821-1901) Joseph Noel Paton was the leading Scottish artist of the Victorian period to specialise in imaginative figure subjects, and notably fairies. In producing such masterpieces as The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, he capitalised on his mimetic skills in order to represent the supernatural with great conviction.

Joseph Noel Paton was born in Dunfermline, Fife, on 13 December 1821, the second of three children of a damask designer and manufacturer. His father’s interests as an antiquarian and collector provided early inspiration.

(The collection, inherited by Paton, is now in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.) From his earliest years, his reading fired his imagination, and he made drawings based on tales of Celtic romance and legend, in addition to episodes from the Bible and ancient history. He developed talents for both literature and art, and would become a poet and critic as well as a painter and sculptor.

On completing his education at Dunfermline School and Dunfermline Art Academy, Paton spent three years in his father’s profession, becoming director of design at Brown, Sharp & Co’s sewn-muslin factory at Paisley, Strathclyde. Then, in 1842, he left Scotland for London where, in the following year, he entered the Royal Academy Schools. Though he did not take up a studentship, his time at the Schools proved important to his artistic development, for he met and befriended a younger, precocious student, John Everett Millais.

Paton’s aptitude for literary subjects enabled him to work as both illustrator and painter. He contributed to Samuel Carter Hall’s The Book of British Ballads (1842/1844) and Mrs Hall’s Midsummer Eve: A Fairy Tale of Love (1847), two landmarks in the construction of the Victorian imagination. He also entered the competitions for the decoration of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, a project on which the health of British history painting seemed so strongly to depend. He established his reputation in England with his two prizewinning entries, The Spirit of Religion (1845) and especially The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847). He had already exhibited his first, small version of its pendant, The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, in Edinburgh in 1846, as his diploma work on becoming an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Paton was invited by Millais to join the newly founded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Though sympathetic with its ideals, he declined, for he disliked London and preferred to return to Scotland. As a result, he practised and promoted its principles in the Scottish capital, recording the natural world in almost uncanny detail, and capitalising on his mimetic skills in order to convincingly represent the supernatural. This he

demonstrated triumphantly with the large version of The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, judged to be the painting of the exhibition when shown, in 1850, at the Royal Scottish Academy. He was elected a full academician in the same year.

Paton’s approach to landscape painting was influenced not only by the example of the Pre-Raphaelites but by the writings of their champion John Ruskin. Paton met Ruskin through Millais and, in 1853, attended the lectures that he gave in Edinburgh on Architecture and Painting. Soon after, he went on painting trips with his brother, the artist Waller Hugh Paton, to the Isle of Arran (1854 and 1855), possibly to Loch Lomond (1858), and later to the Continent (1861 and 1868).

By the late 1850s, Paton was as well known and admired in England as in Scotland, through his exhibits at the Royal Academy (1856-83) and his illustrations to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863). He was appointed Queen’s Limner for Scotland in 1866, and knighted a year later.

His work as an original imaginative painter culminated in 1867, with the completion of The Fairy Raid and its exhibition at the Royal Academy. Five years later, he declined the invitation of Lewis Carroll to illustrate Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, the author’s second great work of fantasy, stating that John Tenniel remained the ideal artist for the job.

Instead, he devoted his remaining time to painting religious subjects in an academic manner comparable to that of his compatriot William Dyce. He died at his home in Edinburgh on 26 December 1901. Of the 11 children from his marriage to Margaret Gourlay (died 1900), his sons Frederick Noel Paton and Ronald Noel Paton also became artists.

His work is represented in the collections of the British Museum; and the Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove (Glasgow) and the National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh).

Further reading: Alasdair A Auld, Fact and Fancy: Drawings and Paintings by Joseph Noel Paton, 1821-1901, Scottish Arts Council, 1967; Alasdair A Auld, ‘Paton, Sir (Joseph) Noel [Noël] (b Dunfermline, Fife, 1821; d Edinburgh, 25 Dec 1901)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 24, page 266; Nicola Bown, ‘Paton, Sir Joseph Noël (1821-1901)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 43, pages 62-63; Francina Irwin (editor), M H NoelPaton and J P Campbell, Noel Paton, 1821-1901, Edinburgh: The Ramsay Head Press, 1990

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103 Oberon and Puck Listening to the ‘Sea-Maid’s’ Music A Midsummer Night’s Dream Signed with initials and dated ‘28th June 1848’ Inscribed with title and dedicated ‘To MP from her “Affectionate Connection” JNP May 1864’ below mount Pen and ink 10 3⁄4 inches diameter

Oberon and Puck Listening to the ‘Sea-Maid’s’ Music In the wake of the enormous success of his paintings of Oberon and Titania, Paton produced numerous small fairy pictures, including several more based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

(See, for example, Puck and the Fairy of 1847, reproduced in the catalogue to the Chris Beetles Summer Show, 1999, page 4.)

The present drawing, originally dated 1848, is probably the first of several attempts by Paton to depict one particular episode described but not dramatised in Shakespeare’s play. In Act II, Scene i, Oberon, King of the Fairies, says to his sidekick, Puck: Thou rememb’rest Since I once sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music.

Oberon’s description acts as an atmospheric prelude to his instruction to Puck to pick love-in-idleness (the wild European pansy also known as heartsease). The juice of that plant makes ‘man or woman madly dote/Upon the next live creature that it sees’ and so significantly affects the action of the play; Titania,

Oberon’s Queen, becomes ‘enamour’d of an ass’, while two young Athenian couples find the complexity of their affections further compounded. Paton seems to have been interested in ‘the sea-maid’s music’ as a parallel to that botanical power, music being ‘the food of love’ (Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene i).

As such, it was also a parallel to Puck and the Fairy, another representation of the desire that controls the play. Indeed, Paton had originally intended his last painting of the present subject, Oberon Listening to the Sea Maid (exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883), to act as the pendant to a version of Puck and the Fairy.

Given this suggestion of emotional intensity, it may seem surprising that Paton should dedicate the work, in May 1864, to ‘MP’, almost certainly Margaret Paton, the wife of Waller Hugh Paton, his brother and fellow painter. Yet, he may have intended it to mark their second wedding anniversary, its Shakespearean subject generally signifying nuptials. After all, the 1847 version of Puck and the Fairy had become similarly associated with the marriage of Paton’s sister, the sculptor Amelia Robertson Paton, to David Octavius Hill, a union also solemnised in 1862.

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J OHN E DMUND B UCKLEY John Edmund Buckley (1820-1884) Working as a watercolourist of landscapes and architectural scenes with figures, John Edmund Buckley developed a speciality for historical and literary subjects, especially of the Tudor and Stuart periods.

John Edmund Buckley is probably one of a family of Irish artists, who migrated from Cork to London, and may be equated with the John Buckley who was working in Cork in 1835 as a miniaturist, portrait and landscape

painter. Living with Charles Frederick Buckley, at 17 King William Street, in the City, in 1843, he began to exhibit at the Society of British Artists in the same year.

He continued to do so intermittently until 1861, moving at least three times during that period: to Newman Street, in what was then the heart of the artistic quarter, north of Oxford Street (1846); 7 Rathbone Place, which runs parallel with Newman Street (1852); and 16 College Place, further north in Camden Town (1861).

Dated works suggest that he painted until at least 1879.

‘[Shakespeare’s] Measure for Measure is a problem play in that it sets a special problem of moral duty before the main character. While deputizing for the absent Duke of Vienna, Angelo enforces laws against unchastity which had fallen into desuetude. Claudio is sentenced to death for anticipating the marriage rite, and his sister Isabella, a novice, prays Angelo to pardon him.

Angelo is affected by her beauty and offers to grant her wish if she will sacrifice her virginity. Isabella refuses, though Claudio for a time weakly begs her to pity him.’

(Harry Blamires, A Short History of English Literature, London: Methuen & Co, 1984 (2nd ed), page 59)

104 Claudio and Isabella conversing with Angelo listening Measure for Measure Signed and dated 1864 Watercolour with bodycolour on board 17 1⁄2 x 29 1⁄2 inches

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R ICHARD D OYLE Richard Doyle, sometimes known as ‘Dick Kitcat’ (1824-1883) One of the most inventive illustrators of the Victorian period, Richard Doyle achieved a fine balance between observation and imagination, and so was able to work equally well as a Punch cartoonist and an illustrator of fairy subjects. His incisive draughtsmanship complemented the fine stippling of his watercolours.

Richard Doyle was born in London in September 1824, the second son of the Irish caricaturist, John Doyle (‘HB’). Educated at home, he showed an early talent for drawing, and was encouraged to observe and memorise the London scene and work the results into paintings.

To counterbalance such demands he filled many sketchbook pages with ‘nonsense’ figures and, in 1840, illustrated his own diary. (It was published in 1885 as A Journal Kept By Richard Doyle in the Year 1840.) His first published book, providing a comic interpretation of the mediaeval-inspired Eglington Tournament, appeared in the same year to wide acclaim.

105 The Woodman and the Elves Signed with monogram Watercolour and bodycolour with pencil 8 3⁄4 x 12 inches

The combination of fantasy and observation that comprised the work of his childhood set Doyle in good stead for his employment by Punch in 1843. The decorations and initial letters that he first produced extended the playful images of his sketchbooks, while the cartoons that he began in March 1844 were all the better for his father’s training; the series ‘Manners and Customs of ye Englishe’ (1849) was instrumental in making him a household name.

Resigning from Punch in 1850 because of its antipapism, Doyle devoted the rest of his career to illustrating books and painting in watercolour. Projects of the 1850s centred upon such contemporary subjects as Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1854-55) and his own comic novel, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854); but his illustrations to Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River (1850) gave a better indication of the course that his work was taking. Making use of both black and white and colour, he began to

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create a complete fairy world, best known through his images for In Fairyland (1870), with verses appended

by William Allingham. However, his fairy world is shown at its most atmospheric in his exquisite independent watercolours. These paintings – built up from small stippled strokes or structured by ink cross-hatching – depict families of subjects, such as fairies sitting in the branches of a tree or various versions of The Altar Cup of Aagerup. Doyle also produced landscapes and views of country houses, such as Longleat, that he visited as a house guest, but these were less well received and he gave them up when he became ill. Devoted to Blanche Stanley, who became the wife of Lord Airlie, he never married. He died at his home – 7 Finborough Road, West Brompton – on 11 December 1883.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum and the V&A; and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston MA).

Further reading: Rodney Engen, Richard Doyle, Stroud: Catalpa Press, 1983; Rodney Engen, Michael Heseltine and Lionel Lambourne, Richard Doyle and his Family, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983; Michael Heseltine, ‘Doyle, Richard [pseud. Dick Kitcat] (1824-1883)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 16, pages 841-843

106 A Fox-Hunter’s Nightmare Watercolour 12 x 18 inches Richard Doyle’s exhibition watercolours: The Woodman and the Elves and A Fox-Hunter’s Nightmare Richard Doyle made his name as a fairy illustrator in 1846 with The Fairy Ring, John Edward Taylor’s translation of tales from the Brothers Grimm. However, he had collected folk legends and stories from childhood, and had such a strong imagination that he developed his own vision of fairies and fairyland. This vision culminated most famously in the set of images that were published as In Fairyland (1870), but also fired the series of watercolours that he exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery between 1878 and 1883.

Though the present watercolours cannot be identified among the titles of the Grosvenor exhibits, they are typical of those that were shown.

The Woodman and the Elves, in particular, is one of a group of works in which a human observes – or is observed by – an assembly of fairies or other supernatural figures in a woodland setting. Here, a woodman actually disturbs figures dressed in green, a colour identifying them variously as fairies, imps or pixies to the folklorists of the day. Richard’s collaborator, William Allingham, wrote in his most famous poem of ‘Wee folk, good folk,/ Trooping altogether; Green jacket, red cap,/ And white owl’s feather’, and both Richard and Charles Doyle often followed this tradition in representing fairy folk.

A Fox-Hunter’s Nightmare shows this supernatural world at its sparest and most haunting, but injects it with a degree of humour, akin to that employed by Doyle in his social cartoons, for a Victorian gentleman is dreaming of being carried away by a literal ‘night-mare’.

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J OHN E VERETT M ILLAIS Sir John Everett Millais, PRA, HRCA HRI (1829-1896) John Everett Millais was one of the most significant English painters and illustrators of the nineteenth century. While making his mark as the youngest ever student of the Royal Academy Schools, he publically rejected academic values, from 1848, as a founder member of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. Then gaining public popularity for his figure subjects even before the Brotherhood’s dissolution, he gradually became highly successful, respected and honoured – both a Baronet and President of the Royal Academy.

John Everett Millais was born in Southampton, Hampshire, on 8 June 1829. His father was a man of independent means from an old Jersey family, while his mother came from a family of prosperous Southampton saddlers. Millais grew up in Southampton, Jersey and Dinan, in Brittany, before moving to London, in 1838, to study art. Initially, he attended Henry Sass’s independent drawing academy. Then, in 1840, he entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he revealed his outstanding talent, winning several prizes, including a silver medal for drawing from the antique (1843) and a gold medal for historical painting (1847).

In 1846, he began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy. However, his developing friendship with fellow student, William Holman Hunt, led, in 1848, to the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which specifically rejected academic values in favour of a Romantic naturalism. A number of the works that he designated ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ met with controversy, but A Huguenot, of 1852, proved very popular with the public, in both its painted and engraved forms. His ensuing election as an associate of the Royal Academy, in the following year, led effectively to the dissolution of the Brotherhood.

In the summer of 1853, Millais visited Scotland with John and Effie Ruskin, Ruskin having been the critic who had most championed Pre-Raphaelitism. However, during the trip, Millais and Effie fell in love; as a result, Effie had her marriage to Ruskin annulled and married Millais on 3 July 1855. They would have eight children.

The newlyweds settled in Perth, staying first at Annat Lodge and then with Effie’s parents at their home, Bowerswell. At this time, Millais painted distinctive symbolic images, such as Autumn Leaves (1855-56), and worked extensively as an illustrator.

From early in his career, Millais had demonstrated a mastery of draughtsmanship, through his illustrations for the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, The Germ (1850), and an unpublished series of modern moral studies (1851-55).

In 1857, he confirmed his power as an illustrator through his contributions to the Moxon edition of the poems of Tennyson. Then, during the 1860s, he made

significant contributions to the leading new periodicals, most notably The Parables of Our Lord (in Good Words, 1863) and his illustrations to novels by Anthony Trollope (in The Cornhill Magazine, 1860-69). The latter have been considered ‘arguably the best of their kind done for a novelist in the entire 19th century’ (Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1981 (revised ed), page 391).

By early in the 1860s, Millais had returned to London, and reverted in his painting to the theme of ill-fated love; the resulting works proved highly popular, and earned him a greater degree of success than any other English painter. This growing status led, in 1865, to his election as a Royal Academician. Though he ceased to work regularly as an illustrator at the close of the 1860s, he did expand his repertoire as a painter, producing large-scale Scottish landscapes, inspired by holiday destinations, and establishing a highly fashionable portrait practice. The first English artist to be made a Baronet (1885), he was elected President of the Royal Academy a decade later (1896). However, he died of throat cancer soon after, at his home at 2 Palace Gate, Kensington, on 13 August 1896, and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. Effie died a year later. In January to March 1898, the Royal Academy mounted a memorial exhibition.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the collections of the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the V&A; and the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; the Lady Lever Art Gallery (Port Sunlight), Manchester Art Gallery and the Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool).

Further reading: Malcolm Warner, The Drawings of John Everett Millais, Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 1979; Malcolm Warner, ‘Millais, Sir John Everett (b Southampton, 8 June 1829; d London, 13 Aug 1896)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 21, pages 601-604; Malcolm Warner, ‘Millais, Sir John Everett, first baronet (1829-1896)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 38, pages 176-182

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‘There is a wonderful truth and power of expression in all he does, united with a purpose and a meaning such as are conveyed by language at once vigorous and eloquent.’

(Art Journal, 1866, page 64)

107 Sir Tristrem Signed with monogram Watercolour with pencil 3 1⁄2 x 6 inches Provenance: The collection of Harold Hartley Illustrated: Once a Week, 22 March 1862, page 350, ‘Sir Tristrem’ by Williams Buchanan Literature: Ann F Howey and Stephen Ray Reimer, A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500-2000), Cambridge: D S Brewer, 2006, page 48

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C HARLES D OYLE Charles Altamont Doyle (1832-1893) Charles Doyle was one of the most distinctive fairy painters of the Victorian period, at turns high-spirited, sharp-witted, disturbing and melancholy. However, he was little known in his lifetime, at first overshadowed by his brothers, and later confined to a series of psychiatric hospitals.

Charles Doyle was born in London on 25 March 1832, into a Roman Catholic family of Irish extraction. He was coached as an artist by his father, the political caricaturist, John Doyle (‘HB’), and so followed in the footsteps of his elder brothers: James (1822-1892), Henry (1827-1892) and – especially – Richard (18241883). Yet, in 1849, his father advised that he abandon his artistic ambitions and take a job in Edinburgh, as assistant to Robert Matheson, the architect of the Scottish Office of Works. From December 1853, he also studied at the Trustees’ Academy, as a result of Matheson’s recommendation. His architectural projects included the figures for Matheson’s fountain for the forecourt of Holyrood Palace (1859). In 1855, he had married Mary Foley, daughter of the first of his Edinburgh landladies. They would raise seven children together, their third child and eldest son being Arthur Conan Doyle.

During his spare time, Doyle continued to produce distinctive paintings and illustrations, but gained no reputation from them, despite the sympathetic advice of his successful brother, Dicky. As a result, he felt increasingly inadequate, and soon moved from ineffectual charm to exhaustion and alcoholism.

Losing his job in June 1876, he was sent to Fordoun House, a nursing home in Kincardineshire specialising in the treatment of alcoholics. The pathologist, Bryan Charles Waller – who was lodging with the Doyles – may have been instrumental in this confinement; Waller certainly became very close to the family, taking them with him when he moved and inviting Mary Foley Doyle to reside in a cottage on the Waller estate in Yorkshire, which she did for over 30 years from 1882.

Meanwhile, Doyle’s condition deteriorated rapidly, as he developed delirium tremens, epilepsy and bouts of depression. Following an attempt to break out of Fordoun House in May 1885, he was moved south to Sunnyside Royal Hospital, Forfarshire, where he remained for seven years. In 1892, he was transferred to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and, in May of the same year, to Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries, dying there on 10 October 1893.

Throughout his years of incarceration, Doyle had continued to produce work, including illustrations for publication. However, it was the unpublished drawings that best revealed his states of mind. His fairy subjects seem to represent the hospitalised communities in which he lived, parallel to mainstream society but distinct from it, and with their own freedoms as well as demands.

His later projects included the illustrations to A Study in Scarlet – the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories, written by his son, Arthur Conan Doyle – for its first appearance in hard covers in 1888. Conan Doyle had drawn on aspects of his father’s appearance and character in creating his famous detective, and would be influenced by his imagination in writing The Coming of the Fairies (1921). He also organised an ‘Exhibition of Drawings and Studies by the late Charles Doyle’ at the Brook Street Galleries in 1924. On seeing the exhibition, ‘George Bernard Shaw thought the paintings deserved a room to themselves in any national gallery’ (Baker 1978, page xv). Yet it took another six decades before he began to be properly appreciated.

His work is represented in the collections of the V&A; and The Huntington Library (San Marino, CA).

Further reading: Michael Baker, The Doyle Diary, London: Paddington Press, 1978 (a facsimile of Charles Doyle’s sketchbook for 1889); Rodney Engen, Michael Heseltine and Lionel Lambourne, Richard Doyle and his Family, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983; Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales. The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, London: Penguin Books, 1999; Robert R Wark, Charles Doyle’s Fairyland, San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1980

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‘My father, Charles Doyle, was in truth a great unrecognised genius. His mind was on strange moonlight effects, done with extraordinary skill in watercolours; dancing witches, drowning seamen, death coaches on lonely moors at night, and goblins chasing children across churchyards.’

(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, quoted in Stashower 1999, page 154)

108 Grouse Mistake Youth and Age in Nature and Fairyland Inscribed with title and dated ‘Tomorrow’s the 12th’ Pen ink and watercolour 6 3⁄4 x 9 1⁄2 inches Taken from a sketchbook of the 1880s, which is inscribed ‘Ida with Mama’s love’ and dated ‘11th April 1899’ on the inside front cover. Ida was the nickname of Doyle’s youngest daughter, Jane Adelaide Rose

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109 Discussing the Utility of Tails Inscribed with title Inscribed with title on reverse Pen ink and watercolour 5 x 7 1⁄4 inches Provenance: From the collection of Dr Aidan McGennis, MB, DPM, MRCPsych

110 On the North West Coast of Ireland Fairies and Piper The Piper’s name was Shaughan and these are his Burgh carried down from the North Inscribed with title on reverse Pen ink and watercolour 5 x 7 1⁄4 inches Provenance: From the collection of Dr Aidan McGennis, MB, DPM, MRCPsych

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J OHN S IMMONS John Simmons (1823-1876) While little is known about the life of the provincial artist, John Simmons, his name lives on as the creator of some astonishing fairy pictures and portraits.

John Simmons was born in Clifton, near Bristol, and worked there as a painter of watercolour portraits, and especially miniatures, in the 1850s. In the mid 1860s, he turned to fairy paintings. These invariably portray Titania, Queen of the Fairies, as an unattainable, pale fleshed nude set within a bower of exotic flowers. The erotic charge of such images is self-evident. However, the technical means by which Simmons created their atmosphere should not be under-estimated. His delicate application of pure watercolour gives an otherworldly quality even to the domestic environment of By the Window, and so suggests that it is more than a portrait and conceals a narrative. Simmons died in Bristol.

111 By the Window Watercolour with bodycolour 12 3⁄4 x 10 1⁄4 inches

B IRKET F OSTER Myles Birket Foster, RWS (1825-1899) Myles Birket Foster was one of the most popular artists of the Victorian period, achieving success first as an illustrator and then as an exhibition watercolourist. In both disciplines, he conveyed a gentle naturalism through mastery of technique.

Myles Birket Foster was born at North Shields, Northumberland, on 4 February 1825, the youngest of seven children of a Quaker brewer. When he was five years old, the family moved to London, and his father founded M B Foster & Sons, the largest firm of bottlers in the world. His artistic talents were encouraged at two Quaker boarding schools: Grove House in Tottenham and Isaac Brown’s Academy in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where he received lessons from Charles Parry. However, despite his desire to be a landscape painter, he had to join the family business, and was allowed to leave only after he had a serious accident with a broken bottle.

At the age of 16, Foster began an apprenticeship in wood engraving with the Northumbrian, Ebenezer Landells, a one-time apprentice of a Foster family friend, Thomas Bewick. Landells soon recognised Foster’s talents as a draughtsman, and allowed him to

make designs for cutting, among which was a beautiful series of initial letters for Punch (1841-43), and others for The Illustrated London News. From 1846, he worked independently as a black and white illustrator, notably of poetry, and established close collaborations with the engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, and the engraver and publisher, Henry Vizetelly. With the first, he travelled across England for a series on watering places for The Illustrated London News. For the second, he illustrated Longfellow’s Evangeline (1849) and Hyperion (1853), among other titles – developing the latter project with Vizetelly during their journey down the Rhine in 1852. A similar journey, in 1854, provided material for Foster’s own album, The Rhine and its Picturesque Journey, published in 1856.

In 1850, Foster had married his cousin, Anne Spence, and settled in St John’s Wood. Together, they would have five children, including the painter and ornithologist, William Foster (1853-1924). She encouraged her husband’s ambition to paint, and he responded by producing landscapes and rustic scenes in the Home Counties and on the Continent. He even developed a flexible stippled technique that enabled him to become one of the few artists to transfer the ☛ page 50

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☛ medium of watercolour successfully to large surfaces. Anne died of tuberculosis in 1859, just a year before he succeeded in establishing himself as a painter.

He was elected an Associate of the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1860 and a full member in 1862, when he published his culminating achievement as an illustrator, Pictures of English Landscapes. Among his later works were oils that he exhibited at the Royal Academy. As late as 1895, he would be elected to the membership of the Berlin Academy.

In the early 1860s, Foster built The Hill, a Tudor-style house in Witley, Surrey, which was decorated by his artist friends, including members of the Pre-Raphaelite firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Having settled in, he embarked on a second marriage, in 1864, to Frances Watson, the sister of the watercolourist, John Dawson Watson. Their many visitors included the painters, William Quiller Orchardson and Frederick

Walker. In 1893, ill health forced him to sell much of his impressive collection of pictures and move to a smaller house in Weybridge. He would die there on 27 March 1899.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including The Courtauld Gallery and the V&A; and Tyne & Wear Museums.

Further reading: Jan Reynolds, Birket Foster, London: Batsford, 1984; Jan Reynolds, ‘Foster, (Myles) Birket (1825-1899), H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 20, pages 495-496; Scott Wilcox, ‘Foster, Myles Birket (b Tynemouth, Northumb., 4 Feb 1825; d Weybridge, Surrey, 27 March 1899)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 11, page 331

112 The Milkmaid Signed with monogram Watercolour with bodycolour 10 1⁄2 x 8 inches Exhibited: ‘Birket Foster.

Watercolourist & Illustrator’, Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museums, Burnley, 21 March9 May 1999, and Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, 22 May-21 July 1999

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H ENRY B ENJAMIN R OBERTS Henry Benjamin Roberts, RBA RI LA (1831-1915) One of the finest followers of William Henry Hunt, Henry Benjamin Roberts became best known for his scenes of rustic comedy in both oil and watercolour.

Henry Benjamin Roberts was born in London Road, Liverpool, on 5 February 1831, the son of Benjamin Roberts, a house decorator who also exhibited genre and still life paintings. Beginning his career in his father’s business, Henry painted in his spare time and then entered Liverpool Academy Schools as a probationer in 1850. It is believed that he also studied under William Fettes Douglas in Edinburgh in 1855. Like his father, he exhibited at the Liverpool Academy, in the years 1852-65, and was elected an associate in 1855 and a member in 1859. He married Ann Barton of Liverpool in 1860. He also seems to have been elected to the Literary & Philosophical Society of Liverpool in 1861.

However, from 1859, Roberts exhibited in London, at the British Institution (until 1866) and the Royal Academy (until 1875). He had an address in the capital, at 38 Baker Street, by 1860, when he began to exhibit at the Society of British Artists. He was elected unanimously as an associate of the New Society of

‘All this artist’s productions have a trenchant character, a quiet humour, and a directness of purpose, which, after the circumlocution and subterfuge of pseudo-students of nature, are truly refreshing.’

(The Art Journal, 1868, page 112, ‘Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. Thirty-Fourth Exhibition’)

113 The Frozen Pump Signed and dated 76 Watercolour with bodycolour 22 x 14 inches

Painters in Water Colours in 1867, and a full member three years later. (He would resign in 1884.) Between 1869 and 1877, he also contributed to magazines, including The Illustrated London News and Once a Week. During this period, he was living at Haverstock Hill, first in St James’s Gardens (by 1867) and later at 14 Eton Villas, Eton Road (by 1878). He became a member of the Society of British Artists in 1878. Maintaining connections with his birthplace, he exhibited at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition between 1871 and 1904.

Early in the 1880s, Roberts left London for Leyton in Essex, and spent time in Ness, Cheshire (1890), and Trefriw, Caernarvonshire (1895). He died at Leyton on 23 January 1915.

His work is represented in the collections of the Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool).

Further reading: Mary Bennett (ed), Merseyside. Painters, People & Places, Catalogue of Oil Paintings of the Walker Gallery, Liverpool – Text, Merseyside County Council, 1978, page 182

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G EORGE G OODWIN K ILBURNE George Goodwin Kilburne, RBA RI RMS ROI (1839-1924) George Goodwin Kilburne worked in both oil and watercolour to produce highly detailed scenes of historical and contemporary genre. These became particularly popular through the dissemination of engraved reproductions.

George Goodwin Kilburne was born at Hackford, near Reepham in Norfolk, on 24 July 1839. He was the eldest child of Goodwin Kilburne of Hawkhurst, Kent, who acted as the Principal of Tudor Hall Academy. At the age of 15, he moved to London to receive an apprenticeship in wood engraving from the Dalziel brothers and, in 1862, married Janet, the daughter of the painter, Robert Dalziel.

In the early 1860s, Kilburne turned to painting and, from 1863, exhibited at various societies, including the Royal Academy. He was elected to the New Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1866 (renamed the Royal Institute in 1883), the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1883, the Royal Miniature Society in 1898, and the Royal Society of British Artists. He was also a member of the Artists’ Society and Langham Sketching Club.

His paintings became popular as prints and as reproductions published in a number of magazines,

114 A Game of Tennis Signed and dated 82 Watercolour, 13 1⁄2 x 19 3⁄4 inches

including The Graphic (1873-77). Following the death of Napoleon III in exile in Chislehurst, in 1873, the Empress Eugénie commissioned Kilburne to paint images of several of the rooms that he had occupied.

Kilburn travelled extensively in Italy and elsewhere in the mid 1870s. Around the same time, the architects, Batterbury and Huxley, built Hawkhurst House for him at 39 Steeles Road, Haverstock Hill, Hampstead – a popular area for artists. Seven years after the death of his first wife in 1882, he married again. His later work includes many designs for greeting cards for Raphael Tuck & Sons and De La Rue. At the time of his death, on 26 June 1924, Kilburne was living at 16 Albion Road, Swiss Cottage. However, he died at 38 Steeles Road, the home of his daughter, Florence.

Of the five children from his first marriage, George Goodwin Kilburne Jnr also became an artist.

He also had two children with his second wife.

His work is represented in the collections of Manchester Art Gallery.

Exhibited: ‘Pure Gold, 50 Years of the Federation of British Artists’, Mall Galleries, 9-19 February 2011; ‘Court on Canvas: Tennis in Art’, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, May-September 2011

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F RANCIS S YDNEY M USCHAMP Francis Sydney Muschamp Jnr, RBA (1851-1929) Francis Sydney Muschamp was a painter of genre, history and mythology, being best known for his scenes of Classical, Elizabethan and Baroque life and literature. His Classical works have been compared to those of Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Painters in Oils, and also in Birmingham. He was elected a member of the RBA in 1893, by which time he was living at 18 Goldhurst Terrace, South Hampstead.

Francis Sydney Muschamp was born in Hull, the son of the landscape painter, Francis Muschamp (active 1865-1881). The family was living at 58 College Place, Camden Town, London, by 1865, the year in which Muschamp Snr began to exhibit at the Royal Society of British Artists. Three years later, they moved to 124 Gloucester Road, Regent’s Park, and Muschamp Jnr began to exhibit at the Royal Society of British Artists from that address in 1870. In 1876, the family moved again, to 52 Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill.

Tennis Circa 1882 Tennis developed greatly as a popular sport through the 1870s and 1880s, with the world’s first club being established in Leamington Spa in 1874. A year later, the All England Croquet Club, Wimbledon, set aside one of its lawns for tennis and, in 1877, held the first Gentlemen’s single competition, at the same time changing its name to The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club.

Muschamp Jnr exhibited oils at the RBA (from 1870), the Royal Academy (1884-1903), the Royal Institute of

115 The Tennis Party Signed and dated 1882 Oil on canvas, 16 x 22 1⁄2 inches

He was living at Marcus Stone House, 6 Earl’s Court Square, SW5, at the time of his death.

The Wimbledon club added Ladies’ Singles and Gentleman’s Doubles in 1884, while the first English championships for mixed doubles took place in 1888 at the Northern Tournament, Liverpool. However, the Irish were ‘more favourably disposed to sporting womanhood’ than the English and ‘had inaugurated ladies’ championships as early as 1879’ (Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History, London: Leicester University Press, 1997, page 200).

Exhibited: ‘Chris Beetles Summer Show’, 2010, no 9; ‘Court on Canvas: Tennis in Art’, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, May-September 2011

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C HARLES G REEN Charles Green RI (1840-1898) Charles Green was a painter and illustrator of genre and historical subjects. He is now best remembered for images illustrating, or inspired by, the work of Charles Dickens.

Charles Green studied at Leigh’s School of Fine Art and under the engraver, J W Whymper, before quickly establishing himself as a painter and illustrator.

Specialising in genre pieces, he joined the Langham Sketching Club and was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (ARI 1864; RI 1867).

the early numbers of The Graphic were admired by Van Gogh, but he was best known for his depiction of period settings and for his illustrations to The Old Curiosity Shop in Dickens’ ‘Household Edition’ (1871). Green often transformed his delicate pen and ink illustrations with the addition of watercolour. Also painting in oils, he exhibited at the Royal Academy until 1883. He died at Hampstead 15 years later on 4 May 1898. The Fine Art Society held a memorial show in October of the same year.

His elder brother, Henry Towneley Green, was also a member. His contribution of contemporary subjects to

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the V&A; and the Mercer Art Gallery (Harrogate).

116 Little Nell and her Grandfather at the Races (The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens) Signed and inscribed with title on backboard

Watercolour 8 x 13 3⁄4 inches Provenance: John Fulleylove

M ARY G OW Mary Lightbody Gow, RI RMS (1851-1929) Brought up in an artistic circle, Mary Gow developed into a skilled painter of genre scenes, especially those that featured girls.

Mary Gow was born in London, on 25 December 1851, the daughter of James Gow, a painter of genre and historical subjects. She grew up 35 Fitzroy Square, and studied at Queen’s Square School of Art and the Heatherley School of Fine Art. Developing as a genre painter, specialising in subjects of girls, she exhibited

oils and watercolours at leading venues from the age of 18; those venues included the Society of British Artists (1869-80), the Royal Academy (1873-75) and, especially, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, of which she was elected a member in 1875. From the early 1880s, she turned increasingly to illustration, and contributed to children’s books and such periodicals as Cassell’s Family Magazine, The Graphic, Harper’s Magazine and The Quiver.

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Both Mary Gow and her artist brother, Andrew, were members of the circle of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the highly popular painter of classical history subjects. They moved from Fitzroy Square (circa 1890) to houses in Grove End Road, in St John’s Wood, where Alma-Tadema had constructed a property to his own design. It is probably through Alma-Tadema that Gow met her future husband, Sydney Prior Hall, also a painter and

illustrator. On their marriage in 1903, she resigned from the RI, though remained a member of the Royal Miniature Society (following her election in 1900).

She died in London on 27 May 1929.

Her work is represented in the collections of the V&A; and Manchester Art Gallery.

117 A Children’s Garden Party, Pallinsburn House Signed and dated 1878 Watercolour and bodycolour 17 1⁄4 x 22 inches Exhibited: Institute of Painters in Water Colours, 1878, no 75, as ‘A Children’s Garden Party’

A Children’s Garden Party, Pallinsburn House Mary Gow was a London-based painter, whose travels tended to take her to the Southern counties and beyond to the Continent.

But while it seems surprising that she should have visited Northumberland, it must be considered fortuitous that, while there, she produced one her most ambitious and enchanting images. For, in A Children’s Garden Party, she extravagantly exploited her expertise for painting children by multiplying her more usual simple and small-scale compositions. The result provides an idyllic representation of the leisure pursuits of the juvenile upper classes during the later Victorian period.

The setting for the party is eighteenth-century Pallinsburn House, owned in the 1870s by Watson Askew. It still stands, close to both the Scottish border and the ruins of Norham Castle, so famously painted by J M W Turner. Soon after Gow

depicted the scene, Augustus Hare included a passage concerning the house and its environs in one of his guide books: This place was anciently Paulinus-burn, from Paulinus, who baptized his Northumbrian converts in its lake. The water of the lake is bright green. It is resorted to by some of the birds of the Farne Islands, and in spring they cover its banks and isleets like snow, and attend the ploughmen who are working in the fields, by hundreds together. The house contains a very large and magnificent picture of the Adoration of the Shepherds, by Bassano; also the flag under which the Grenadier Guards fought at Waterloo, given to Sir Henry Askew, who commanded them upon the field. (A Handbook for Travellers in Durham and Northumberland, London: John Murray, 1873, page 319)

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G EORGE S AMUEL E LGOOD George Samuel Elgood, RI ROI (1851-1943) George Samuel Elgood is best known for his watercolours of gardens, which were informed by a combination of observation and knowledge, and exemplfiy a classic genre of the Edwardian age.

However, his range encompassed landscapes and interiors, as is exemplified by the present work.

George Samuel Elgood was born in Oxford Street, Leicester, on 26 February 1851, one of 10 children of a wool merchant. Brought up in Suffolk, he was educated privately and, for a year, from 1865, at Bloxham School, near Banbury. For financial reasons, the family returned to Leicester soon after that date. He studied at Leicester School of Art, and sketched the surrounding countryside with his teacher, Wilmot Pilsbury; his brother, Thomas Elgood; and his future brother-in-law, John Fulleylove. Another brother, Richard, would found the Leicester firm, Elgood Brothers, Art Metalworkers.

Elgood specialised in architecture at the National Art Training School, South Kensington (which later became the Royal College of Art). However, the death of his father in 1874, forced him to return to Leicester to take over the family yarn agency. Though able to paint only in his spare time, he managed to produce images of Leicestershire and elsewhere, and began to exhibit them at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool and in London at the Dudley Gallery and the Baillie Gallery.

Following his marriage to the artist, Mary Clephan, in 1881, Elgood painted full time. They based themselves at Rose Cottage, Markfield, Leicestershire, and also spent several months each year in Italy. He exhibited at London and provincial societies, and at dealers, including the Leicester Galleries and especially the Fine Art Society, where he held 13 solo shows. He was elected to the membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1881) and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (1883).

After the turn of the century, Elgood worked increasingly as an illustrator of books, including Some English Gardens (1904 with Gertrude Jekyll), Some Italian Gardens (1907) and two books by Alfred Austin: The Garden that I Love (1905) and Lamia’s Winter Quarters (1907). He worked as a landscape gardener, specialising in the laying out of formal gardens, and becoming an authority on Renaissance gardens in England, Italy and Spain. From 1908, he lived with Mary at Knockwood, Tenterden, Kent, dying there on 21 October 1943. His wife survived him by 15 years.

His work is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery New South Wales (Sydney).

Further reading: Diana Baskervyle-Glegg, ‘Elgood, George Samuel (18511943), H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 18, pages 43-44; Eve Eckstein, George Samuel Elgood: His Life and Work 1851-1943, London: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1995 For a further work by George Samuel Elgood, please see page 102.

118 The Screen, Le Folgoët, Brittany Signed Watercolour 14 x 11 3⁄4 inches Literature: Charles Holme (ed), The Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, The Studio, Special Number, Spring 1906, plate xvii Exhibited: Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours

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J OHN H ENRY H ENSHALL John Henry Henshall, RWS MAFA (1856-1928) John Henry Henshall specialised in large-scale genre scenes in watercolour in an absorbing realistic mode. His favourite themes included the contrast of youth and old age, as in the present example.

John Henry Henshall was born in Manchester on 11 April 1856, the son of Benjamin Henshall, a pawnbroker and money lender. Initially studying at Manchester School of Art under William Jabez Muckley, he moved to London in March 1876 and took up a place at the National Art Training School. However, after just a term, he transferred to the Royal Academy Schools, on the recommendation of Edward Poynter. In 1880, the RA Schools awarded him a silver medal for a Painting of a Head from the Life.

Becoming a figure and portrait painter in oil and especially watercolour, Henshall produced often largescale genre and historical scenes in a realist mode. He began exhibiting from as early as 1878, and especially

119 Joining Grandma for Tea Signed Watercolour 7 3⁄4 x 11 3⁄4 inches

at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Society of Painters in WaterColours (of which he became an associate in 1883, a full member in 1897). His work also appeared in provincial exhibitions and abroad, and he won several international medals.

During the 1880s and early 1890s, Henshall lived at a number of London addresses. However, in 1895, he went back to Lancashire and settled in Southport (possibly as the result of marriage). While there, he continued to exhibit regularly and, in 1901, became a member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. Then, in 1904, he returned south, and lived at ‘Torghatten’, a house on the Pinner Road, Harrow, and also at ‘The Cottage’, Bosham.

He is likely to have been the Henry Henshall who illustrated K H MacDermott’s Bosham Church: Its History and Antiquities, which appeared in 1911. In April 1912, the Leicester Galleries mounted a solo show of his work, entitled, ‘Watercolours of Cottage Folk’. He died on 18 November 1928.

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S T G EORGE H ARE St George Hare, RI ROI (1857-1933) St George Hare was a painter of contemporary and historical genre, and of portraits, who worked with equal success in oil and watercolour.

He was unusual and innovative among British painters of the period, in regularly painting the nude, in a style that seems inspired by the French academic, William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

The breadth of his achievement is well represented in the collections of Stourhead House, the National Trust property in Wiltshire.

He achieved popularity with subjects of children, exhibited at the Royal Academy (from 1884), and distinction when The Death of William the Conqueror, hung at the Royal Academy in 1886, won a gold medal during subsequent exhibition at the Crystal Palace.

In 1891, he exhibited his first important nude subject, The Victory of Faith, at the RA, and soon became known as one of the few Irish artists to work in this vein. These early successes helped him, through the 1890s, to fully establish his artistic reputation.

St George Hare was born in Limerick, Ireland, on 5 July 1857, the son of George Frederick Hare, a dentist from Ipswich, and his wife, Ella, who came from County Wexford. He spent three years at Limerick School of Art, studying under Nicholas A Brophy. Then, in 1875, he moved to London, studying for seven years at the National Art Training School, South Kensington, where he distinguished himself by acquiring all three art master’s certificates. Though he taught for a while, he concentrated on painting, specialising in portraits and figure subjects. In 1881, while still a student, he began to exhibit, first showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy.

An inhabitant of Chelsea, he helped to found the Chelsea Arts Club (1891), and was elected to the membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours (1892), the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils (1892) and the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists. He also contributed illustrations to The Graphic (in 1893, 1899 and 1912) and Outram Tristram’s historical romance, The Dead Gallant (1894). In 1893, he married Lily Freeman, the daughter of George St George Freeman, Mayor of Waterford, a dentist colleague of his father, and possibly his godfather. During the early 1900s, he received numerous commissions from Sir Henry Hoare of Stourhead. He died in hospital in London on 30 January 1933.

His work is represented in the collections of Stourhead House (Wiltshire).

120 Politicians Watercolour 17 1⁄2 x 11 1⁄2 inches Exhibited: Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, 1898, no 292 (Diploma Work); ‘Pure Gold’, 50 Years of the Federation of British Artists, Mall Galleries, 9-19 February 2011

7.

AESTHETICISM

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A cult of beauty had been intrinsic to European, and especially French, civilisation since at least the early nineteenth century. As an extreme form of Romanticism, it opposed bourgeois philistinism and its need for art to have a purpose.

The cult was introduced into the English-speaking world during the early 1870s by Francophile artists and writers, such as James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde, who attempted to apply the expression, ‘art for art’s sake’, to every aspect of their lives as well as their work.

Aestheticism drew on the more solipsistic aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism – particularly the ideal worlds of Rossetti and Burne-Jones – and the decorative thrust of the Arts and Crafts Movement. It also found inspiration in Oriental art, and especially that of Japan, which was only just opening up to the west. Japanese woodblock prints, in particular, were valued for their artificiality, asymmetry and emphasis on tonal harmony.

Tropes of aestheticism were applied to a wide variety of cultural products, even those intended for children. So the picture books of Walter Crane – whose work ranged from illustration to interior design – are replete with images of black lacquer furniture, blue and white china, and floral prints. The movement also affected other definitions of beauty, such as that embodied in Charles Dana Gibson’s all-American ‘Gibson Girl’.

The extreme and manifest aspects of Aestheticism were ripe for satire, and soon parodied in the Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, notably Patience (1881), and the cartoons of George Du Maurier, who had been of a friend of Whistler and influenced Gibson. Those aspects also provoked more negative responses as Aestheticism became increasingly equated with decadence.

In the mid 1870s, John Ruskin described Whistler as ‘throwing a pot of paint in the public’s face’ for painting an abstracted falling rocket in Nocturne in Black and Gold, and so provoked him into suing unsuccessfully for libel. Two decades later, in 1895, Wilde brought a private prosecution against the Marquess of Queensberry for accusing him of sodomy, and when that failed, was himself brought to trial and convicted for gross indecency.

The imprisonment of Wilde cast a shadow across the careers of many of the artists who had been associated with Aestheticism, including Wilde’s one-time illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley. The death of Beardsley of tuberculosis in 1898, at the age of only 25, proved another blow to the movement while also helping to fuel its almost mythological status.

G EORGE D U M AURIER George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier (1834-1896) Equally talented as artist and writer, George Du Maurier developed a cartoon format for Punch that balanced text and image in order to record and satirise the fashions and foibles of society.

George Du Maurier was born on 6 March 1834 in the Champs-Elysées, Paris, and baptised in May 1835 at Rotherfield, Sussex. He spent his childhood, between England and the Continent, in an atmosphere of precarious gentility. His father came from a French family of master glassblowers but, obsessed with social status, gave himself the aristocratic name of Du Maurier. As a novelist, George Du Maurier would rehearse the events of his early life in general but, as a cartoonist for Punch, he would concentrate on dissecting the pretensions and foibles of the society in which he lived, and to which his family had been prey.

Though Du Maurier failed his baccalauréat, his father was determined that he should take up a steady profession. So, in 1851, he enrolled at the Birkbeck Chemical Laboratory, University College, London. After a wasted year, he left to work as an analytical chemist, but spent his most profitable hours drawing at the British Museum so that, on the death of his father in

1856, he returned to Paris to study art. He spent a sociable year at the Atelier Gleyre as part of the English group, befriending Edward Poynter and meeting James McNeill Whistler, and then moved to Antwerp to further his studies at the city’s Academy of Arts, under Jacob Van Lerius. The sudden loss of the sight of his left eye, however, led to a period of great uncertainty as to his future career. Joined by his mother, he lived first at Malines and later at Düsseldorf, desperately consulting oculists while still attempting to work. In 1860, he finally decided to settle in London and, encouraged by the example of John Leech, tried to earn his living as an illustrator.

In London, Du Maurier reacquainted himself with Whistler and members of the English group, and became immersed in an enlightened social circle while beginning to contribute – as artist and writer – to such leading periodicals as Once a Week, Good Words and The Cornhill Magazine. By evolving his own style from the work of the finest of contemporary illustrators, he developed the extensive repertoire of immediately recognisable motifs and gestures on which he drew increasingly for the satires and parodies that he published in Punch.

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Du Maurier became a regular member of the Punch team in 1864, when John Tenniel and Charles Keene both voted for him to succeed the recently deceased Leech as observer of society. In its pages he developed a very literary type of cartoon, which married oftenextensive texts to subtle drawing and displayed an understanding of wider cultural issues. This reached its peak in his satires of the upper middle class attempting to follow the fashions of the Aesthetic Movement.

Through his career, he moved from a position of Bohemianism – from which he defended the PreRaphaelites and tolerated Whistler – to one that, at worst, revealed ‘his essential snobbery, conservatism and loathing of change’ (Ormond 1969, page 248), and inevitably lost him many friends.

But as his graphic talent failed, he found new, and phenomenal, success as the novelist of Peter Ibbetson (1891), The Martian (1896) and particularly Trilby (1894), in which he returned to the youthful extremes of Bohemian life that he had eschewed in his cartoons.

He died at home in Oxford Square, Paddington, on 8 October 1896. A memorial show was held at the Fine Art Society in the February of the following year.

Though Du Maurier has been dubbed as ‘naturally lazy’*, he had to provide for a wife and three children without straining his one good eye. For much of his career, he could work safely for only two hours a day, and during the 1890s considered retiring from illustration in order to become a professional lecturer.

By that time, he needed to work with a magnifying glass in order to complete his regular work for Punch.

Further reading: Leonée Ormond, ‘Du Maurier, George Louis Palmella Busson (1834-1896)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 17, pages 177-180; Leonée Ormond, George Du Maurier, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969

*Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1996, page 124 His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum.

121 Hardly Consistent!

Brown (to Smith): ‘Ugh! there goes Jones, as usual, with a crowd of adoring Duchesses hanging on his lips, and grovelling at his feet, and following him all over the room! How disgusting it is to see a man of talent toadying up to the aristocracy like that!’

Signed Signed and inscribed with title on mount Pen and ink 5 x 8 inches Illustrated: Punch, 23 February 1889, page 90; Society Pictures drawn by George Du Maurier, selected from ‘Punch’, London: Bradbury Agnew & Co, vol ii, page 51

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122 Affiliating an Aesthete Pilcox, a promising young pharmaceutical chemist, has modelled from memory an heroic group, in which Mrs Cimabue Brown is represented as the muse of this century, crowning Postlethwaite and Maudle as the twin gods of its poetry and art.

Postlethwaite: ‘No loftiah theme has evah employed the sculptah’s chisel!’

Maudle: ‘Distinctly so! Only work on in this reverent spirit, Mr Pilcox, and you will achieve the truly great!’

Mrs Cimabue Brown: ‘Nay! You have achieved it! Oh, my young friend, do you not know what you are, a heaven born genius?’

Poor Pilcox: ‘I do!’ (Gives up his pestle and mortar, and becomes a hopeless nincompoop for life.)

Signed Inscribed with title and dated ‘June 19 80’ below mount Pen and ink 5 3⁄4 x 8 3⁄4 inches Illustrated: Punch, 19 June 1880, page 287; Society Pictures drawn by George Du Maurier, selected from ‘Punch’, London: Bradbury Agnew & Co, vol ii, page 231 Exhibited: Fine Art Society, 1884, no 144

Affiliating an Aesthete For the decade between 1873 and 1882, George Du Maurier produced a series of highly memorable cartoons for Punch which satirised the Aesthetic Movement and its extravagant cult of the beautiful. However, he gave the series a proper sense of unity only by introducing Mrs Cimabue Brown, the leader of a circle of aesthetic enthusiasts (1877) and then the painter Maudle and the poet Postlethwaite (1880). Here they are joined by Peter Pilcox, who gives up chemistry for sculpture, and vies with Postlethwaite for public attention.

124 (opposite page) How the distinguished amateur’s reputations are made, sometimes.

Herr Silbermund (the great pianist) to Mrs Bonamy Tatler: – ‘Ach! Lady Crichton has, for bainting, ze most remarrgaple chenius! Look at zis! It is equal to Felasquez!’

M Languedor (the famous painter) to Miss Gushington: – Ah! For ze music, Miladi Cretonne has a talent quite exceptionnel!

Listen to zat! It surpasses Madame Schumann!’ (Whence it gets about that on the very highest professional authority, Lady Crichton’s music and painting (which are just on a par) are of the very highest artistic order!’

Signed and inscribed with title Signed, inscribed with instructions to printer and dated ‘Apr 27. 87 Bayswater’ below mount Pen and ink 6 1⁄4 x 10 inches Illustrated: English Society, Sketched by George Du Maurier, with a Foreword by W D Howells, London: Osgood, Mcilvaine & Co, 1897, [unpaginated]

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123 What we may come to in time Mrs Brabasour Vavazon (reading extract from Journal of Anthropological Institute, May, 1878, pp 480-1). ‘The bodies of the Motu girls in New Guinea are covered with tattoo marks resembling fine lace garments ... it has the appearance of a tight-fitting suit of clothes’

Ethel and Clara. ‘How quite too lovely!’

Sir George and the Colonel. ‘Aw-Yes! Awf’lly jolly!’

Signed and inscribed with title Pen and ink 6 1⁄2 x 7 inches Illustrated: Punch, 9 November 1878, page 210

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W ILLIAM J OHN H ENNESSY William John Hennessy, ROI PS NA (1839-1917) Irish born William John Hennessy established himself as a painter and illustrator in New York before settling in England in 1870, and becoming a member of a significant expatriate community.

He then became well known for a range of genre scenes set in the open air, in a style that synthesised the precision of Pre-Raphaelitism and the atmospherics of French Naturalism, the latter absorbed through long stays in Normandy.

William John Hennessy was born in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Ireland, on 11 July 1839, the son of John Hennessy and Catherine (née Laffin). John Hennessy’s involvement in the Young Ireland movement led to his forced emigration to Canada in 1848.

Following his move to New York in the following year, his family joined him and settled in the city.

Receiving his education from private tutors, William Hennessy made his first drawings from life in his early teens. He entered the National Academy of Design late in 1854, and exhibited there regularly between 1857 and 1870.

In 1854, The New York Times recorded that the Hennessy family was living at 87 Franklin Street, and reported the extraordinary news that John Hennessy there assaulted David Wemyss Jobson, the former Surgeon-Dentist to Queen Victoria, who had settled in the city and become a journalist. The assault seems to have been a form of revenge, Jobson having apparently insulted Thomas Francis Meagher, a member of Young Ireland, in the Fifth Avenue Journal. Though John Hennessy appeared in court, the outcome is unknown.

From 1860, William Hennessy gave his exhibition address as the studio complex known as the New York University building. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1861 and an academician in 1863. On election, he presented The Wood Gleaner, an oil sketch on paper, as a representative example of his work. A founder member of the Artists’ Fund Society in 1859, he was invited to join the private club, the Century Association, in 1864, remaining a member for 12 years.

The American Society of Painters in Water Colors, founded in 1866, also made him an honorary member.

Developing a skill in wood engraving, Hennessy soon became sought after as an illustrator, especially of the work of poets, and notably of Tennyson and Whittier (for the publisher, Ticknor and Fields). As a result, he has gained a reputation as ‘the “graphic laureate” of the Victorian period’ (Ben Harris McClary (ed), George Washington Harris, The Lovingood Papers, Athens TN: Sut Society, 1967, page 28). However, ‘his most admired work in graphic design’ during his American period was

perhaps Mr Edwin Booth in His Various Dramatic Characters, a volume on the famous actor, which he worked on in 1870 and published in 1872 (Dearinger 2004, page 261).

In the late 1860s, Hennessy rented a house in Hamden, Connecticut, from the Mather family. He began a relationship with Charlotte Amelia Mather, a noted beauty who was then married to John Ward, a prominent New York surgeon, and had two illegitimate children with her (neither of whom survived infancy). Following Charlotte’s divorce, she and Hennessy married on 19 June 1870. They soon left for Europe, and stayed in Loughton, Essex, before settling in London. Travelling with them was Charlotte’s sister, Mary, who would help support them through her articles for The Atlantic Monthly. (Five years later, Charlotte’s younger brother, Thomas, would marry Margaret Linton, the daughter of Hennessy’s friend and collaborator, the engraver and printer, William James Linton. Linton himself lived in Hennessy’s former Hamden home.)

Through the 1870s, Hennessy lived at a number of addresses in Kensington, Chelsea and Chiswick, and developed a social circle that included such expatriate artists as Joseph Pennell and James McNeill Whistler, and also the illustrator, Randolph Caldecott. While continuing to work with American publishers, he established himself in England as both a painter and magazine illustrator. He exhibited landscapes and genre subjects in London, most notably at the Royal Academy (1871-82), and in the provinces, especially in Manchester and Glasgow. He also contributed to The Dark Blue (1871-73), The Graphic (1872-76; 1880) and Punch (1873-75), among other periodicals.

Spending many of his summers painting the rustic life and landscapes of Normandy, Hennessy began to lease Le Manoir de Pennedepie, Pres Honfleur, Calvados, in or before 1877. His work began to appear at an increasing number of venues, including the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (1879-1907), and the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery, both in London (the last of which opened in 1888). He would become a member of the Pastel Society, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Union Internationale des Beaux Arts and des Lettres, Paris, and also the Savile Club, which he often gave as his London address. As an illustrator, he worked mainly for Macmillan and Co, and particularly on the popular novels of Charlotte M Yonge. He also contributed to The English Illustrated Magazine (1884-92) and Black & White (1891).

In 1886, Hennessy moved from Honfleur to SaintGermain-en-Laye, near Paris, settling at the Pavillon Montespan in the Rue de Fourqueux. During his time

7: AESTHETICISM | 65

there, he also toured Italy. In 1893, he returned to England, living in Susssex, first at Brighton and then at Rudgwick, but continuing to spend much time in France.

He died at Rudgwick on 27 December 1917.

The Hennessys’ only surviving child, Nora, trained in Paris, at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and also became an artist. She married the painter, Paul Ayshford Methuen, the Fourth Baron Methuen, in 1915, and lived with him at Corsham Court.

Further reading: David Bernard Dearinger (ed), Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design, Manchester VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004, pages 261-262

The Swallows William John Hennessy produced this watercolour in October 1871, within a year of his arrival in London from New York, with his new wife, Charlotte, and her sister, Mary. At the time, they were living at Vine House, Chiswick, which had been built in the late eighteenth century.

Though atypical, the image reveals Hennessy’s success at essaying Aestheticism, the artistic credo that was only then gaining in popularity.

An elegant lady wears an unstructured dress and stands in an unspecified idyllic landscape. In showing the influence of Japanese art, it may be compared to works by Walter Crane, Albert Moore and Hennessy’s friend, James McNeill Whistler. To a degree, the birds and branches presage Crane’s 1878 wallpaper design, Almond Blossom and Swallow.

125 The Swallows Signed Signed with initials, inscribed ‘Vine House Chiswick’ and dated ‘Oct 1871’ Pen ink, watercolour and bodycolour on tinted paper 13 1⁄2 x 6 1⁄4 inches

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A Preliminary Checklist of Books Illustrated by William John Hennessy 1858 Thomas Chandler Haliburton, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, Esq, New York: Dick & Fitzgerald 1860 Charles E Whitehead, Wild Sports in the South; or, Campfires of the Everglades, New York: Derby & Jackson (with others) 1864 Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Sam Slick: The Clockmaker, Philadelphia: T B Peterson & Brothers Washington Irving, Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, New York 1865 Alfred Tennyson, Enoch Arden, Boston: Ticknor and Fields (with others) Alfred Tennyson, Gems from Tennyson, Boston: Ticknor & Fields (with others) 1866 Frederick Saunders (ed), Festival of Song: A Series of Evenings with the Poets, New York: Bobbett & Hooper (with others) John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 1867 Rebecca Harding Davis, Waiting for the Verdict, New York: Sheldon & Company 1868 John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-bound: a winter idyl, Boston: Ticknor and Fields (with others) 1869 The Atlantic Almanac for 1870, Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co (with others) Albert Deane Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi: From the Great River to the Great Ocean …, Hartford: American Publishing Company &c (with others) Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall, Boston: Ticknor and Fields John Greenleaf Whittier, Ballads of New England, Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co (with others) 1870 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, New York: C Scribner Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Building of the Ship, Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co (with R S Gifford) Winter Poems by Favorite American Poets, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co (with others) 1871 William Cullen Bryant, The Song of the Sower, New York: D Appleton & Company 1872 The Atlantic Almanac for 1873, Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co (with others) William Winter, Edwin Booth in Twelve Dramatic Characters, Boston: J R Osgood & Co William Winter, Mr Edwin Booth in his Various Dramatic Characters: From Life, Boston: J R Osgood & Co (These are possibly two versions of the same book) 1873 William Henry Herbert, The Spider and the Fly or, Tricks, Traps, and Pitfalls of City Life by One who Knows, New York: C Miller & Co 1877 J G Holland, Kathrina: Her Life and Mine in a Poem, New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co (with C C Griswold) 1878 Eleanor Catharine Price, A French Heiress in her own Château, London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co

1880 Lady Mary Anne Barker, The White Rat: And Some Other Stories, London: Macmillan and Co Moncure Daniel Conway, A Necklace of Stories, London: Chatto & Windus Poems of Alfred Tennyson, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company (with others) Daniel MacLeod (ed), Good Words for 1880, London: Isbister and Company (with others) Eleanor Catharine Price, The Story of a Demoiselle, Belfast: Marcus Ward & Company 1881 Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Chaplet of Pearls; or, The White and Black Ribaumont, London: Macmillan and Co Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest, London: Macmillan and Co 1882 Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Caged Lion [a story of James I of Scotland], London: Macmillan and Co Charlotte Mary Yonge, Unknown to History: a story of the captivity of Mary of Scotland, London: Macmillan and Co 1883 Sir Samuel White Baker, True Tales for my Grandson, London: Macmillan and Co Mary E Hullah, Hannah Tarne: A Story, London: Macmillan and Co Flora Louisa Shaw, Hector: A Story of Young People, London: George Bell and Sons Charlotte Mary Yonge, Magnum Bonum, or, Mother Carey’s Brood, Macmillan and Co Charlotte Mary Yonge, Nuttie’s Father, London: Macmillan and Co 1886 Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Two Sides of the Shield, London: Macmillan and Co 1888 Avery MacAlpine, Broken Wings, London: Chatto & Windus 1889 Charlotte Mary Yonge, Stray Pearls: Memoirs of Margaret de Ribaumont, Viscountess of Bellaise, London: Macmillan and Co Charlotte M Yonge, The Armourer’s Prentices, London: Macmillan and Co Charlotte Mary Yonge, Scenes and Characters; or Eighteen Months at Beechcroft, London: Macmillan and Co Charlotte Mary Yonge, Chantry House, London: Macmillan and Co Charlotte Mary Yonge, Love and Life: an old story in eighteenth century costume, London: Macmillan and Co Charlotte Mary Yonge, A Modern Telemachus, London: Macmillan and Co 1891 Mary Mather, A Chateau in France, Macmillan and Co 1892 Mrs Molesworth, An Enchanted Garden: Fairy Stories, London: T Fisher Unwin 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Suicide Club; and The Rajah’s Diamond, London: Chatto & Windus 1895 Susan Ferrier, Marriage, London: Macmillan and Co 1902 Frederic W Farrar, St Winifred’s, or, The World of School, Edinburgh: A & C Black F Milford, Strange Secrets, London: Chatto & Windus (with others)

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WALTER C RANE Walter Crane, RWS RI ROI (1845-1915) Though he considered himself primarily as a painter, Walter Crane was a wide-ranging artist and theorist who, allied to the Arts and Crafts Movement, developed as a significant and influential designer and illustrator. His groundbreaking ‘toy books’ of the 1860s and 1870s, printed by Edmund Evans, increasingly emulated the flat colour and asymmetrical compositions of fashionable Japanese prints. Later, William Morris employed Crane to work for the Kelmscott Press, and encouraged him to turn to Socialism.

Walter Crane was born in Liverpool on 15 August 1845, the son of the portrait painter, Thomas Crane. He grew up in Torquay and London. At the early age of 13 he made a set of coloured designs to Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott that were seen by the wood-engraver, William James Linton. He was so impressed that he took Crane on a three-year apprenticeship (1859-62), and not only gave him a thorough grounding in theory and practice of illustration but encouraged his interest in politics.

He also studied at Heatherley’s. In 1863, he met Edmund Evans, the pioneer of colour printing, and they soon began to produce the long series of cheap children’s picture books that made Crane’s name, beginning with The ‘House That Jack Built’ Alphabet (1865). From 1867, he also worked for the Dalziels, for Once a Week and Fun. His illustrative work in general would help to establish the Aesthetic Style of the 1870s and 1880s.

Meanwhile, inspired by Burne-Jones’s exhibits at the Old Water-Colour Society, Crane began to show paintings at the Dudley Gallery (and subsequently at many other venues, including the Fine Art Society and the Leicester Galleries). He met Burne-Jones and William Morris in 1871, the latter further stimulating his interest in politics. In the September of that year he married and set out with his wife for an extended honeymoon in Italy (the first of many travels), returning in 1873 and settling in Shepherd’s Bush. (Crane and his family would move to Holland Street, Kensington, two decades later.) While he continued to paint and exhibit, maintaining that his painting was his first love, he made his greatest mark as a prolific and versatile designer; he undertook important decorative schemes for George Howard, Frederic Leighton, Alexander Ionides and the American heiress, Catherine Wolfe.

126 Who dress’d my doll in clothes so gay, And taught me pretty how to play.

And minded all I had to say?

My Mother.

Watercolour and bodycolour 8 x 6 1⁄4 inches Illustrated: [Ann Taylor], My Mother, London: George Routledge and Sons (New Sixpenny Toy Books), 1873, page 3

Crane identified closely with the growing Socialist movement, and joined Morris’s Socialist League shortly after his establishment in 1884. In the same year he became a member of the Fabian Society, and for the rest of his life he often placed his versatile talents at the service of the Socialist cause. He was also much involved with art education, being Examiner in Design to the Board of Education to London County Council and the Scottish Board of Education; Director of Design at Manchester School of Art (1893-96); Director of the Art Department of Reading University (1898); Principal of the Royal College of Art (1898-99).

Ever willing to help raise the public profile of art, Crane was founder and first master of the Art Workers Guild (1884) and first President of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1888-93, and again in 1896-1912).

His memberships of the other exhibiting societies included the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1882-86, resigning to join the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours), ARWS (1888), RWS (1899), the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils (1893) and the Society of Painters in Tempera (as a founder in 1901). His many and influential publications include Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (1896), The Bases of Design (1898) and Line and Form (1900). He also published An Artist’s Reminiscences (1907). He had an international success as both designer and painter, and his later paintings – flat, stylised and symbolic – appealed in particular to German collectors. In 1902, his contribution to Turin’s decorative art show, in which he was assisted by Robert Anning Bell, led to his being made a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel. He died at Horsham Cottage Hospital, Sussex, on 14 March 1915. ☛ page 68

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☛ His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the V&A; Manchester Art Gallery; Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums; the Musée du Louvre (Paris); and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA).

Further reading: Alan Crawford, ‘Crane, Walter (1845-1915)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004,

vol 13, pages 996-998; Christopher Newall, ‘Crane, Walter (b Liverpool, 15 Aug 1845; d Horsham, W Sussex, 14 March 1915)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 8, pages 121-122; Gregory Smith and Sarah Hyde, Walter Crane: Designer and Socialist, London: Lund Humphries/Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 1989; Isobel Spencer, Walter Crane, London: Studio Vista, 1975

127 And can I ever cease to be Affectionate and kind to thee, Who was so very kind to me?

My Mother Signed with monogram Watercolour with bodycolour 8 x 12 1⁄4 inches Illustrated: [Ann Taylor], My Mother, London: George Routledge and Sons (New Sixpenny Toy Books), 1873, pages 4-5

My Mother ‘My Mother’, was written by Ann Taylor (1782-1866), and first published in the two-volume Original Poems for infant minds by several young persons of 1804 and 1805. Well known for her children’s poetry, the author was a member of the Taylors of Ongar, a once famous literary family that included her sister, Mary, who penned ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’, and her brother, Isaac Taylor, philosopher and theologian.

‘My Mother’ had become much loved – and much parodied – even before Walter Crane chose to illustrate it in 1873, as part of Routledge’s highly popular series of ‘sixpenny toy books’.

His images gave a new sophistication to the charming verses by employing asymmetrical compositions – inspired by Japanese prints – and including such characteristic features of the contemporary Aesthetic Style as black lacquered furniture, blue and white pottery and floral prints.

When his illustrations were reissued in 1910 in The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book, Crane wrote in its Preface, ‘“My Mother” is mid-Victorian – just after crinolines had gone out – but mothers are always in fashion, bless them’.

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K ATE G REENAWAY Catherine Greenaway, RI (1846-1901) The characteristic charm of Kate Greenaway’s illustrations resides in a simplicity of both vision and visual style. A past time – the Regency – is represented through clear outline and flat wash as the embodiment of innocence; an eternal English spring is peopled, for the most part, by graceful youths engaged in gentle occupation.

Kate Greenaway was born in Hoxton, East London, on 17 March 1846. The urban background of her childhood gave her a longing for the countryside, a longing made more definite and painful by happy memories of family holidays in Nottinghamshire. She would transform these desires into the enchanted yet homely visual world that made her name.

The favourite daughter of a wood-engraver to The Illustrated London News, Greenaway studied at the Finsbury School of Art, the National Art Training School, South Kensington, and, in 1870-71, at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. In 1871, she enrolled at the Slade School of Art, and spent time in the life class of the director, Edward Poynter, there meeting Helen Allingham, who later became a close friend.

Greenaway’s earliest fairy illustrations were robust, painterly and even grotesque, so revealing the influence of her distant cousin, Richard Dadd. But the child portraits that she exhibited at the Royal Academy, from 1877, more clearly marked the direction of her developing career. In the same year, she began to work for the printer and publisher Edmund Evans, who

recognised her original ability to emphasise the innocence of childhood through the use of a Regency setting. Her illustrated books and various designs – epitomised by The Kate Greenaway Almanack (which appeared between 1888 and 1897) – soon became enormously popular in both Britain and the United States. And, with Ruskin acting as champion and adviser, her fame and stature rapidly increased. She was elected to the membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RI) in 1889, and held three solo shows at the Fine Art Society (1891, 1893 and 1897). A fourth, memorial show was held at the gallery in the year following her death at Hampstead on 6 November 1901.

Her work is represented in the collections of the British Museum and the V&A; and the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and Manchester Art Gallery.

Further reading: Rodney Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography, London: Macdonald, 1981; Rosemary Mitchell, ‘Greenaway, Catherine [Kate] (1846-1901)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 23, pages 549-553; Emma M Routh, ‘Greenaway, Kate (b Hoxton, London, 17 March 1846; d Hampstead, London, 6 Nov 1901), Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 13, page 615; M H Spielmann and G S Layard, Kate Greenaway, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905

‘The fairy land she creates for you is not beyond the sky nor beneath the sea, but nigh you, even at your doors.’

(John Ruskin, The Art of England, 1883)

I’m going a milking, Sir, she said.

May I go with you, my pretty maid?

You’re kindly welcome, Sir, she said.

Who is your father, my pretty maid?

My father’s a farmer, Sir, she said.

What is your fortune, my pretty maid?

My face is my fortune, Sir, she said?

Then I won’t marry you, my pretty maid.

Nobody asked you, Sir, she said.

128 Where are you going to, my pretty maid?

Signed with initials pen ink and watercolour 2 x 4 inches Illustrated: The April Baby’s Book of Tunes with the story of how they came to be written by the author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’, London: Macmillan & Co, 1900, facing page 67

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M ORTIMER M ENPES Mortimer Luddington Menpes, RBA RE FRGS RI ROI NEAC (1855-1938) Gaining fame as a member of the circle of James McNeill Whistler, Australian-born Mortimer Menpes developed a style that tempered nineteenth-century realism with the bright, spare aesthetic of Japonisme. Equally skilled in watercolour, oil and etching, he exhibited widely and frequently, and became an active and popular member of many clubs and societies.

Mortimer Menpes was born in Port Adelaide, Australia, on 22 February 1855, the sixth of eight children of an English-born draper. He was privately educated at Adelaide Educational Institution, and while there received lessons in art, first from Charles Hill, and then from Wilton Hack. He also attended classes at Adelaide School of Design under John Hood.

In 1875, Menpes moved to London with members of his family and his fiancée, Rose Mary Grosse, the only child and heir of a wealthy Adelaide ironmonger and ship’s chandler. Still both minors, he and Rose married at All Soul’s Langham Place on 27 April 1875. Living first in Westminster, they had moved to Fulham by 1878, when Rose gave birth to the first of their six children. In that year, Menpes began to study under Edward Poynter at the National Art Training School, South Kensington (which later became the Royal College of Art). He spent the following two summers working at the artists’ colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany. Taking up printmaking in 1880, he exhibited two drypoints at the Royal Academy, the first of 35 works that he would show there over the next two decades.

In the winter of 1880-81, Menpes met James McNeill Whistler, who soon induced him to abandon his studies at the South Kensington Schools and join Walter Sickert as another of his disciples and studio assistants. As a

James McNeill Whistler, PRBA PIS (1834-1903) This flamboyant American artist studied in Paris, where he began his career as a Realist painter and, in 1858, made his name as an etcher. He soon moved to London, and synthesised a number of influences, including Japanese art, in order to develop an aesthetic of ‘Art’s for Art’s Sake’, which allowed a central appeal to the eye and eschewed literary association.

Taking as his subjects arrangements of colour, he produced work which had some connections with both Impressionism and Symbolism; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he became known as a supreme decorative artist. With reference to his painting of The Falling Rocket, Ruskin accused him of ‘throwing a pot of paint in the public’s face’ but, though he won the ensuing libel trial (1879), he was bankrupted in the process. He returned to etching, producing the First Venice Set for the Fine Art Society, which helped restore his fortunes. He had an influence on many younger artists but, maintaining a waspish, provocative manner, his friends easily became enemies. He properly established his reputation with the British public in 1892 only with a retrospective at the Goupil Gallery.

129 Dual faces with Cane Portrait of James Abbot McNeill Whistler Signed Drypoint, 7 1⁄2 x 5 1⁄2 inches Literature: A E Gallatin, The Portraits and Caricatures of James Mcneill Whistler. An Iconography, London: John Lane, 1913, page 30; A E Gallatin, Portraits of Whistler. A Critical Study and an Iconography, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918, page 54; Mortimer Menpes, Whistler as I knew him, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1904, facing page 136, as ‘Portrait Studies’; Gary Morgan, The Etched Works of Mortimer Menpes, Crafers West: Stuart Galleries, 2012, vol 1

The Australian artist Mortimer Menpes met Whistler at the Fine Art Society in the winter of 1880-81, while he was studying with Edward Poynter at the National Art Training School. He was one of the few of Whistler’s followers actually to receive instruction from him, and remained a member of his entourage through the 1880s, breaking with him in 1888. In 1904, he rehearsed his association by publishing the substantial memoir, Whistler as I Knew Him, which included among its illustrations a number of Menpes’s portraits of Whistler. As Eric Denker has written, After Walter Greaves, Menpes was the most prolific of the artist’s portraitists, representing Whistler in various media more than twenty times ... [His] portraits fall into three distinct categories: bust-length studies emphasizing Whistler’s range of expression [as in the example here], half- to three-quarter length representations of the artist seated, and sheets containing multiple images of the artist.

In each category Menpes focussed all of his attention on his sitter eliminating any background detail.

(In Pursuit of the Butterfly. Portraits of James McNeill Whistler, Washington: National Portrait Gallery, 1995, page 120).

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result, he became part of a circle of like-minded artists who absorbed the developments of Impressionism and approved, in particular, the achievement of Degas.

Among his various roles, he helped print Whistler’s Second Venice Set of etchings in 1883. Beginning to exhibit widely and with great success, he was soon elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (1881), the Royal Society of British Artists (1885) and the New English Art Club (1886).

Dorothy, though they rarely met with the enthusiasm of the publisher. His close association with A & C Black lasted only until 1917, though his involvement with its Menpes Series of Great Masters continued for longer.

In all, he produced well over 900 watercolours for reproduction. Menpes was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1897 and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1899. He also became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1890.

Following a visit to Japan in 1887, Menpes broke with Whistler; he refused to sign himself ‘Pupil of Whistler’ on the images that he had made on the trip and exhibited at the first of many solo shows, at Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell in spring 1888. Then, when, later the same year, he decorated his new house at 25 Cadogan Gardens, Kensington, in the style japonais, Whistler accused him of copying his own ideas and attempted to destroy his reputation.

By 1910, Menpes was sharing his time between 13 Shelley Court, Tite Street, Chelsea, and Iris Court, Pangbourne, Berkshire, where he ran his own fruit farm and carnation nurseries, and also the Menpes Press.

He died in Wokingham on 1 April 1938.

Menpes returned to Japan in 1896 and continued to travel extensively, producing paintings and, from 1901, illustrating books for A & C Black, the first of which recorded his impressions of South Africa during the Boer War. The texts were sometimes written by his daughter,

Futher reading: Michael Parkin, ‘Menpes, Mortimer Luddington (18551938)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 37, pages 818-819; Rosemary T Smith, ‘Menpes, Mortimer (b Port Adelaide, Australia, 22 Feb 1855; d Pangbourne, England, 1 April 1938)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 21, page 138

L AURENCE H OUSMAN Laurence Housman (1865-1959) As both a writer and an artist, Laurence Housman produced illustrated books that, at their best, elegantly integrate text and design. The illustrations themselves display a sophisticated response to the engraver-illustrators of the 1860s.

Laurence Housman was born at Perry Hall, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, on 18 July 1865, the son of a solicitor.

He was one of several children, of whom the poet, A E Housman, was the eldest. Initially educated at home, he won a scholarship to Bromsgrove School.

of the 1860s with elements of magic and fantasy. This is well exemplified by his masterly edition of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1893), which retains the clarity of Boyd Houghton’s work but introduces sinuously composed, sinister little creatures. This use of line is carried over to the cover, where plant forms blocked in gold intertwine across a sage green background, so giving a beautiful unity to the book.

In 1883, Laurence and an elder sister, Clemence, moved to London, both hoping to develop artistic careers. They studied at two schools run by the City & Guilds of London Institute: the South London Technical Art School, Kennington Park Road, and Lambeth School of Art, Miller’s Lane (Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon looming large among their fellow students). Later in the decade, Housman went on alone to the National Art Training School, South Kensington. During the 1890s, he established himself as an illustrator, and then more broadly as an artist and writer. (Meanwhile, Clemence became a writer and wood-engraver.)

Influenced by Rossetti and Morris, as well as by Houghton, Housman had great insight into the potential of combining word and image and, as a poet, was able to hold responsibility for an entire product; The House of Joy (fairy tales, 1895), Green Arras (poems, 1896) and The Field of Clover (tales, 1898) instance this total control. However, his eyesight began to fail after a decade of working as an illustrator and he turned to concentrate upon his writing. For a long time, he worked in the shadow of his brother – the author of A Shropshire Lad (1896) – but succeeded in making a literary reputation, especially as a playwright. Of his many works, he is probably best remembered for Victoria Regina (1934) and other plays on the life of Queen Victoria, which were published with illustrations by E H Shepard.

Housman’s great contribution to the development of illustration was his synthesis of the black and white art

Both Laurence and Clemence were deeply involved in the cause of women’s emancipation. ☛ page 72

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☛ When they moved to Edwardes Square, Kensington, in 1902, their home ‘became the headquarters of the Suffrage Atelier, a society which produced banners and artwork for the movement’ (Cockin in Matthew and Harrison 2004, vol 28, page 298). In 1907, he became a founder member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, while Clemence was imprisoned in October 1911, as a result of her active involvement in the Tax Resistance League. Laurence was equally devoted to a number of other controversial campaigns.

In 1924, Laurence and Clemence moved to Street, Somerset, home to the shoemaking business of their Quaker friends, Roger and Sarah Bancroft Clark.

When Clemence ‘declined into senility’ (loc cit), Laurence and the Clarks cared for her until her death in 1955. Laurence himself died in Butleigh Hospital, Glastonbury, on 20 February 1959.

Further reading: Katharine Cockin, ‘Houseman, Laurence (1865-1959)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 28, pages 297-299; Rodney Engen, Laurence Housman, Stroud: Catalpa Press, 1983 130 Bring Us into the Land of Returning Time Signed with initials Pen and ink, 6 1⁄4 x 4 inches Provenance: Luke Gertler Illustrated: Laurence Housman, The House of Joy, London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co, 1895, page 170, ‘Happy Returns’

H ENRY O SPOVAT Henry Ospovat (1877-1909) Perhaps more than any illustrator working in England at the turn of the century, Russian-born Henry Ospovat spanned two very different and even opposing strands, as is represented by the elegant late Pre-Raphaelitism of his literary interpretations and the raw modernity of his caricatures of music hall performers. More astonishing still is the way that he began to combine the two, as in his projected portfolio for Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Sadly, his career was cut too short for it to be certain which direction he would have taken.

Henry Ospovat was born in Dvinsk (also known as Daugavpils), then on the western edge of the Russian Empire, and now in Latvia. His family was part of the large Jewish minority resident in the city. It is possible that the Ospovats left Dvinsk for England less because of persecution than in the hope of finding greater financial security. It seems that Henry was already advanced in childhood when that migration took place.

Ospovat spent the remainder of his youth within the large Jewish community of Manchester, attending the Jews’ School in Derby Street and, almost certainly, a private Hebrew school. His talent as an artist was recognised by his teachers who, around the year 1893, helped to send him to the Municipal School of Art and secure his apprenticeship to a lithographer. At the school, he was encouraged by Walter Crane, the visiting Master of Design.

In 1897, Ospovat settled in London and, as the result of a scholarship, entered the Royal College of Art. Specialising in lithography, he studied under Thomas Robert Way. While he was there, Crane became the college’s Principal, and so continued to influence his progress. He also met George Frederick Watts and the novelist Arnold Bennett. Other inspirations included Rossetti, Sandys and Boyd Houghton, whose work he carefully studied and absorbed, as exemplified by his early designs for book-plates (including one for Crane).

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In 1899, when he left the RCA, Ospovat produced an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the illustrations for which reveal an awareness of Laurence Housman and Charles Ricketts as well as of the artists of the 1860s.

This was followed by the equally exquisite and atmospheric Poems of Matthew Arnold (1900) and Shakespeare Songs (1901).

As he developed as an illustrator, Ospovat planned to publish his work in a large, portfolio format, and hoped to initiate this plan with a commission by J M Dent for an edition of Browning’s Men and Women. However, the published volume (1903) was much more conventional in appearance, and omitted some of the more adventurous versions of the drawings. His disappointment with this project may also have affected his illustrations to Constance E Maud’s Heroines of Poetry (1903), for few, if any, show him at his best.

Around this time he undertook ‘a series of direct and hatchet-like illustrations to a series of cheap novels’ (Onions 1911, page 23), probably from financial necessity. Nevertheless, he remained ambitious, and

‘Ospovat … was among the few who can illustrate a serious author without insulting him’ (Arnold Bennett, The New Age, 14 January 1909)

132 Sonnet V ‘For never resting time leads Summer on’ Signed with initials Inscribed with title on reverse Pen and ink 7 1⁄2 x 5 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, London: John Lane, 1899, [unpaginated]

planned portfolios for Stars of the Music-hall Stage and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. These unpublished projects demonstrate his increasingly broad handling and his great skill for both character and caricature.

The caricatures that were published (particularly in Sporting Sketches in 1907) would influence such major cartoonists as H M Bateman. Some caricatures were exhibited at the Baillie Gallery in 1908, while other works appeared in the same year at the New English Art Club and the International Society. A great talent was lost when Ospovat died in London of stomach cancer on 2 January 1909, at the age of 31. A substantial memorial exhibition was held at the Baillie Gallery during the following month.

His work is represented in the collections of Tate, the V&A; and the Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester).

Further reading: Oliver Onions, The Work of Henry Ospovat, London: The Saint Catherine Press, 1911

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C HARLES D ANA G IBSON Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) Charles Dana Gibson was one of the most influential of American illustrators and cartoonists, best known for the assured pen drawings of social subjects that he contributed to magazines, and especially the ‘Gibson Girl’ – a term that has entered the language.

Charles Dana Gibson was born in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, on 14 September 1867, the son of a salesman for the National Car Spring Company.

Growing up in Flushing, Long Island, New York, he revealed his artistic skills at an early age, and received encouragement from his parents. At the age of 11, he worked with the New York architect, George Browne Post, and, at the age of 13, spent two years studying with the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, stopping

only to complete his education at Flushing High School.

Then, in 1884, he spent two years in professional training at the Art Students League of New York, while supporting himself as a commercial artist.

Regular contributions to Life and Tid-Bits, from 1886, helped Gibson save enough to travel to Europe to further his studies. While there, he visited the cartoonist, George Du Maurier, whom he greatly admired, and spent two months at the Académie Julian, in Paris. On returning to New York, he established himself properly as an illustrator, for various magazines, but especially Life, which featured his social cartoons as central double-page spreads. By 1890, his ideal female character – a resolute, modern young woman influenced by the work of Du Maurier – had become popularly known as the ‘Gibson Girl’. Of the 16 collections of cartoons that began to appear in 1894, The Education of Mr Pip (1899) and A Widow and her Friends (1901) are particularly notable.

From 1888, Gibson had a parallel career as a book illustrator. In this field, he is best remembered for Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune (1897) and the American editions of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1898) and its sequel, Rupert of Henzau (1906).

In 1895, Gibson married Irene Langhorne, the daughter of a Southern railway industrialist, and elder sister of Nancy (who, as Nancy Astor, would become the first woman to be elected a Member of the British Parliament in 1918). Of their two children, their daughter, Irene, would take George Browne Post III, the grandson of Gibson’s former teacher, as her first husband.

Gibson was elected to the membership of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1898, joining the newly founded Society of Illustrators four years later in 1902.

(He would serve as the society’s president from 1904 to 1907 and again from 1909 to 1921, then becoming honorary president.)

131 Elegant Lady Pen and ink 10 x 5 1⁄4 inches Preliminary drawing for Life, 4 January 1894, ‘The Young One: I beg your pardon, Sir, but I believe it is my turn next.’

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The great popularity of the Gibson Girl, and of his work in general, led Gibson to sign a six-figure contract – unprecedented at any price – with Collier’s Magazine in 1902. This helped make him feel sufficiently secure to go to Paris, in 1905, to study painting. However, two years later, a financial panic reduced his income and forced him to return to New York to work as a black and white illustrator.

With the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914, Gibson’s work began to contribute to anti-German propaganda. As a result, when the United States entered the war in 1917, he became head of the Division of Pictorial Publicity of the Committee of Public Information. In 1918, he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design (becoming a full member in 1932), and, in 1921, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (becoming a director in 1932).

In 1920, Gibson acquired Life magazine, serving as its president and editor, and initially resuscitating it by introducing a large number of his own pen and ink drawings. However, when he refused to follow the trends of the 1920s, the magazine’s circulation declined

and, following the onset of the Depression, it folded in 1936. (Its name was sold to Henry Luce for his new news magazine.) Having already returned to painting, he was given a solo show at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1934, and a major retrospective at the Cincinnati Art Museum, in 1943. In that year, he received the gold medal of the American Artists Professional League for his distinguished contribution to American art.

An influence upon an entire generation of American illustrators, Gibson died on 23 December 1944. Having been President of the American Society of Illustrators, he was elected to its Hall of Fame in 1974.

His work is represented in the collections of the Library of Congress (Washington DC).

Further reading: Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C D Gibson, New York: C Scribner’s Sons, 1936; Rowland; P Elzea, ‘Gibson, Charles Dana (14 Sept. 1867-23 Dec. 1944)’, John A Garraty and Mark C Carnes (eds), American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 1999, vol 8, pages 930-932

The Young One: I beg your pardon, Sir, but I believe it is my turn next Life, 4 January 1894

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AUBREY B EARDSLEY Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-1898) Though Aubrey Beardsley was initially influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, he soon outgrew them, and developed his own unique style, at once sophisticated and provocative. During his brief flowering in the fin de siècle, the elegant restraint of his art emulated Japanese prints and Rococo painting, while the elegant restraint of his life surpassed those of his friends and rivals, James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde.

Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton on 21 August 1872. He grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty, in which his ambitious mother ensured that he became a precocious student of literature and music. At the age of seven, he contracted the then incurable disease of tuberculosis and was sent off to improve his health, first at nearby Hurstpierpoint, and then at Epsom. In 1884, he returned to Brighton and soon became a boarder at Brighton Grammar School, where it was recognised that he had a talent for drawing. At the age of 16, he moved with his family to London, where financial circumstances forced him to work as a clerk in an Islington surveyor’s office, and later at the Guardian Life and Fire Assurance Company in Holborn. He made the most of his brief periods of good health, developing his artistic skills, and absorbing the visual delights of the capital, such as the Peacock Room that J M Whistler had designed for Frederick Leyland’s house. He visited Edward Burne-Jones and, spurred on by the artist’s encouragement, took his advice, attending evening classes under Fred Brown at the Westminster School of Art. From early in his career, he was absorbing many disparate influences, from Mantegna to Japanese printmakers, and boasting of working in several styles.

In 1892, Beardsley was introduced by the bookseller Frederick Evans to the publisher John Dent, and asked by him to illustrate a new edition of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. This major commission enabled Beardsley to resign from his clerical position and establish himself as a major modern artist; this he achieved by refining a style that challenged and parodied the historicist approach of the Kelmscott Press, and was at the same time appropriate to reproduction by the new photomechanical line-block process. However, Beardsley soon became tired of the demands of this large-scale project, so that Dent had to rekindle his interest by issuing another commission, that for the three-volume series of Bon-Mots. The grotesque, even sinister, vignettes with which he decorated the series comprise perhaps his first truly mature work.

The importance of Beardsley was confirmed in April 1893 by the first number of the immediately influential periodical The Studio, in which he appeared as the subject of an illustrated article by Joseph Pennell.

Among the illustrations was a drawing based on an episode from Salome by Oscar Wilde, and its presence prepared the way for Beardsley to meet its author, and then to illustrate the first translation of the symbolist play from French to English, in an edition by John Lane. The result, published in February 1894, attracted wide attention, even controversy, and permanently linked author and illustrator in the mind of the public.

The provocative character of Beardsley’s work was then further emphasised, in April 1894, with the issue of the first number of The Yellow Book, also published by John Lane, which Beardsley helped edit and illustrate. Words and images of sophisticated economy, bound in yellow, summed up the decadence of the decade.

Exactly a year later, in 1895, Wilde was arrested on a charge of committing indecent acts, placed on trial and imprisoned. Beardsley was considered guilty by association, and more sanctimonious contributors forced his dismissal from The Yellow Book. Yet by the end of the year, he had defiantly developed The Savoy as a rival periodical, with help from decadent poet Arthur Symons and pornographic publisher Leonard Smithers.

The presence of Smithers also facilitated the publication of his great late illustrated volumes, especially The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope and Lysistrata by Aristophanes (both 1896). Becoming increasingly plagued by tuberculosis, he attempted to aid his physical health by spending time on the Continent, and his spiritual health by converting to Roman Catholicism. He died in Menton, on the FrenchItalian border on the 16 March 1898, at the age of 25.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the V&A; the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge); and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA) and Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, MA).

132 Devil Doll Pen and ink 3 1⁄4 x 2 inches Illustrated: Charles Lamb and Douglas Jerrold, Bon Mots, London: J M Dent, 1893, page 69; Samuel Foote and Theodore Hook, Bon Mots, London: J M Dent, 1894, page 77 Literature: Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogué Raisonne, Yale University Press, forthcoming Exhibited: ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, Yamato Transport Co, no 28

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Further reading: Stephen Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley, London: V&A Publications, 1998; Alan Crawford, ‘Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent (1872-1898)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 4, pages 541-545 Brian Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, London: Studio Vista, 1967; Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, London: Harper Collins, 1998; Simon Wilson, ‘Beardsley, Aubrey (Vincent) (b Brighton, 21 Aug 1872; d Menton,

16 March 1898), Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 3, pages 444-446; Simon Wilson and Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Centenary Tribute, Japan: Art Life, 1998; Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné, Yale University Press (forthcoming); Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics, Oxford: Clarendon, 1990; Linda Gertner Zatlin, Beardsley, Japonisme and the Peversion of the Victorian Ideal, Cambridge University Press, 1997

133 In a Wood Pen and ink 4 x 4 1⁄4 inches Provenance: Pickford Waller; Miss Sybil Waller Illustrated: Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, London: J M Dent & Co, 1893-94, vol 2, page 846, heading to Book XVIII, Chapter XII, ‘How Sir Lancelot and Sir Lavaine departed out of the field, and in what jeopardy Launcelot was’ Literature: Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonne, New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming

134 La Beale Isoud Pen and ink 3 1⁄4 x 2 3⁄4 inches Provenance: Mark Samuels Lasner Illustrated: Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, London: J M Dent & Co, 1893-94, vol 1, page 404, heading to Book IX, Chapter XX, ‘How King Mark found Sir Tristram naked, and made him to be borne home to Tintagil, and how he was there known by a brachet’ Literature: Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonne, New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming Exhibited: ‘Beautiful Decadence’, The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan, and touring, April-May 1998, no 11

Le Morte Darthur and Bon-Mots Late in the autumn of 1892, Aubrey Beardsley was working fitfully on a serial edition of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1893-94), the publication that would make his name.

Yet he still accepted a further commission from J M Dent, to illustrate three small volumes of the epigrams of six eighteenth and early nineteenth-century wits, as edited by Walter Jerrold. Such material, so different from Le Morte Darthur in both scale and tone, was an inspired choice on the

part of Dent, for the publisher used it successfully to dispel Beardsley’s boredom and rekindle his interest in the project in hand. Of the resulting publications, Le Morte Darthur displays Beardsley’s burgeoning liberation from the influence of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones even to a point of parody; while the volumes of Bon-Mots (1893-94) reveal his complete originality.

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135 Lady Golfers with Pierrot as their Caddie Signed Pen and ink 9 x 5 inches Design for an invitation to the opening of Prince’s Ladies Golf Club at Mitcham, Surrey on 16 July 1894 Provenance: Robert Hippisley Cox (who commissioned the work from the artist, his friend, in 1894), and thence by descent Illustrated: The Sketch, 20 June 1894, page 406, as ‘Pierrot as a Caddie’; The Illustrated American, 25 August 1894, front cover Literature: Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, London: John Lane, 1909, no 106 (List of drawings compiled by Aylmer Vallance); The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley, London: The Bodley Head, 1912, plate 48; Holbrook Jackson (intro), Books of the Nineties, London: Elkin Mathews, [circa 1930], no 25, as ‘Pierrot as Caddie’; A E Gallatin, Aubrey Beardsley: Catalogue of Drawings and Bibliography, New York: The Grolier Club, 1945, no 874; R A Walker (ed), The Best of Beardsley, London: The Bodley Head, 1948, plate 41; R A Walker, How to Detect Beardsley Figures, Bedford: R A Walker, 1950, plate ii; A E Gallatin and Alexander D Wainwright, The Gallatin Beardsley Collection in the Princeton University Library, New Jersey: Princeton, 1952, page 25; Brian Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, London: Studio Vista, 1967, no 329; Brigid Brophy, Beardsley and his World, London: Thames and Hudson, 1976, page 78; Kenneth Clark, The Best of Aubrey Beardsley, London: John Murray, London: The Bodley Head, 1979, plate 48; Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming Exhibited: ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, V&A, MaySeptember 1966, no 503; Gallery of Modern Art, New York, February-April 1967; Los Angeles, 1967, as ‘Two Women Golfers and Pierrot as a Caddie’; ‘Aubrey Beardsley: A Centenary Tribute’, Kawasaki City Museum, February-April 1998; The Museum Of Modern Art, Wakayama, April-May 1998; The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, JuneJuly 1998

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Lady Golfers with Pierrot as their Caddie In the short career of Aubrey Beardsley, 1894 may be considered his annus mirabilis. In that year, he completed his illustrations to Le Morte Darthur, the book that made his name; produced those to the succeeding succès de scandale, Oscar Wilde’s Salome; and began to contribute to the decade’s essential periodical, The Yellow Book.

Among his other projects for the year was a commission from a friend, Robert Hippisley Cox, to design an invitation for the opening of Prince’s Ladies Golf Club at Mitcham, Surrey, on 16 July. The present drawing was the result.

Robert Hippisley Cox Robert Hippisley Cox (1857-1923) was born in Bath, Somerset, and educated at the Moravian School in Ockbrook, Derbyshire.

By 1881, he had qualified as a physician and, in that year, became a lieutenant in the medical corps of the Coldstream Guards. During the same decade, he became Vice-Chairman of the Prince’s Racquets and Tennis Club in Knightsbridge.

Prince’s Club The Prince’s Club was founded as a members-only sports and health establishment in 1853 by George and James Prince, the owners of a wine and cigar shop in Regent Street. Its original spacious premises was on land owned by Henry Smith’s charity estate, south of Hans Place and west of Sloane Street, and included a cricket pitch and several tennis and racquets courts. Proving highly successful, and highly fashionable, the venture was incorporated as Prince’s Racquets & Tennis Club Company Ltd a decade later.

Between 1872 and 1876, Middlesex County Cricket Club made use of Prince’s cricket ground, before moving to Lord’s, in Marylebone, in 1877. Then, in 1881, Prince’s hosted the first Varsity tennis match. However, as it constituted the last open space in the area, much of the land used by the club was developed as Cadogan Square and its surrounding streets in the mid 1880s. As a result of a reduction of the site, the company board decided to move the club to Humphreys’ Hall, on Knightsbridge, and this was effected in 1888. The force behind this decision was the Vice-Chairman – Robert Hippisley Cox. Originally used for roller-skating, and then for exhibitions, Humphreys’ Hall was greatly remodelled to accommodate the Prince’s Club. The new premises – opened by the Prince of Wales – contained many of the features of the larger West End clubs, including a Turkish bath, as well as two courts for

racquets and one for real tennis. Later expansion allowed for a second tennis court, a gymnasium and a bowling alley. In 1896, the Prince’s Skating Club would open at nearby Montpelier Square as an offshoot of the club.

Most ambitious was the decision to construct a club golf course on Mitcham Common, in Surrey. Again, it seems that Hippisley Cox was the prime mover in this, for, with a branch of his family living in the area, it was he who was granted a licence in 1891 by the lords of the local manors. Though its course, designed by Tom Dunn, was nondescript and ordinary, the club was considered to be distinguished, a reputation helped by the identity of its first President, the Conservative politician, Arthur Balfour.

Three years later, a ladies’ golf club was mooted, and Hippisley Cox commissioned Beardsley to design the invitation for the opening on 16 July 1894. Yet, according to Mitcham Golf Club’s own website, ‘Princes Ladies Club … was founded on land south of Mitcham Junction in 1897’. So a delay of some kind is likely to have occurred between the idea and the actuality.

In the late 1890s, the chairmanship of The Prince’s Golf Club was taken by Harry Mallaby-Deeley, a local MP and a highly successful real estate speculator. He went on to purchase and overhaul the course at Mitcham, as well as founding another course at Sandwich, Kent, in 1904. In 1908, the club at Mitcham employed Mrs Gordon Robertson as the country’s first professional woman golfer. In 1924, Mallaby-Deeley presented it to the public.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Prince’s Club, Knightsbridge, was requisitioned for use as the Army Post Office. Closed down in 1952, the building was demolished to make way for Mercury House in 1956. With the demise of Prince’s Club, The Queen’s Club – established in 1886 – became the premier Lawn Tennis and Racquets club in London.

Beardsley’s design for the invitation To commission a design from Aubrey Beardsley was tantamount to expecting the unexpected. In being asked to design an invitation to the opening of a ladies’ golf club, he was unlikely to respond with the kind of restrained, naturalistic image that was common in the popular press. Instead, he would produce something refined, indirect, and possibly suggestive. And so he did.

By 1894, there was an accepted costume for the female golfer on both sides of the Atlantic. It tended to be plain and practical, featuring an ankle length skirt and a straw boater. ☛ page 80

The Prince’s Ladies Club Invitation

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☛ By contrast, Beardsley’s women wear an exaggerated version of elegant city wear, which seems to mix the cut of an evening dress with the elaborate kind of hat likely to be worn by day. The decorative bows accentuate the impracticality in having the appearance of delicate, frivolous Whistlerian butterflies.

Though often considered synonymous with the proto-feminist ‘New Woman’, Beardsley’s females are seductive rather than sporting – as is indicated by the way that the main figure fondles the head of the club. As has been described by Linda Gertner Zatlin, her intent is emphasised by the actions of Pierrot, her caddie: With one hand he is either putting away or readying a club, even as he caresses both the club and, with the other hand, the golf bag, in a sexually suggestive manner.

Pierrot became a very popular figure in the arts of the late nineteenth century, and particularly in the work of Beardsley, as he represented both the theatricality of the Commedia dell’arte and the revival of interest in the rococo style of Antoine Watteau. Though he is traditionally characterised as melancholy and naïve, Beardsley tends to present him as cheeky and even decadent. The artist’s fascination, indeed obsession, with the character can be traced through many drawings from his illustrations to the volumes of Bon-Mots in 1893 to those to Ernest Dowson’s Pierrot of the Minute in 1897.

He even included an ageing Pierrot in the design for his own bookplate, implying that he may be considered as an alter ego.

Similarly, in the present image, he acts as an intermediary between the viewer and the ladies that he assists and furnishes.

(Linda Gertner Zatlin, in Simon Wilson and Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Centenary Tribute, Tokyo: Art Life, 1898, page 232)

136 The Performer Pen and ink 4 1⁄4 x 2 1⁄4 inches

Accompanied by an autograph letter on paper headed ‘114 Cambridge Street, SW’ Signed and dated ‘Sept 17’ Pen and ink 7 x 4 1⁄2 inches Beardsley lived at 114 Cambridge Street between 1894 and July 1895.

8.

LONDON: IMPERIAL CAPITAL

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Though Britain had established colonies from as early as the 1490s, its unchallenged international strength was evidenced in its victory over Napoleon, in 1815, and confirmed in the crowning of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, in 1876. The great age of empire lasted from then until the outbreak of the First World War. If Britain was an empire, then London was its capital. This was made manifest by the development of the city from the mid nineteenth century. The Classicism of many of its new official buildings suggested that it was a second Rome, while the Mediaevalism of such as the Houses of Parliament acted as a reminder of a heritage more native and Chivalric.

If architects redefined the character of the city, then topographers communicated it. As the result of his architectural training, William Walcot became a particularly celebrated draughtsman of the built environment from the Edwardian era onwards, and confidently populated his presentation drawings with rapid figures indicative of modern metropolitan energy.

Cartoonists and caricaturists brought the city to life in other ways, indeed by making the members of its population seem larger than life, either as celebrities or types. Within the pages of Vanity Fair – a title that itself implies urbane satire – Coïdé and Spy placed leading personalities into such categories as ‘Men of the Day’ and ‘Statesman’, and in so doing helped make their names. Max Beerbohm worked similarly, though with greater idiosyncrasy, and became a personality in his own right.

They dealt mainly with the high life of the movers and shakers who seemed to drive the empire. By contrast, Phil May caught the vitality of the working classes who made up the majority of the capital’s inhabitants. The guttersnipes are out on the streets, and the ’Arries and ’Arriets up on the Heath, like visual counterparts to the characters of music hall songs.

C OÏDÉ James [Jacques-Joseph] Tissot (1836-1902), known also as Coïdé Though best known as the French painter of English society, James Tissot also produced insightful caricatures. These appeared in Vanity Fair, under the name ‘Coïdé’, in the period from 1869 to 1873, alongside those of ‘Ape’ and before the arrival of ‘Spy’.

The second of four sons of a prosperous linen merchant, James Tissot was born in Nantes, on the River Loire, on 15 October 1836. He was educated at Jesuit colleges in Brugelette, Belgium; Vannes, Brittany; and Dôle, Franche-Comté. He considered becoming an architect and then an artist. Moving to Paris by 1856, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, under Louis Lamothe and Hippolyte Flandrin. While there, he befriended James McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas. Exhibiting at the Paris Salon from 1859 and at the Royal Academy, London, from 1864, he soon abandoned mediaeval subjects in favour of the elegant, polished, often complex, contemporary scenes for which he is best known. In 1869, he also began to produce his first caricatures for Thomas Gibson Bowles’s society paper, Vanity Fair, signing them ‘Coïdé’, ‘perhaps because they were a collaboration between Bowles’s notions and Tissot’s draughtsmanship, thus “co-idée”’(Richard Thomson, in Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson, Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. London and Paris 1870-1910, London: Tate, 2005, page 20).

Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Tissot fought in the defence of Paris, but fled to London a year later. Through the auspices of Bowles, he made many professional and social connections, and his work gained rapid popularity. He lived openly with his

Irish mistress, Kathleen Newton, in a house in Grove End Road, St John’s Wood. However, this sojourn came to an end in 1882 when, having contracted tuberculosis, she committed suicide. He returned to France, and soon turned to religion, both as a way of life and a subject for his art. He even made two visits to the Holy Land, in 1886-87 and 1889, which inspired a large series of watercolour illustrations of the Bible. On 8 August 1902, he died at the Château de Buillon, Doubs, FrancheComté, which he had inherited from his father in 1888.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and Tate; Musée d’Orsay; and Brooklyn Museum (New York) and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Further reading: Willard E Misfeldt, ‘Tissot, James [Jacques-Joseph] (b Nantes, 15 Oct 1836, d Château de Buillon, Doubs, 8 Aug 1902)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 31, pages 29-31; Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford University Press, 1984

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Mr George Bentinck, MP George Bentinck (1803-1886) was the Conservative MP for Norfolk West in the periods 1852-65 and 1871-84. Known for being bluff, outspoken and highly independent, he was nicknamed ‘Big Ben’.

On 23 December 1871, Vanity Fair published Tissot’s caricature of George Cavendish-Bentinck (1821-1891), who was then Conservative MP for Whitehaven. A cousin of ‘Big Ben’, he was known in Parliamentary circles as ‘Little Ben’.

137 Mr George Bentinck, MP Watercolour, pencil and charcoal 12 x 7 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: Vanity Fair, 5 August 1871, no 144, Statesmen no 90, ‘Big Ben’ Literature: Michael Justin Wentworth, James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of his Prints, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1978, page 348

Col James Farquharson of Invercauld James Ross Farquharson (1834-1888) was the 13th Laird of Invercauld, an estate in Aberdeenshire, which includes Braemar Castle. Entering the army in 1853, he rose to the rank of LieutenantColonel in the Scots Fusilier Guards. While serving in the Crimea War, he received severe wounds at Sebastopol on 29 August 1855, and was subsequently awarded the Crimean medal and clasps. He retired his commission in 1859, and became Laird of Invercauld three years later, in 1862. As such, he became ‘the Queen’s Landlord’, as the Royal Family leased land from him, which enabled the extension of its own estate of Balmoral. He and his wife, Louisa, were friends of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and spent much time with him enjoying the pleasures of London. As a result, Farquharson gained the nickname, ‘Piccadilly Jim’.

138 Col James Farquharson of Invercauld Signed with monogram Inscribed with title and dated ‘26 August, 1876’ below mount Watercolour with bodycolour and pencil on tinted paper 12 1⁄4 x 8 inches Illustrated: Vanity Fair, 26 August 1876, Men of the Day no 134, ‘The Queen’s Landlord’ Literature: Michael Justin Wentworth, James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of his Prints, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1978, page 349

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S PY Sir Leslie Ward, RP (1851-1922), known as ‘Spy’ For almost 40 years, the caricaturist, Leslie Ward, was synonymous with the society paper, Vanity Fair. His ‘character portraits’ were invariably well observed and witty, but rarely cruel.

Leslie Ward was born on 21 November 1851 at Harewood Square, London (on the site of what is now Marylebone Station). He was the son of the history painter, Edward Matthew Ward, and his wife, Henrietta Ada Ward, a fashionable portrait painter. His mother came from a long line of artists, most notably her paternal grandfather, James Ward. He learned to draw, paint and sculpt within this environment.

Ward was educated at Chase’s School, Salt Hill, near Slough, and then at Eton. While there, he drew caricatures of his masters and fellow pupils, and exhibited a bust of his brother, Wriothesley, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1867. In 1869, his father placed him with the architect, Sydney Smirke, a family friend. Yet he really wanted to paint, and this was made possible by the intervention of W P Frith.

Soon after he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1871, Ward began to exhibit portraits in oil and watercolour, and could easily have made a career in that field. (Indeed, he would be elected to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1891.) However, in 1873, another family friend, John Everett Millais recommended that Ward take his caricature of the zoologist, Professor

Colonel William Cornwallis-West MP William Cornwallis-West (1835-1917) was born in Florence, the youngest child of Frederick West of Ruthin Castle, Denbighshire. Following his education – at Eton and Lincoln’s Inn – he returned to Florence and developed his talent as a painter, gaining a reputation as a copyist, and also collecting.

On the early death of his elder brother, Frederick, in 1868, he succeeded to the estate of Ruthin, and four years later married 17-year-old Mary Fitzpatrick, who would become a leading socialite (and have an affair with the Prince of Wales). They shared their time between Ruthin and 49 Eaton Place.

West became High Sheriff of Denbighshire (1872), LordLieutenant of Denbighshire (1872-1917), a Justice of the Peace and Honorary Colonel in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was awarded the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Officers’ Decoration. In 1885 he was returned to Parliament for Denbighshire West, a seat he held until 1892, first as a Liberal and then as a Liberal Unionist.

On the death of his mother in 1886, West came into possession of Newlands Manor, Lymington, Hampshire, and attempted to develop the resort of Milford on Sea in emulation of the Duke of Devonshire’s project at Eastbourne.

His children included George, who was the second husband of Jennie Jerome, mother of Winston Churchill, and then the second husband of the actress, Mrs Patrick Campbell; Daisy, Princess of Pless; and Constance Edwina, Duchess of Westminster.

139 Colonel William Cornwallis-West MP Signed Watercolour with bodycolour 15 1⁄2 x 7 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: Vanity Fair, 16 July 1892, Statesmen no 595, ‘Denbighshire’

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Richard Owen, to Thomas Gibson Bowles, the owner of Vanity Fair. As Bowles had temporarily fallen out with his regular caricaturist, Carlo Pellegrini (who signed as ‘Ape’), he invited Ward to join the staff, and suggested his pen name, ‘Spy’. For the next 15 years, the two artists shared between them most of the weekly coloured cartoons that featured in Vanity Fair. Then, on the death of Ape in 1889, until he left in 1911, Spy dominated. Latterly he also contributed ‘character portraits’ to The Graphic, Mayfair and The World.

Three years after he published his autobiography, Forty Years of Spy, in 1915, Ward was knighted. He died suddenly of heart failure at 4 Dorset Square, Marylebone, London, on 15 May 1922.

Mr Walter Herries Pollock The second son of Sir William Frederick Pollock, Walter Herries Pollock (1850-1926) was best known as the editor the London weekly newspaper, the Saturday Review, from 1884 to 1894. On leaving the position, he moved to Chawton to devote himself to his writing and, in 1899, produced a major study of Jane Austen, a previous resident of that Hampshire village. His wide-ranging output included essays, novels, plays and poems, as well as translations from French, and he numbered Egerton Castle and Rudyard Kipling among the members of his wide literary circle.

In addition, Pollock participated in the first revival of historical fencing in Britain, and gained repute as the finest amateur fencer in the country. In 1897, he contributed to Fencing, Boxing and Wrestling for the Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes published by Longmans, Green & Company.

140 Mr Walter Herries Pollock Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and pencil on tinted paper 12 3⁄4 x 7 3⁄4 inches Illustrated: Vanity Fair, 31 December 1892, Men of the Day no 553, ‘The Saturday Review’

His work is represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery.

Further reading: Peter Mellini, ‘Ward, Sir Leslie [pseud. Spy] (18511922)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 57, pages 325-326

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E DWARD T ENNYSON R EED Edward Tennyson Reed (1860-1933) Preferring pencil to pen and ink, E T Reed developed into a superb draughtsman, using his confident line to express a rich imagination.

Known equally for his political caricatures and his Punch series, ‘Prehistoric Peeps’, his range of subject and allusion was astonishingly wide.

E T Reed was born in Greenwich, London, on 27 March 1860, and educated at Harrow. On leaving school, in 1879, he travelled to Egypt and the Far East with his father, Sir Edward Reed, Chief Naval Architect and Liberal MP for Cardiff. Four years later, he took up drawing, receiving encouragement from Edward BurneJones and studying for 18 months at Frank Calderon’s Art School. However, he failed to get a place at the Royal Academy Schools, or to establish himself as a portrait painter, and so began work as a cartoonist and illustrator. His first published work illustrated his father’s book, Japan: Its History, Religion and Traditions (1880).

Reed made his first contributions to Punch in June 1889, and was elected to the staff in the following year by its editor, F C Burnand. He soon became an

established part of the periodical, introducing his ‘Prehistoric Peeps’ series into its Almanack in 1893, and following Harry Furniss as parliamentary caricaturist in 1894, a post he held till 1912. (As the son of an MP, he had long been familiar with the House of Commons.)

Without obscuring his uncanny ability to capture individual likenesses, he restored to Punch the spirit of grotesque. Yet, despite this early association with one particular publication, he contributed some of his best political and legal cartoons elsewhere, including The Sketch (from 1893) and The Bystander (to which he moved in 1912). His work was exhibited at societies and dealers in London, including the Leicester Galleries and Fine Art Society, and also in the provinces. He was also a talented lecturer. Married with one son and one daughter, he died in London on 12 July 1933.

Further reading: E V Knox, rev Jane Newton, ‘Reed, Edward Tennyson (1860-1933)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 46, page 302; Shane Leslie (ed), Edward Tennyson Reed, 1860-1933, London: Heinemann, 1957

Murdered Masterpieces: Gems at the Royal Academy Reset E T Reed epitomises and satirises the state of British art, and specifically the Royal Academy of Arts, on the eve of the First World War. The 146th Summer Exhibition took place at Burlington House between 4 May and 15 August 1914.

On 5 May, the suffragette, Mary Wood, attacked John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James.

Gallery No II: Oils 99: J J Shannon RA [1862-1923]: Thomas L Devitt Esq [Chairman of Lloyd’s Register] 109: The Late J H F Bacon, ARA [1868-1914]: William Nevett, Esq South Rooms: Oils 234: David Murray RA [1849-1933]: The Bora, Venice Gallery No III: Oils 350: Edward J Poynter, Bt, PRA [1836-1919]: The Sea Bath [also known as The Champion Swimmer, this work is now in Wolverhampton Art Gallery] 373: Arthur Hacker RA [1858-1919]: Presentation Portrait: Rt Hon George Lambert PC MP [1868-1958; civil lord of the Admirality in the Liberal cabinet of the time, he would be created Viscount Lambert in 1945; private collection] 384: William Orpen ARA [1878-1931]: Richard B Fudger, Esq of Toronto Gallery No IV: Oils 433: Arnesby Brown ARA [1866-1955]: Dawn 461: P A de Laszló [1869-1937]: Lady Richard Wellesley [18891946; the wife of Captain Lord Richard Wellesley (1879-1914),

the third child of the 4th Duke of Wellington, who served in the Grenadier Guards and died from wounds received in action during the first battle of Ypres.]

Gallery No V: Oils 539: R Grenville Eves [1876-1941]: John Gow, Esq Gallery No VII: Oils 640: The Late Sir Hubert von Herkomer [1849-1914]: Arthur Bourchier, Esq [1863-1927; an actor and theatre manager, he was noted for his roles in Shakespeare’s plays, and especially the lead in Henry VIII.] 647: F Cadogan Cowper ARA [1877-1958]: Walter Carlile Esq JP DL [1862-1950; Conservative MP for Buckingham until 1906, he would be made a baronet in 1928; this work is now in the collection of Buckinghamshire County Council.]

Gallery No VIII 694: Stanhope A Forbes, RA [1857-1947]: Philip Dawson Esq [1866-1938; an electrical engineer, he worked for the Ministry of Munitions during the First World War, and was subsequently knighted, while, from 1921, he wold serve as Conservative MP for Lewisham West; in 1977, his family presented this work to the Institute of Fuel, which he had served as President.]

718: John Lavery ARA [1856-1941]: The Studio of the Painter [private collection] Lecture Room: Sculpture 2207: W Reid Dick [1879-1961]: Femina Victrix – group, bronze

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141 Murdered Masterpieces: Gems at The Royal Academy Reset Signed with monogram and inscribed with picture captions Inscribed ‘Priceless Gems at The Royal Academy’ and ‘Graphic’ and dated ‘May 2 1914’ on original mount Pencil 17 x 12 inches Illustrated: The Graphic, 9 May 1914, page 797

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M AX B EERBOHM Sir Henry Maximillian Beerbohm, IS NEAC NPS (1872-1956) Equally valued as a caricaturist and writer, Max Beerbohm sustained an elegant detachment in art and life. Though the tone of his drawings is often lightly wicked, it is also affectionate, for he hated to wound his subjects, most of whom he knew and liked. As a result, he was on safest ground in satirising artists and writers of the past, and in making many self-caricatures.

Max Beerbohm was born at 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington, London, on 24 August 1872, the youngest child of a prosperous corn merchant of mixed Baltic origins. He was educated Henry Wilkinson’s preparatory school at 11 Orme Square (1881-85), Charterhouse (1885-90) and Merton College, Oxford (1890-94). Self-taught as an artist, he was an intelligent student of caricature and revered the work of Alfred Bryan and Carlo Pellegrini (Ape). On the edge of various fashionable groups, he produced lightly wicked sketches in pen and wash of many of the leading figures of the day. He contributed to The Strand Magazine (1892), Pick-Me-Up (1894) and Vanity Fair (1896) and published his first book of caricatures in 1896. Two years later, he began his only job, as theatre critic for the Saturday Review. He kept up prickly relations with his predecessor, Shaw and the editor, Frank Harris, and wrote a teasing first article, entitled ‘Why I ought not to have become a theatre critic’. With the actor-manager Beerbohm Tree as a half-brother, he had actually had constant access to the theatre from an early age and was well acquainted with a number of actors, directors and playwrights. He even complemented his work as a critic with attempts at writing plays, most successfully in an adaptation of his own story, The Happy Hypocrite (1896), produced as a curtain raiser in 1900. A severe judge of the work of others, he believed that significant drama should combine intelligence, beauty and reality, but his theatrical taste was broad enough to encompass both music hall and the Symbolist dramas of Maeterlinck.

Soon after the appearance of his novel Zuleika Dobson, a decade later, in 1911, Beerbohm resigned from his position with the Saturday Review. He decided that, on his marriage to the American actress, Florence Kahn, in 1910, he would retire to the Villino Chiaro, Rapallo, Italy; from then he returned to England only on short visits. Nevertheless, he remained one of the country’s best-known public figures. He was elected to the New English Art Club (1909), the National Portrait Society (1911) and the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers (1912). From this time, a number of exhibitions of his work were held at the Leicester Galleries, in 1911, 1913, 1921, 1923, 1925 and 1928.

The Leicester Galleries mounted a retrospective in

1952, and a memorial show in 1957. He delivered the Rede Lectures at Cambridge between 1933 and 1935, and was knighted in 1939.

Following the death of his wife in 1951, Elisabeth Jungmann became his secretary and companion, and on 20 April 1956 his wife. He died in Rapallo on 20 May 1956.

His work is represented in the collections of The Courtauld Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the V&A; the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Charterhouse (Godalming) and Merton College Library (Oxford); and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), the Lilly Library (University of Indiana, Bloomington), Princeton University Library and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (University of California at Los Angeles). His archive is held by the Houghton Library, Harvard University (Cambridge MA).

Further reading: S N Behrman, Portrait of Max: an intimate memoir of Sir Max Beerbohm, New York: Random House, 1960; Alan Bell, ‘Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max(imilian) (b London, 24 Aug 1872; d Rapallo, 20 May 1956)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 3, pages 493; Lord David Cecil, Max, London: Constable, 1964; N John Hall, ‘Beerbohm, Sir Henry Maximilian [Max] (1872-1956)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 4, pages 817-821; N John Hall, Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life, London: Yale University Press, 2002; N John Hall, Max Beerbohm. Caricatures, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; Rupert Hart-Davis, Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm, London: Macmillan, 1972; Rupert Hart-Davis (editor), Letters of Max Beerbohm 1892-1956, London: John Murray, 1988 Rupert Hart-Davis (editor), Max Beerbohm, Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964

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142 Evenings in Printing House Square Lord Northcliffe: ‘Help! Again I feel the demons of sensationalism rising in me. Hold me fast! Curb me, if you love me!’

Signed ‘Max’, inscribed with title and dated 1911 Pen ink and watercolour with pencil 12 1⁄4 x 15 1⁄2 inches Provenance: The Times Illustrated: Fifty Caricatures by Max Beerbohm, London: William Heinemann, 1913, no 38 Literature: Rupert Hart-Davis, A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm, London: Macmillan, 1972, no 1118 Exhibited: NEAC, Winter 1911; London Group, 1913 ‘Pure Gold’, 50 Years of the Federation of British Artists, Mall Galleries, 9-19 February 2011

Evenings in Printing House Square Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865-1922), was a powerful publishing magnate, who resuscitated unprofitable newspapers by making them popular to a mass market. He developed Amalgamated Press, the largest publishing empire in the world at the time, which included, among others: the Evening News (acquired 1894), the Daily Mail (founded 1896), the Daily Mirror (founded 1903), the Observer (acquired 1905), The Times and The Sunday Times (both acquired 1908). The present cartoon refers to this latest acquisition.

‘the greatest caricaturist of the kind – that is, portrayer of personalities – in the history of art’ (Edmund Wilson, 1954, quoted in Behrman 1960, page 262)

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P HIL M AY Philip William May, RI RP NEAC (1864-1903) Sometimes referred to as the ‘grandfather of British illustration’, Phil May was one of the most influential black-and-white artists of his generation. Earthy, street-wise, and redolent of the music hall, his work is the antithesis of that of Aubrey Beardsley.

Phil May was born in New Worthley, Leeds on 22 April 1864. His father, an unsuccessful brass founder from landowning stock, died when May was only nine years old, leaving him to struggle for survival. His schooling was terminated four years later and he had to take various jobs in offices and warehouses. His mother had strong theatrical contacts, and he eventually found work as an assistant scene painter at the Grand Theatre. At the same time, he made his first periodical contributions to the Yorkshire Gossip, a newspaper that lasted just a fortnight. Then, in 1879, May joined the touring theatrical company with which he remained for three years. Playing small parts, he also made caricatures of his fellow actors, some of which were used for advertising posters while others were sold at a shilling each. The work of this period bears the influence of Linley Sambourne, Caran d’Ache and Carlo Pellegrini (‘Ape’).

May said of his early days: ‘I never had a drawing lesson in my life, but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t draw ... When I was sixteen I made up my mind to come to London ... I had no friends and no introductions ... But in six months, I worked for Society, the Penny Illustrated, St Stephen’s Review and the Pictorial World’ (quoted in William Feaver, Masters of Caricature. From Hogarth and Gillray to Scarfe and Levine, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981, page 117). While deputising for Matt Morgan, the political cartoonist of the St Stephen’s Review, he was spotted by an Australian talent scout and offered a contract with the Sydney Bulletin. He sailed in November 1885, and so entered the period in which he developed his professionalism; he completed nearly 900 drawings, cartoons, caricatures and joke illustrations while working on the newspaper.

May returned to England in 1888 by way of Europe, visiting Naples and Rome and studying briefly in Paris.

There he met with Charles Conder, whom he had known in Australia, and shared a studio with William Rothenstein. He arrived in London, penniless and in need of work, at an opportune moment. In his absence, the majority of British magazines had begun to make use of photomechanical methods of reproduction and were able to include an increased number of drawn illustrations. New talent was much sought after. He renewed his connection with the St Stephen’s Review and in 1890 began to illustrate its comic serial ‘Parson

and Painter’. This account of London social events seen through the eyes of a country parson and his artist nephew was an overnight success; May was immediately employed by the newly-founded Daily Graphic and sent to Chicago to cover its World Fair. And then, when published in book form in 1891, Parson and Painter sold out in its first edition of 30,000 copies, making Phil May a household name. He launched his own annual, which ran until 1905, and in 1895 joined the staff of Punch. He was elected to the membership of the New English Art Club (1894-97), the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1897) and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In 1896, he might have been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy had his sponsor Lord Leighton not died.

May had much admiration for the recently deceased Punch artist, Charles Keene whom he dubbed ‘the daddy of the lot of us’ (quoted in Thorpe 1948, page 31), but even in his captionless drawings, May was intrinsically the funnier of the two. In turn, he himself was sometimes called ‘the grandfather of British Illustration’ and was very influential upon the next generation of draughtsmen, especially such colleagues of the London Sketch Club as Bert Thomas and Frank Reynolds. They learned both from his stylistic qualities and from his approach to society, which was coloured by a lack of snobbishness best exemplified by his Guttersnipes (1896).

Apparently spontaneous, May’s economical ink drawings were in fact the product of a careful refining process which began with detailed studies and ended with a few lines; Whistler is believed to have said that ‘black-and-white art is summed up in two words – Phil May’. Yet May also used wash with extreme subtlety, and showed himself to be an exquisite colourist in his European studies (he had returned to Rome in 1892 and also stayed in Holland, on the last occasion just a few months before his death).

The Holland Park studio from which May worked gave a clear indication of his flamboyant, bohemian character. It was decorated in the style japonais, with prints by Hokusai, but was further embellished by hanging plaster limbs. It was a fashionable surrounding, for May had established himself as a star, but nevertheless he remained perpetually ‘hard up’.

Genial and generous to both friends and spongers, he was also an alcoholic. As a result, he died at home, at Melina Place, St John’s Wood, of cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis on 5 August 1903 at the age of 39. The Leicester Galleries held a memorial show of his work in October 1903 as its opening exhibition.

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His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the V&A; Leeds Art Gallery; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the National Library of Australia (Canberra).

Further reading: David Cuppleditch, Phil May. The Artist and His Wit, London: Fortune Press, 1981; Leo John De Freitas, ‘May, Phil(ip William) (b New Wortley, Leeds, 22 April 1864;

d London, 5 Aug 1903)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 20, pages 880-881; Simon Houfe, ‘May, Philip William [Phil] (1864-1903)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 37, pages 556-558; Simon Houfe, Phil May. His Life and Work, 1864-1903, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002; James Thorpe, Phil May, London: Art and Technics, 1948

Ow ’ampstead ’appy ’appy ’ampstead Hampstead Heath became a very popular destination for a day out for working-class Londoners of the nineteenth century, particularly after the passing of the Metropolitan Fairs Act of 1871, which prohibited fairs within urban centres. The arrival of such phenomenal numbers of visitors to the heath inevitably led to difficulties, as described in A History of the County of Middlesex: Damage, particularly fires among the furze, and rowdiness were often a problem in the 1870s, when there might be 30,000 visitors at the August holiday and 50,000 on a fine Whit Monday. Violence was also a problem at the bonfires and processions held from before 1850 on Guy Fawkes day, until in 1880 a committee was set up to regulate them. Numbers reached 100,000 in the 1880s, although that estimate included trippers to Parliament Hill Fields, which were not yet part of the heath. The crowds were thickest in the south-east corner near the station, where in 1892 nine people died in a rush to escape from the rain.

(T F T Baker (ed), A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 9: Hampstead and Paddington Parishes (The Victoria History of the Counties of England), Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1989) Against this, popular culture idealised the heath as a place of entertainment. This tendency culminated in 1893 when the ‘costers’ laureate’, Albert Chevalier, and the composer, John Cook, published their humorous song, ‘Oh! ’ampstead’. Having produced a pen and ink portrait of Chevalier in 1892, Phil May then responded to the song with the present drawing; but then, as Sacheverell Sitwell has written, May ‘is the artist of Hampstead Heath, as he is of Petticoat Lane, or equally, of the Strand’ (Narrative Pictures. A Survey of English Genre and its Painters, London: Batsford, 1936, page 24).

‘Oh, ’Ampstead! ’Appy ’Ampstead! ’Appy, ’appy ’Ampstead; All the donahs look so nice; Oh, ’Ampstead’s very ’ard to beat.

If you want a beano it’s a fair old treat!’

(Albert Chevalier, ‘Oh! ’Ampstead!’, 1893, Chorus)

143 Ow ’ampstead ’appy ’appy ’ampstead Signed inscribed with title and dated 94 Pen and ink with crayon and pencil 12 1⁄2 x 7 3⁄4 inches Exhibited: Fine Art Society, April 1969; ‘The Fine Art of Illustration’, Fine Art Society, 2-27 July 2001

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144 An Unpopular Idol!

How Billy and his Sunday-schoolmates intend to wreak their vengeance, if only a Snow-storm be propitious, on the Embankment some Sunday afternoon about Christmas-time Signed and dated 1902 Inscribed ‘Sunday in the Embankment Gardens Time 2.45pm 1st Urchin “Come on Billy – it’s school time” 2nd D “Let’s give him another first” (they snowball statue rigorously and exeunt.)’ below mount Pen and ink 10 1⁄4 x 8 1⁄4 inches Provenance: William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme; M W Ingram Illustrated: Punch, 24 December 1902, page 435 Literature: The Illustrated London News, December 1958, page 16, as ‘Sunday Snowballs for the founder of Sunday Schools: A Thames Embankment scene drawn by Phil May’

An Unpopular Idol!

The newspaper proprietor and editor, Robert Raikes the Younger (1736-1811), set up the first Sunday School for working-class children in the home of a Mrs Meredith, in Sooty Alley, Gloucester, in 1780. He advertised the development of this school in his widely circulating newspaper, the Gloucester Journal, on 3 November 1783, and by so doing initiated the Sunday School Movement. This would provide the first schools of the English state system, which, by 1831, was providing an education for 1,250,000 children.

Centenary celebrations of the first Sunday School, in 1880, included the erection of a statue of Robert Raikes by Thomas Brock in Victoria Embankment Gardens, on the north bank of the Thames. Phil May’s drawing, made two decades later, shows one of his favourite types of characters – working-class boys – expressing their disapproval of Raikes’ benevolence, by pelting this statue with snowballs.

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H ERBERT M ENZIES M ARSHALL Herbert Menzies Marshall, VPRWS RE ARIBA ROI (1841-1913) Herbert Menzies Marshall was one of the most atmospheric of the Edwardian painters of urban topography.

Herbert Menzies Marshall was born on 1 August 1841, the youngest son of Thomas Horncastle Marshall, barrister-by-law, and later Judge of the Leeds County Court. The family lived at 33 Park Square, Leeds, and Outwood Hall, near Wakefield.

Marshall was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, playing first-class cricket for the university, and graduating in 1864 with a second-class degree in the natural science tripos. In the same year, he went to Paris for the purpose of studying architecture, and entered the atelier of Charles-Auguste Questel. On his return from Paris in 1867, he became a student of the Royal Academy Schools, and in the following year received the Travelling Studentship for Architecture. Apparently, ‘the result of travelling in Italy and of constant sketching under a bright sun was to weaken his eyesight so much that he was obliged to give up all work for two years, and especially any architectural drawing’ (Plarr 1895, page 570). On his return to England, he lived close to the Royal Academy at 22 Old Burlington Street, with the architect, Robert Kerr, and was elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects, though never practised as an architect, and retired in 1871.

Marshall’s ‘accident induced him to turn his attention to water-colour painting, as being less trying to the eyes, and in 1871 he exhibited his first drawing at the Dudley Gallery’ (Plarr 1895, loc cit). He then worked mainly in London, producing series of topographical watercolours for exhibition and publication. He was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in WaterColours in 1879, a full member in 1882 and acted as Vice-President between 1898 and 1900. He was also elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (1881), and the Royal Institute of Painters in

‘His special aim [is] to show how beautiful and mysterious is the common life of the streets and on the river when seen under the atmospheric effects which are found only in London.’

(Plarr 1895, page 570) 145 Ludgate Hill from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral Signed and dated 1898 Watercolour with pencil 11 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄4 inches

Oils (1901). In addition, he showed regularly at such London dealers as the Fine Art Society, the Abbey Gallery and the Leicester Galleries, and in Paris, winning a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889.

Lodging at 35 Great Marlborough Street by April 1881, Marshall married Amy Lee, the daughter of a solicitor, at the end of that month. Together, they would have one son and two daughters. By 1883, they were living at 1 Victoria Mansions, Westminster, with the Great Marlborough Street address probably being retained as a studio. In 1896, they probably moved to 39 Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, and were certainly living there by 1900.

In 1904, Marshall was appointed Professor of Landscape Painting at Queen’s College, Harley Street, London. By that date, he and his family were living at 83 Philbeach Gardens, Earl’s Court. He illustrated a number of books, including Miss Mitton’s The Scenery of London (1905), E V Lucas’s Wanderer in Holland (1905) and – with his daughter, Hester – Cathedral Cities of France (1907). He died at home on 2 March 1913.

Further reading: Victor G Plarr, Men and Women of the Time. A Dictionary of Contemporaries, London: George Routledge, 1895, page 570

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W ILLIAM WALCOT William F Walcot, RBA RE FRIBA (1874-1943) Working as a painter and printmaker, William Walcot became the most celebrated architectural artist in England during the 1920s and 30s.

William Walcot was born at Lustdorf, near Odessa, on 10 March 1874, the elder son of travelling merchant, Enoch Shannon, known as Frank Walcot, and his RussoGerman wife, Catherine. During his childhood, he travelled through Europe with his parents, attending schools in Amiens and Paris in the 1880s. On returning to Russia at the age of 17, he studied architecture under Louis Benois at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, St Petersburg (1895-97), and also in Paris at Atelier Redon, in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He practised architecture in Moscow for five years, designing the city’s Hotel Metropol (1898-1902) and several villas, and subsequently visiting Rome and London. While still in Moscow, he met and married an Irish governess, Margaret Ann O’Neill. However, she suffered from ill health and would die of tuberculosis on the Isle of Wight in 1904.

Settling in London in 1907, Walcot was first employed as a draughtsman to the architect Eustace Frere. He soon became a freelance draughtsman, producing presentation drawings for a number of leading architects to show their clients and to exhibit at the Royal Academy. His treatment of these drawings as works of art rather than technical exercises led to commissions from the Fine Art Society to visit Rome

and Venice, and he held a total of eight solo shows with that dealer (1908-28). He also showed watercolours and etchings with leading exhibiting societies, and was elected to the membership of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (ARE 1918, RE 1920) and the Royal Society of British Artists (1913). He was additionally a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (1922) and an associate of the British School in Rome. Steeped in the culture and architecture of antiquity, he designed and illustrated luxury editions of Salammbô (1926) Hérodias (1928) by Gustave Flaubert for Les Editions d’Art Devambez.

In 1911, Walcot entered a second marriage, with Alice Maria Wheelan, and she would bear him two daughters.

However, from 1926, he lived with Ada Grace Chamberlain, known as Margot; together they would have a daughter and son.

The most celebrated architectural draughtsman in England through the 1920s and 30s, Walcot worked from studios in London, Oxford and Rome at the height of his career. However, his practice collapsed on the outbreak of the Second World War, and he went into a decline. Moving with his family to the Ditchling estate of Frank Brangwyn early in the war, he entered St George’s Nursing Home, Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, in 1943. While at the nursing home, on 21 May 1943, he fell from a window to his death.

Piccadilly Tube Station Piccadilly Circus underground station opened in 1906 in order to serve the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (the Bakerloo Line) and the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (the Piccadilly Line). The original building, planned by Leslie Green (1875-1908) and designed by Delissa Joseph (1859-1927), in an Arts and Crafts style stood on the corner of Jermyn Street and Haymarket.

However, a new sub-surface booking hall was constructed in 1928, and the old station closed for traffic in 1929.

146 Piccadilly Tube Station Signed Inscribed with title and stamped ‘From the George Gallery, 53 George Street, Edinburgh’ on reverse Watercolour with pencil, bodycolour and gum arabic on board 5 1⁄2 x 5 3⁄4 inches Provenance: George Gallery, Edinburgh; Arthur Ackermann, Chicago

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His work is represented in the collections of The Cleveland Museum of Art. Further reading: Catherine Cooke and Polly Walcot Stewart, ‘Walcot, William (1874-1943)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 56, pages 760-761; J M Richards, ‘Walcot, William [Valkot, V F] (b Lustdorf, near Odessa, Russia, 10 March 1874; d Hurstpierpoint, W Sussex, 21 May 1943), Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 32, page 773

‘Increasingly, a goal of London’s planners was the transformation of the city into a monument of empire.

It was increasingly conceived of as an imperial stage as well as an imperial capital.

References to London’s imperial pedigree and its imperial locations, monuments and shrines were to be found in a surprising range of media, including guidebooks and advertisements.’

(Ashley Jackson, Buildings of Empire, Oxford University Press, 2013, page 241)

148 St Mary Le Strand Signed and dated 1914 Signed and inscribed ‘The Strand’ on label on original backboard Watercolour with pencil and bodycolour 7 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2 inches Related to the etching of the same name

147 The Law Courts Main Entrance Signed Inscribed with title on label on reverse of board Watercolour with pencil, bodycolour and gum arabic on paper laid down on board 10 1/2 x 12 1⁄4 inches

The Law Courts Main Entrance Housing the High Court and the Court of Appeal, the Royal Courts of Justice were built on the Strand to a Neo-Gothic design by George Edmund Street (1824-1881), who died before their completion in 1882.

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149 The Royal Exchange, London Signed Watercolour with pencil and bodycolour 7 3⁄4 x 9 1⁄2 inches

‘The symbolic site which framed the idea of the City as the heart of empire was Bank Junction, the public space where seven of the City’s key commercial streets converge, surrounded by the monumental architecture of the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House. This site, capture in Niels Lund’s classic painting “The heart of the empire” (1904), began to acquire the character of an imperial Roman forum in the 1840s, when the Royal Exchange was rebuilt

by Sir William Tite, enclosing the space at the eastern end with a reoriented Exchange faced with a massive temple portico.’

(Iain Black, ‘Imperial visions: rebuilding the Bank of England, 1919-39’, Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, Manchester University Press, 1999, page 96)

9.

EDWARDIAN DREAMS: LANDSCAPES AND GARDENS

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Through the Victorian era, the population of England had more than doubled, with many of its inhabitants gravitating towards cities in search of secure employment and a better standard of living. However, while many of these cities offered opportunities in their impressive, dynamic centres, they also exposed those arriving to the dangers of poverty, overcrowding, pollution, disease and crime.

Artists were among those who sought an escape from the urban way of life, and provided an antidote to it, through idealised landscapes. Like Algernon Talmage, many would join or establish artists’ colonies in remote parts of the British Isles, such as Kirkcudbright in Scotland, Staithes in North Yorkshire, Walberswick in Suffolk, and Newlyn and St Ives in Cornwall. Others chose to live more separately from their peers, as did John William North in rural Somerset.

However, artists could stay close to the city, for easy reach of their market, and generate ideal landscapes in other ways. As a collector and dealer as well as a painter, James Orrock did so by situating himself within the long, distinguished tradition of British landscape painting, and emulating some of his favourites, such as Constable and Cox. Alternatively, George Samuel Elgood and Beatrice Parsons focussed on gardens, an ultimate man-made form of ideal landscape, Elgood designing them as well as painting them.

J AMES O RROCK James Orrock, RI ROI (1829-1913) A significant collector of English pictures, James Orrock became a skilled and prolific watercolourist in an early nineteenth-century manner.

James Orrock was born in Edinburgh on 18 October 1829, the elder son of the four children of a chemist and surgeon-dentist by his first wife. Encouraged by his mother in his lifelong passions for art and music, he began to board at Irvine Royal Academy, Ayrshire, at the age of eight, and there received his first formal drawing lessons from Mr White. Going on to Edinburgh University to read surgery and dentistry, he found time to study oil painting with James Ferguson. He then moved to Leicester to perfect the mechanical branch of dentistry under the surgeon-dentist, Mr Williamson.

While there, he took lessons in watercolour from John Burgess of Leamington, and began to produce paintings for exhibition based on sketches that he made on his travels. On his return to Edinburgh to complete his medical studies, he resumed lessons with Ferguson.

In 1853, Orrock married Susan Gould of Leicester, and moved to Nottingham to establish a dental practice. This gave him the financial security that enabled him to build his collection of English pictures, blue and white porcelain, and Chippendale and Adam furniture. Continuing to develop his own artistic talent, he took lessons from Thomas Stuart Smith at the local School of Design, and began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1858.

Eventually, in 1866, Orrock moved to London to become a professional painter, and settled in Bloomsbury, living at 17 Brunswick Square (1867), 6 Bedford Place (1868) and then 43 Bloomsbury Square (by 1872). In 1870, he took lessons from William Leighton Leitch who, in the

following year, proposed him as an associate of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours. Four years later, in 1875, he became a full member. Becoming active and influential in the affairs of the society, he was chiefly responsible for its new gallery, which opened in Piccadilly in 1883, for reconstituting the institute, and for gaining the royal charter in 1885. He was also elected to the membership of the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils in 1883. Specialising in producing watercolours in an early nineteenth-century manner, he possessed the gift to promote both the English watercolour tradition and his place within it through articles and lectures.

He also evolved his passion for collecting into a secondary career as an art dealer, Lord Leverhulme becoming a particularly important client. From 1892, he lived at 48 Bedford Square, a fine Adam house that provided a suitable setting for these activities.

Late in his career, Orrock illustrated some books, most notably W S Crockett’s In the Border Country (1906) and two by W S Sparrow: Mary Queen of Scots (1906, with his friend, Sir James Linton) and Old England (1908).

His last years were spent at The Chestnuts, Shepperton-on-Thames, Middlesex, and he died there on 10 May 1913. His wife had died two years earlier.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the V&A; and the Lady Lever Art Gallery (Port Sunlight).

Further reading: Christopher Beetles, ‘Orrock, James (1829-1913)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 41, pages 968-969

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150 Ratcliffe Ford, Nottinghamshire Inscribed ‘To Nurse Fuller, from Jas Orrock, Aug 5th 1907’ on original backboard Watercolour with pencil 19 3⁄4 x 29 3⁄4 inches

150 (detail)

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J OHN W ILLIAM N ORTH John William North, ARA HRSW RWS RWA (1842-1924) John William North was one of the most successful of late Victorian painters at capturing the experience of the rural atmosphere, in both oil and watercolour. Though he was best known for his English landscapes – and especially those of Somerset – his intense, almost tactile, approach to representing dense foliage equally suited the lush vegetation of the Bay of Algiers, which he visited regularly during the late 1870s.

151 Summer in a Western Wood Signed with initials and dated 1907-8 Signed and inscribed with title on label attached to the backboard Oil on canvas 20 1⁄2 x 28 3⁄4 inches Provenance: Horner Galleries, Sheffield Exhibited: Royal Academy of Arts, 1908, no 77

For a biography of John William North, and a further work by him, please refer to The Long Nineteenth Century, Volume One, London: Chris Beetles Limited, 2014, pages 72-73.

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‘on my return from a visit to [John William North’s] painting-grounds in that loveliest region of England which lies between the Quantock Hills and the Severn sea; undulating country that slopes from uplands of pasture and furze common down through orchards and crops to fall into wooded valleys where wind the sweetest fern-fringed streams. Intricate lanes burrow their way in deep grooves between banks or red earth which are overhung with canopies of greenwood festooned with sprays of honeysuckle, dog-rose and the wild clematis.’

(Herbert Alexander, ‘John William North’, Old Water-Colour Society’s Club, vol 5, 1927-28, page 35

152 The Quantock Hills, Somerset Signed and dated 1903 Inscribed with title on label on reverse of frame Oil on canvas 20 1⁄4 x 30 1⁄4 inches Provenance: John A Cooling, Dealer in Works of Art

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G EORGE S AMUEL E LGOOD George Samuel Elgood, RI ROI (1851-1943) George Samuel Elgood is best known for his watercolours of gardens, which were informed by a combination of observation and knowledge, and exemplfiy a classic genre of the Edwardian age.

However, his range encompassed landscapes and interiors, as is exemplified by the present work.

For a biography of George Samuel Elgood, and a further work, please refer to page 56.

153 Forecourt of the Grand Hotel Varese, formerly Villa Morosini Signed and dated 1909 Watercolour 13 1â „4 x 10 1â „2 inches Exhibited: The Fine Art Society, 1910, no 33

Forecourt of the Grand Hotel Varese, formerly Villa Morosini Overlooking the city of Varese, in northwest Lombardy, Villa Morosini was transformed into the Grand Hotel Varese Excelsior in 1874. Four decades later, it was rebuilt to designs by the Art Nouveau architect, Giuseppe Sommaruga, and renamed the Palace Grand Hotel Varese.

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B EATRICE PARSONS Beatrice Emma Parsons (1869-1955) Beatrice Parsons specialised in detailed representations of gardens, and especially floral borders. The results were exhibited in a large number of highly successful solo shows in London, and used to illustrate a number of books.

Beatrice Parsons was born in Peckham, South London, the sister of the stained-glass designer Karl Parsons, and educated at the Haberdashers’ Askes School for Girls. She studied at King’s College, London, and at the Royal Academy Schools, where she won three prizes.

Beginning to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1889, she attempted a variety of subjects but, from the turn of the century, specialised in the detailed depiction of gardens, and especially floral borders. The results were exhibited in some 22 highly successful solo shows, mainly at

154 September Roses, Hamper Mill, Watford Signed Watercolour 7 x 9 3⁄4 inches

Dowdeswell’s Gallery and the Greatorex Gallery, and well over 30 of her works were bought by Queen Mary.

Other notable purchasers include the Duchess of Westminster and the Duchess of Harewood.

Parsons also illustrated a number of books on gardens, including Gardens of England (1908) and Dion Clayton Calthrop’s The Charm of Gardens (1910). She lived in Hampstead (after 1901) and Oxhey, in Hertfordshire (from 1907). She died on 17 February 1955.

Biography and notes on Beatrice Parsons by Sue Selwyn, the author of a forthcoming biography of the artist

September Roses, Hamper Mill, Watford The ancient Hamper Mill is thought to be recorded in the Domesday Book under its alternative name of Oxhey Mill, and lies five minutes’ walk from the house inhabited by Beatrice Parsons from 1907 until her death in 1955.

Despite its proximity to Watford, the mellow mill buildings, and Hamper Mill Lake fed by the River Colne (visible in this painting), remain surrounded by an idyllic rural landscape, reminiscent of Constable country.

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Rose Garden and Tidal Pool, Porlock Bay, Somerset A number of Porlock Bay subjects were included in Parsons’ exhibition ‘Gardens Gay and Joyous’, held at the Greatorex Galleries in March 1920.

These employed a favourite compositional device, of flowers set against a sea view. One work, Sunrise, Porlock Bay, was purchased from this exhibition by Queen Mary, a great admirer of Beatrice’s work. Another painting in the Royal Collection – A Garden Gate, Porlock Bay – was also acquired from the Greatorex Galleries.

Both now hang in the private apartments at Sandringham House, Norfolk and were featured in the Sandringham exhibition ‘Gardens of England’, held from March to September 1989.

Parsons was much sought after as a painter of rose gardens and six of her paintings were used as colour illustrations for Walter P Wright’s Roses and Rose Gardens (London: Headley Brothers, 1911).

155 Rose Garden and Tidal Pool, Porlock Bay, Somerset Signed Inscribed with title on reverse Watercolour 12 x 10 inches

156 A Dorset road in May Inscribed with title and ‘No 12’ on reverse Signed Watercolour 12 1⁄4 x 10 inches

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157 Winchester College from the Warden’s Garden Signed Watercolour 14 3⁄4 x 10 1⁄2 inches

A LGERNON T ALMAGE Algernon Mayow Talmage, RA RBA HRE ROI RWA (1871-1939) Talmage is principally known as a painter of plein-air landscapes and pastorals in a restrained yet sparkling Impressionist manner.

Algernon Talmage was born in Fifield, Oxfordshire, on 23 February 1871, the second son of John Mayow Talmage by his second wife, Susan Penkivil. Both his mother and his paternal grandmother were of Cornish stock. During his childhood, he was involved in an accident with a gun, which crippled his right hand. As a result, he would paint with his left hand, and be exempted from active service in the First World War. Little is known of Talmage’s early education, though it has been suggested that he spent a short time at university. However, he studied under Sir Hubert von Herkomer at his school of art in Bushey, Hertfordshire.

Founded in 1883, the school allowed British artists to pursue an almost Continental training. The students were put to drawing heads from life and from life-casts, and every three months were allowed to try for entry into life classes, which consisted of drawing from nude

models. The emphasis on studying from life, which Talmage received under Herkomer, provided him with the ability to become a versatile painter in the naturalistic tradition.

By 1888, Talmage and two of his fellow students, Arnesby Brown and William Titcomb, had discovered in St Ives, Cornwall, the familiar security of a small art colony such as that which they had known in Bushey.

Along with such artists as Julius Olsson and Adrian Stokes, Talmage founded an Artists’ Club, which enabled these painters of the sea to meet and discuss different techniques for capturing the essence of the wild and rugged north coast of Cornwall. By 1900, Talmage and Olsson had established the Cornish School of Landscape, Figure and Sea Painting. The Cornish coastline, made beautiful by the ever-changing light and moods of the sea, enabled Talmage to establish his characteristic mellow palette and enchanting use of light.

For the most part, Talmage painted plein-air landscapes and pastorals, and had a passion for ☛ page 107

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☛ painting farming scenes including horses. The later commissions he received from the Canadian Government as an official war artist in France, during the First World War, would allow him to indulge this passion.

Settling in Chelsea in 1907, Talmage held his first solo show two years later at the Goupil Gallery. He was a regular contributor to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, including the exhibition of 1910, which Laura Wortley describes as marking the ‘highpoint of “British” Impressionism … which hummed with “air and light”’ (British Impressionism. A Garden of Bright Images, London: The Studio Fine Art Publications, 1988, page 280). He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1922, and an Academician seven years later.

Talmage was also elected to the Royal Society of British Artists (1903), the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils (1908), St Ives Society of Artists (1928-39), the Royal West of England Academy and the Royal Society of

Painter-Etchers and Engravers (initially as an associate and later an honorary member).

The influence of French painting and landscape was important to Talmage. He exhibited successfully at the Paris Salon, winning a silver medal in 1913 and a gold medal in 1922. Travelling to the country on many occasions, he was in Provence from as early as 1894, and possibly in St Tropez as late as 1932.

Late in life, Talmage shared his time between 49 Elgin Crescent, London, W11, and Sherfield English, near Romsey, Hampshire. He died at the latter on 14 September 1939.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Kirklees Museums and Galleries, and the National Railway Museum (York).

Biography by Rebecca Chapman and David Wootton

158 After the Harvest Signed and dated 1914 Oil on canvas 24 x 30 inches Provenance: The John Cleese Collection

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From early in the nineteenth century, writers and thinkers demonstrated an increased interest in collecting, arranging and sharing a wide range of myths and folk tales – one notable example being the work of the German scholars, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, on ‘children’s and household tales’, which they began to publish in 1812. This trend was partly a reaction to the dominant Classical culture of the eighteenth century, and partly an expression of the desire for greater national identity and independence. In terms of cultural production, the trend reached a peak in the operas of Richard Wagner, who adapted Norse mythology for his tetralogy, Der Ring des Niebelungen (1869-1976), and Arthurian legends for Lohengrin (1850), Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Parsifal (1882). As a result, the Wagnerian music drama became a model for subsequent nationalist composers, including ‘the Cockney Wagner’, Joseph Holbrooke, who based his trilogy, The Cauldron of Annwn (1912-20), on the Welsh collection of legends, the Mabinogion. In turn, this would inspire George Sheringham’s decorative panels on the same subject.

The deep interest in non-Classical mythologies affected the European imagination in many ways, and appeared in a great variety of forms. For instance, technological developments in printing enabled published versions of the myths to be well illustrated, and indeed their dramatic and often fantastic content provided an ideal way of conveying the qualities of improved colour reproduction. This was showcased in the Edwardian format of the Gift Book, a luxury publication that usually contained a classic tale of wonder, and often catered to the Christmas market, if only ostensibly to the tastes of children. First and foremost among Gift Book illustrators was Arthur Rackham, who had a particular affinity for the northern tradition, and the distinction of illustrating the text of Wagner’s Ring (1910-11).

The treatment by Rackham and his rivals, including William Heath Robinson, to an array of texts seems to have summed up an entire artistic and literary tradition. At the same time, it laid the foundation for the impressive, if more partial, achievement of illustrated children’s books in the twentieth century.

B EATRIX P OTTER Helen Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) Beatrix Potter’s picture books remain a landmark in the history of the genre. Originally published in a variety of forms, each volume had its appearance tailored to a particular text, and the integration of word and image was carefully considered. Though Potter made use of a basic anthropomorphism, she tended to eschew further fantasy, and the great success of her illustration often lies in the sense it gives of a particular place.

Beatrix Potter was born at 2 Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, London, on 28 July 1866, the elder child and only daughter of a barrister who chose to live as a dilletante, with painting and photography numbered among his interests. Beatrix herself led a very sheltered life for many years, remaining with her parents until she was nearly 40. Educated at home, she was entirely self-taught as an artist. She sketched fungi, fossils and fabrics in the South Kensington Museums, and animals, both furtively at home, and during family summer holidays in the Lake District and Scotland. Then developing an interest in illustration, she absorbed the influence of Thomas Bewick, Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and John Tenniel, as she published some greetings’ cards and a first book, The Happy Pair (both 1890). Three years later, she invented the character of Peter Rabbit in a series of picture-letters for Noël Moore, the son of her former companion, Annie Carter.

These formed the basis of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which was privately printed in 1900, and finally accepted by Frederick Warne & Co two years later.

This was followed by several more of her classic tales.

After a fierce battle with her parents, in 1905, Potter became engaged to Norman Warne, her editor, though two years later he died. Soon after, she bought Hill Top Farm at Sawrey, near Windermere, gaining a measure of independence and becoming a capable farmer. During the following eight years she produced much of her best work, and both her home and the adjacent Castle Farm, which she bought in 1909, were used as the settings for at least six of her books. Originally published in a variety of forms, each volume had its appearance tailored to a particular text, and the integration of word and image was carefully considered. Though Potter made use of a basic anthopomorphism, she tended to eschew further fantasy, and the great success of her illustration often lies in the sense it gives of a particular place.

Following her marriage to William Heelis, an Appleby solicitor, in 1913, Potter worked little as an illustrator and spent much of her time farming. She died at Hill Top Farm on 22 December 1943. Her properties were bequeathed to the National Trust.

Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, Tate and the V&A.

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Further reading: Anne Stevenson Hobbs, Beatrix Potter: artist and illustrator, London: Frederick Warne, 2005; Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter, London: Warne, 1946; Anne Carroll Moore, The Art of Beatrix Potter, London: Warne,1955; V A J Slowe, ‘Potter, Helen Beatrix (b London, 28 July 1866; d Near Sawrey, Cumbria, 22 Dec 1943)’,

Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 25, page 372; Judy Taylor, Beatrix Potter, artist, storyteller and countrywoman, London: Warne, 1986; Judy Taylor, ‘Potter [married name Heelis], (Helen) Beatrix (1866-1943)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 45, pages 10-11

159 There once was an amiable guinea-pig, who brushed back his hair like a periwig – He wore a sweet tie, As blue as the sky – And his whiskers and buttons were very big

Signed with initials and dated ’93 Watercolour with bodycolour 5 x 7 1⁄2 inches Provenance: Elizabeth Ann Paget Similar to five illustrations in Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes, London: Frederick Warne & Co, 1917

There once was an amiable guinea-pig This sketchbook sheet comprises the drawings that Beatrix Potter made in February 1893 when she borrowed guinea pigs from her friend, Miss Elizabeth Ann Paget, known as ‘Nina’, to use as models. Potter described these ‘sittings’, and an unfortunate circumstance that arose from them, in her diary: First I borrowed and drew Mr Chopps. I returned him safely. Then in an evil hour I borrowed a very particular guinea-pig with a long white ruff known as Queen Elizabeth … this wretched pig took to eating blotting paper, pasteboard and string and other curious substances, and expired in the night. I suspected something was wrong and intended to take it back. My feelings may be imagined when I found it extended a damp – very damp disagreeable body. Miss Paget proved peacable. I gave her the drawing.

(The Journal of Beatrix Potter, London: Frederick Warne, 1966, page 304) It is believed that Potter was originally inspired by the following verse in making these drawings:

There once was an amiable guinea-pig Who brushed back his hair like a peri-wig He wore a sweet tie, as blue as the sky, And his hat and coat buttons were very big.

And, though she gave this particular sheet to Miss Paget, she returned to the compositions when she illustrated the verse, with an amended last line, for the project, Book of Rhymes, which was developed from 1902 and published as Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes in 1917.

The revised, published drawings are more detailed but otherwise very similar. One version of the second vignette is held in the Linder Bequest at the V&A, while one of the fourth vignette is in a UK private collection. However, what is particularly fascinating and unusual is to see the intended original order of the five vignettes and five Potter watercolour illustrations on one piece of paper.

Many thanks to Derek Ross for help in compiling this note.

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160 There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, She had so many children She didn’t know what to do!

She gave them some broth Without any bread – She whipped them all around – And put them to bed!

Inscribed with title Pen ink and watercolour Three images each measuring 4 1⁄4 x 7 inches circa 1917

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A RTHUR R ACKHAM Arthur Rackham, VPRWS (1867-1939) First and foremost among illustrators of the Gift Book, Arthur Rackham had a particular affinity for the northern literary tradition, from Hans Christian Andersen to Richard Wagner, and developed a perfect visual response in his intensely observed characterisation and atmospheric depiction of setting. The images tend to be remembered as grotesque and spine tingling but, wide-ranging and always apt, their mood is as likely to be humorous or tender.

Arthur Rackham was born in Lewisham on 19 September 1867 and was educated at the City of London School. He visited Australia in 1884 and, on his return, enrolled in evening classes at Lambeth School of Art as he looked for work. Employed as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Insurance Office between 1885 and 1892, he resigned from the post to join the staff of the Pall Mall Budget, later transferring to the Westminster Budget.

Rackham began to illustrate books in 1894, and this activity offered a field in which he could expand his imaginative gifts. He assimilated a wide variety of influences, including the work of E J Sullivan and the Victorian fairy painters, and by the turn of the century

161 In the broad walk you meet all the people who are worth knowing Signed and dated 06 Pen ink and watercolour with pencil 7 1⁄2 x 13 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: J M Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906, plate 4

had evolved his characteristic style. Working in both black and white and colour, he enhanced the expressive linear quality of his drawing with a perspectival use of a muted range of pigments that could be accurately reproduced by new printing processes. For some 15 years his only serious rival as a fairy story and gift book illustrator was Edmund Dulac. His first publications included, most notably, The Ingoldsby Legends (1898) and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1899); and with Rip Van Winkle (1905), Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1908) his reputation was assured.

Exhibiting widely at home and abroad, including several solo shows at the Leicester Galleries, Rackham won many awards. He was elected an associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1902, a full member in 1908, and Vice-President in 1910. He was also Master of the Art Workers Guild in 1919, and a member of the Langham Sketching Club.

After 1920, Rackham undertook painting in oils and began to show at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

He visited America in 1927, and in 1931 went to Denmark where he made studies for ☛ page 112

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☛ illustrations to Hans Andersen; these were further used, in 1933, as the basis of his designs for a production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, his first professional theatrical project. These last 20 years were something of an anti-climax, partly due to the decline in the standard of book production. But he continued to produce some excellent illustrations, such as those for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935) and Peer Gynt (1936). Despite declining health, he completed his last set of designs, for The Wind in the Willows, shortly before his death at Limpsfield, Surrey, on 6 September 1939.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum and the V&A; and the Butler Library (Columbia University), The New York Public Library and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin).

162 On the ground Sleep sound: I’ll apply To your eye, Gentle lover, remedy Signed and dated 08 Pen ink and watercolour 8 1⁄2 x 10 3⁄4 inches Illustrated: William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, London: William Heinemann, 1908, facing page 90 Exhibited: ‘Exhibition of Works by Arthur Rackham’, Leicester Galleries, London, 1908, no 32

Further reading: James Hamilton, Arthur Rackham: A Life with Illustration, London: Pavilion Books, 1990; James Hamilton, ‘Rackham, Arthur (b Lewisham, London, 19 Sept 1867; d Limpsfield, Surrey, 6 Sept 1939), Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 25, pages 835-856; James Hamilton, ‘Rackham, Arthur (1867-1939)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 45, pages 718-721; Derek Hudson, Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work, London: Heinemann, 1960

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163 The Fish King and the Dog Fish: Its head was patted graciously Signed and dated 04 Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour 10 3⁄4 x 9 inches Provenance: Alexander Mann, and by descent to Lady Pickthorne Illustrated: Little Folks, February 1905, page 109, ‘Adventures in Wizard-Land’ by Mrs M H Spielmann (in black & white); Mrs M H Spielmann (ed), The Rainbow Book.

Tales of Fun & Fancy, London: Chatto & Windus, 1909, frontispiece (in colour) and page 53 (in black & white) After publication this illustration was reworked by the artist.

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W ILLIAM H EATH R OBINSON William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) Heath Robinson is a household name, and a byword for a design or construction that is ‘ingeniously or ridiculously over-complicated’ (as defined by The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998, page 848). Yet, he was also a highly distinctive and versatile illustrator, whose work could touch at one extreme the romantic watercolours of a Dulac or Rackham, at another the sinister grotesqueries of a Peake, and at yet another the eccentricities of an Emett.

William Heath Robinson was born on 31 May 1872 in Islington, North London, the third son of Thomas Robinson, chief staff artist of the Penny Illustrated Paper. In the hope of becoming a landscape painter, he studied at Islington School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, but soon followed his brothers, Charles and Tom, into the more secure profession of illustration. He contributed to periodicals from 1896 and, in the following year, began to illustrate books.

He established his position in 1902, marking his individuality with illustrations to his own book, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin, and ensuring his financial stability by making his first drawings for advertising. In this first phase, he worked almost exclusively in black and white, fully demonstrating his mastery of monochrome in The Works of Francis Rabelais. This appeared in 1904, just as Grant Richards, his main patron and the book’s publisher, became bankrupt. However, he was able to work with other publishers, developing his use of colour in order to produce true gift books; these began with Twelfth Night (Hodder, 1908), and included his own story, Bill the Minder (Constable, 1912), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Constable, 1914).

Though Robinson competed with others in the field of the gift book, he remained the unparalleled practitioner of the comic image. He produced an increasing number of humorous drawings for magazines and, from the First World War, was acknowledged the most original illustrator of his time. To the general public, as represented by the popular press, he was known as the ‘Gadget King’, that is as the inventor of perversely logical contraptions that gently mocked the products of the industrial age and so endeared society to its own rapid rate of change. He exploited this persona, by appearing on radio and television, designing a house for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition (1934), and parodying the self-help manual in a series of books which began with How to Live in a Flat (written with K R G Browne, 1936). His major set of literary illustrations in this later period further blurred the distinction between fiction and reality: Norman Hunter’s The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm (1933) concerned an amiable, eccentric

inventor. The events of the Second World War, as experienced on both sides of the English Channel, enabled him to sustain his powers of invention even into his final work. He died in Highgate, North London, on 13 September 1944.

His work is represented in the collections of the British Museum, The Cartoon Museum, the V&A and The West House and Heath Robinson Museum Trust.

Further reading: Geoffrey Beare, The Art of William Heath Robinson, London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2003; Geoffrey Beare, The Brothers Robinson, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 1992 Geoffrey Beare, Heath Robinson Advertising, London: Bellew, 1992; Geoffrey Beare, The Illustrations of W Heath Robinson, London: Werner Shaw, 1983 Geoffrey Beare, William Heath Robinson 1872-1944, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2011; Langston Day, The Life and Art of W Heath Robinson, London: Herbert Joseph, 1947; James Hamilton, William Heath Robinson, London: Pavilion Books, 1992 Simon Heneage, ‘Robinson, William Heath (1872-1944)’, in H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 47, pages 428-431; John Lewis, Heath Robinson.

Artist and Comic Genius, London: Constable, 1973 For further works by William Heath Robinson, please see page 128.

The Chris Beetles Gallery has mounted a number of significant exhibitions of the work of William Heath Robinson: 1. ‘William Heath Robinson (1872-1944)’, Chris Beetles Gallery, March 1987 (with a fully illustrated catalogue) 2. ‘The Brothers Robinson’, Chris Beetles Gallery and the Royal Festival Hall, February 1992 (with a fully illustrated catalogue) 3. ‘William Heath Robinson (1872-1944). 50th Anniversary Exhibition’, Chris Beetles Gallery, September 1994 4. ‘The Gadget King’, Manchester City Art Galleries, Heaton Hall, May-October 2000 5. ‘W Heath Robinson’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Linbury Room, November 2003 (to complement Dulwich’s own exhibition of William Heath Robinson) 6. ‘Heath Robinson at Nunnington Hall’, National Trust, Nunnington Hall, North Yorkshire, July 2005 7. ‘Contraptions. William Heath Robinson (1872-1944)’, Chris Beetles Gallery, June-August 2007 (to launch a cartoon collection published by Duckworth) 8. ‘William Heath Robinson 1872-1944’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-June 2011 (with a fully illustrated catalogue)

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164 The Real Soldier Signed with initials Pen ink and watercolour 11 1⁄4 x 8 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: W Heath Robinson, Bill The Minder, London: Constable & Co, 1912, page 147, (originally published in black and white, subsequently coloured by the artist for exhibition) Exhibited: ‘William Heath Robinson 1872-1944’, 25 May-22 June 2011, no 233

166 Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales Signed Pen and ink 13 3⁄4 x 10 inches Illustrated: Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, London: Constable & Co, 1913, title page Exhibited: ‘W Heath Robinson (1872-1944)’, 4-27 March 1987, no 124; ‘William Heath Robinson 1872-1944’, 25 May-22 June 2011, no 234

165 The Elfin King’s House Keeper Signed Inscribed ‘Elfin Mount’ below mount Pen and ink 14 1⁄4 x 10 3⁄4 inches Illustrated: Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, London: Constable & Co, 1913, page 120

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Robinson and Rabelais Following the success of his own illustrated story, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902), William Heath Robinson suggested to its publisher, Grant Richards, an idea for their further collaboration. He chose the The Works of Mr Francis Rabelais in the unexpurgated translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux, which was first published in full in 1694. In doing this, he ‘was making a conscious and highly ambitious effort to launch himself as a leading illustrator of serious, if fantastical, books for adults’ (James Hamilton 1992, page 40). Such an undertaking was bound to test any illustrator’s talents, yet Heath Robinson treated it confidently as a showcase for many aspects of his genius. One of the most luxurious illustrated editions of a classic of the Western canon, its two large volumes contained a total of 254 black and white illustrations, including two frontispieces in photogravure and 98 full-page line drawings.

François Rabelais (c1494-1553) was one of the leading figures of the French Renaissance. He withdrew from religious orders to read medicine at Montpellier, and settled in Lyon as a physician and lecturer in anatomy.

In attacking ecclesiastical abuse and celebrating corporeal functions, his comedy of the giants Gargantua and his son Pantgruel contributed to the contemporary humanistic thinking that has so influenced modern secular society. Its rich use of language and its inventive narrative would offer particular inspiration to such writers as Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and James Joyce. However, when first published, his work so provoked the French Church, that Rabelais had to flee first to Metz and later to Rome, before ending his days near Paris.

167 All very busily employed in seeking of rustie pins Signed Inscribed ‘The Usurers in Hell’ below mount Pen and ink 22 1⁄2 x 14 3⁄4 inches Illustrated: The Works of Mr Francis Rabelais, London: Grant Richards, 1904, vol I, the second book, chapter XXX, page 241 Exhibited: ‘W Heath Robinson (1872-1944)’, 4-27 March 1987, no 78; ‘William Heath Robinson 1872-1944’, 25 May-22 June 2011, no 218

Ironically, Heath Robinson was working in an atmosphere of almost equivalent moral outrage.

During the closing decade of the nineteenth century, a vociferously vocal minority of the public spoke out against decadence in the arts. If the conviction of Oscar Wilde for homosexual practices, in 1895, provided the chief focus for that criticism, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (who died in 1898) offered a visual parallel. Well into the period of the First World War, the name of Beardsley would connote deviant practices and perverse forms, so that Malcolm Salaman would have to qualify the observation that Beardsley had influenced William’s brother, Charles Robinson, by stating ‘not, of course, in subject matter’ (see Hamilton 1992, page 42). However, as James Hamilton has differentiated, Rabelais ‘represented a different kind of decadence...with drinking, defecating and wenching in abundance, but comfortably little sign of buggery’ (loc cit). The choice of a seventeenthcentury translation only served to emphasise that donnish, clubbish aspect of Rabelais’s satire, and surely suggests part of the appeal of the author to a member of the London Sketch Club.

In contrast to Gustav Doré (1832-83), whose edition of Rabelais had appeared in England in 1871, Heath Robinson inevitably concentrated on the humour of the text. Yet his interpretation was anything but one dimensional either in appearance or in tone. His considerable use of portrait caricature, in both the plates and the vignettes, extended the memorable

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168 Rondibilis Signed Pen and ink 22 x 15 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: The Works of Mr Francis Rabelais, London: Grant Richards, 1904, vol I, the third book, chapter XXXI, page 361 Literature: John Lewis, Heath Robinson. Artist and Comic Genius, London: Constable & Co, 1973, page 87

169 She’s kind and ever did admire a well-fed monk Signed Inscribed with title and ‘Ch XLVI’ and ‘Book V’ below mount Pen and ink 15 1⁄2 x 11 inches Illustrated: The Works of Mr Francis Rabelais, London: Grant Richards, 1904, vol II, the fifth book, chapter LXVII, page 317 Exhibited: ‘W Heath Robinson (1872-1944)’, March 1987, no 70

qualities of Rabelais’s individual characters and placed the potent mutifariousness of humanity to the fore. The figures have a visceral immediacy at once reminiscent of the grotesques of Leonardo and the voluptuaries of Jordaens.

Some heads and bodies stand out against the strong black shadows that they cast; others are constructed from series of delicate, sinuous lines. By means of a confident articulation of the degrees of monochrome, Heath Robinson was able to evoke frivolity, melancholy and terror, sometimes together in a single image. Such artistry was firmly based on his knowledge and understanding of a wide range of black and white illustrators: from the elegance and whimsy of John Tenniel and Laurence Housman to the bold concision of the Beggarstaff Brothers and John Hassall.

The success of Rabelais was hard-won for Heath Robinson, and short-lived for Grant Richards. Heath Robinson was reported to have complained about the quality of reproduction, and certainly expressed his disappointment at the reduction in the number of photogravures. In turn, the expense of the project contributed to the bankruptcy of Richards, who later omitted to mention it in his autobiography. In 1904, his business was sold to Alexander Moring, who did not release Rabelais for another eight years. By that time, Heath Robinson had evolved his style through the illustration of another 20 books, including Twelfth Night (1908) and A Song of the English (1909). Yet if reviews of a past production were inevitably mixed, the critic of the Athenaeum found the drawings for Rabelais ‘as good as any Mr Robinson has done’. Few would now fail to concur with such a positive verdict.

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F LORENCE H ARRISON Florence Susan Harrison (1877-1955) While the late Pre-Raphaelite illustrations of Florence Harrison have always stood out from those of her contemporaries, too little has been known of her life, and much of that inaccurate.

In the light of new research, which has been aided by members of her family, it is now possible to present an improved biography of the artist.

Florence Harrison was born on board the Windsor Castle, a ship bound from London to Brisbane, Australia, on 2 November 1877. She was the second daughter of Norwood Harrison, the ship’s captain, and his wife, Lucy. Though her father retired from active duties in 1882, Florence seems to have had a fairly peripatetic childhood. According to the official censuses: in 1881, she was staying at Rockhill House, Folkestone, Kent, a girl’s school run by Elizabeth Harrison, her maiden great-aunt; while, in 1901, she and her family – including two younger brothers – were living at 29 Colworth Road, Leyton, Essex. For at least two periods – 1908 to 1914 and 1918 to 1920 – she was based in Bruges, Belgium, a city that inspired many of her townscapes. There she met her close friend, the

Irish writer, Enid Maud Dinnis, and followed her by converting from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism.

In 1905, Harrison began to work as an illustrator of her own poetry for children. The books were issued by Blackie, her chief publisher throughout her career.

At this stage her illustrations combined Pre-Raphaelite influences with the practices of fin-de-siècle poster artists, and may be compared to those of such contemporary women illustrators as Jessie M King and Anne Anderson. At best, the colour plates have the luminosity and strong outlines of stained glass, while the line drawings have a decorative efflorescence.

In 1910, Harrison began to publish her illustrations to Romantic literary texts, including poetry by Christina Rossetti, Lord Tennyson and William Morris. Yet, at the same time, she contributed to popular annuals, appearing alongside Anne Anderson, Honor Appleton, Agnes Richardson, among many others. A turn to more overtly fantastic imagery was signalled by the appearance of her Elfin Song in 1912.

Continuing to publish until the early 1940s, Harrison moved from London to Hove, Sussex, during the Blitz, and becoming companion and carer to her cousin, Mary Isobel Harrison. Following Mary’s death in 1943, Florence lived on in the rented flat until her death on 5 January 1955.

Mary Jacobs should be acknowledged for her instrumental role in providing an accurate record of the life and work of Florence Harrison.

Further reading Mary Jacobs, ‘Florence Susan Harrison’, Studies in Illustration, Imaginative Book Illustration Society, no 46, winter 2010, pages 22-59 (with a bibliography of published illustrations)

170 Marigold Mary’s hair was gold, Her hair was long, but it stood upright, Till she looked, to that old and bald Kobold, Like a torch alight on a windy night Signed Inscribed with title and ‘Elfin Song’ below mount Pen ink and watercolour 9 x 5 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: Florence Harrison, Elfin Song, London: Blackie & Son, 1912, facing page 78, ‘Marigold Mary’

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G EORGE S HERINGHAM George Sheringham, PS (1884-1937) The versatile and eclectic artist, George Sheringham, found his forte when he became a designer of interiors and theatrical productions.

In drawing on a deep knowledge of both western and eastern traditions, he created highly seductive worlds of fantasy.

George Sheringham was born in London on 13 November 1884, the elder son of the Rev Harry Alsager Sheringham, the then Vicar of St Peter’s Westminster.

Educated at the King’s School, Gloucester, he studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art (18991901), and then under Harry Becker (1901-4). In 1904, he moved to Paris, and there developed his decorative style through visits to the collection of Eastern art at the Musée Guimet. Exhibiting at the Paris Salon, he may have held solo shows in 1905, in Paris and at the Ryder Gallery, London. While in France, he met and became engaged to Sybil Meugens (1877-1941), the daughter of an English accountant of Belgian descent, who was making her way as a painter. Returning to England in about 1907, he held a solo show in London’s Brook Street Gallery in 1908, and then travelled in various parts of Europe and, most significantly, Algeria.

At his debut as a decorative artist, at the Ryder Gallery in 1910, he exhibited silk panels that encouraged much interest and led to commissions to paint Chinoiserie panels for Judge Evans and Sir Albert Levy.

In turning to book illustration in 1915, with an edition of Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite, Sheringham made use of eighteenth-century imagery, which held him in good stead as a theatrical designer. His first set designs, for the Plough Club in 1917, foreshadowed long associations with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.

Throughout the 1920s, he worked as both a theatrical and an interior designer, in Oriental and Baroque styles, a versatility that helped him win the Grand Prix at the Paris Salon in 1925. At the end of the decade, he accomplished his finest decorative scheme, for Eric Hamilton Rose at Leweston Manor, Dorset, by producing a number of murals based on the analysis of the rhythmic character of Oriental art. His achievements in interior decoration and textiles led him to be one of the first to be awarded the distinction of Royal Designer for Industry, in 1936. However, from 1932, ill health forced him to confine his movements, and in consequence he concentrated on still life painting. He exhibited a number of such subjects, in March 1937, in a solo show at the Fine Art Society. He died a few months later at his home in London on 11 November 1937. He had been a member of the Pastel Society and the London Sketch Club.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum and the V&A; and Nottingham City Museums and Galleries

Following their marriage on 25 January 1912, George and Sybil Sheringham lived for a while with his family, in Northamptonshire and London, before moving to a house at Besant Cottage, 106 Frognal, Hampstead.

They then shared their time between Frognal and Little Blenheim, Steeple Barton, Oxfordshire.

The Cauldron of Annwn George Sheringham was commissioned to paint these largescale watercolours on silk by Baron Howard de Walden as illustrations to The Cauldron of Annwn, his dramatic trilogy in verse. They represent two significant strands of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century creativity. Firstly, the choice of subject exemplifies the fascination of artists, composers and writers with ancient myths and their role in culture, as led by the paradigm of Richard Wagner. Secondly, the style epitomises a sophisticated Orientalist approach to decoration, influenced by the French, and applied by such British-based artists as Conder, Dulac and Ricketts to surfaces large and small. The combination of the Celtic and the Oriental in Sheringham’s images suggest a parallel with those dramas of Yeats that present Irish myths through the form of Japanese Noh (dramas for which Dulac produced the designs). As such, they are a particularly fascinating contribution to European Symbolism.

Poetic Drama and Wagnerian Opera Thomas Evelyn Ellis (1880-1946) succeeded as 8th Baron Howard de Walden and 4th Baron Seaford in 1899. A writer, as well as an important patron of the arts, he was inspired by the Welsh legends of the Mabinogion to produce The Cauldron of Annwn. This comprised The Children of Don (in collaboration with Owen Rhoscomyl); Dylan, Son of the Wave; and Bronwen, Daughter of Llyr. Descending from an old Wrexham family, Baron Howard de Walden was devoted to Welsh language and culture, and lived for some years at Chirk Castle (now in Clwyd). A motorboat racer, who competed in the 1908 summer Olympics, he called his boat the Dylan.

Early in 1908, the composer, Joseph Holbrooke (1878-1958) started to set Dylan, Son of the Wave as a choral symphony, at the instigation of Baron Howard de Walden. He developed it into an opera by the end of the year and, two years later, in 1910, published it as a ‘pianoforte vocal score’. ☛ page 120

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171a

171 The Cauldron of Annwn 171a A Dragon passing over Travellers Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and gold paint on silk 21 1⁄2 x 45 inches (lunette) 171b Peredur and the Serpent of the Mount of Morning Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and gold paint on silk 51 1⁄2 x 19 1⁄2 inches 171c The Tale of Kynon, the son of Clydno when King Arthur was at Caerllan upon Usk Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and gold paint on silk 51 1⁄2 x 19 1⁄2 inches 171b

171c

☛ By 1912, Holbrooke had set The Children of Don, the first part of the trilogy, and it was published and produced in that year. This music drama, in a prologue and three acts, premiered at the London Opera House (Covent Garden) on 15 June 1912, with Arthur Nikisch sharing the conducting with the composer. It was later performed in Vienna and Salzburg.

Dylan, Son of the Wave, premiered on 4 July 1914, with Thomas Beecham conducting. However, the third part, Bronwen, Daughter of Llyr, was not completed until 1920, and not premiered until 1 February 1929, in Huddersfield, by the Carl Rosa Opera Company under the baton of C Powell.

Though Holbrooke was a versatile composer, he became known as ‘the Cockney Wagner’ as a result of this ambitious mythological cycle, inevitably compared to Der Ring des Niebelungen. At best, the music for these operas was likened to that by Wagner and Richard Strauss, and considered a

precursor to Ravel. However, by 1929, such large-scale colourful scoring was becoming unfashionable, so that the premiere of Bronwen was perhaps the peak of Holbrooke’s career.

The first productions of The Cauldron of Annwn were designed

by Sidney Sime (1867-1941), the artist and illustrator who specialised in fantasy subjects. He was also commissioned by Baron Howard de Walden to design productions of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1909, with Frederick Cayley Robinson) and Ibsen’s The Pretenders (1913). A decade later, Sime would collaborate with his friend, Holbrooke, on Bogey Beasts, a collection of ‘poems, pictures, pianoforte pieces and a song’ (1923). Thus Howard de Walden and Holbrooke seem to have comprised a nexus for cultural activities of a Symbolist – and fantastic – nature, and one into which Sheringham was drawn.

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171d Playing Music Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and gold paint on silk 58 x 22 1⁄2 inches

171d

171e

171e Branwen Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and gold paint on silk 58 x 22 1⁄2 inches 171f Baptism of Dylan, Son of the Wave Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and gold paint on silk 22 1⁄2 x 58 inches 171f A Set of Decorative Panels In 1902, Lord Howard de Walden acquired the lease to Seaford House, in Belgrave Square (designed in 1842 for the Earl of Sefton), and undertook a substantial remodelling, including putting in a green onyx staircase, friezes and panelling. It is possible that the present silk panels were painted as a late addition to this scheme, or for Chirk Castle.

Sheringham’s debut as a decorative artist took place at the Ryder Gallery, at 47 Albemarle Street, in 1910. Here he demonstrated all he had learned from his studies in Paris and, particularly, his visits to the collection of Eastern art at the Musée Guimet. The silk panels that he exhibited at the Ryder Gallery encouraged much interest, and led to commissions from Sir Albert Levy and Judge Evans. Evans, the father of Quiz, the caricaturist, bought fans from Sheringham (1911) and commissioned a set of panels of The Mabinogion for his country house, Ilmington Hall (1912). These panels may have been similar, and contemporary, to the present set.

Sheringham’s success as a versatile designer for interiors and the stage, in Oriental and Baroque styles, helped him win the Grand Prix at the Paris Salon in 1925. (Indeed, the present panels may have been exhibited at that Salon, and have contributed to his success.) At the end of the 1920s, he accomplished his finest decorative scheme for Eric Hamilton Rose at Leweston Manor, Dorset, by producing a number of murals based on the analysis of the rhythmic character of Oriental art. They confirmed the artist as a rival of Dulac.

The Inspiration for the Dramas, the Operas and the Panels The inspiration behind The Cauldron of Annwn was the Mabinogion, a collection of mediaeval Welsh manuscripts, mostly of the fourteenth century. First translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, and published between 1838 and 1849, the volumes comprise potent national mythology, including some early versions of Arthurian stories. ☛ page 122

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The Cauldron of Annwn According to The Mabinogion, King Arthur descends to the underworld (Annwn) to retrieve a magical – and beautiful – cauldron of rebirth. This had the power to revive dead warriors slain in battle. The myth may be the origin of the Holy Grail, which was only later associated with the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper.

Baptism of Dylan, Son of the Wave Dylan (the eponymous character of the second part of The Cauldron of Annwn), is a son of Arianrhod and Gwydion, two of the Children of Don, the powers of light. However, Dylan himself is sometimes said to be a god of darkness as well as a sea god. Following his baptism by his great uncle, Math, the King of Gwynedd, he rushes into the sea and swims like a fish.

When he returns to land, he is killed by an uncle, Gofannon, who does not know who he is.

Branwen Branwen (or Bronwen, the eponymous character of the third part of The Cauldron of Annwn), is one of the Children of Llyr, the powers of darkness, but also the Welsh goddess of love and beauty. She marries Mathowlch, the King of Ireland, and takes with her the magical cauldron. Following mistreatment by her husband, war breaks out between the Irish and the British, and the British fair badly because they do not have the cauldron to rejuvenate them.

Tale of Kynon, son of Clydno, when King Arthur was at Caerllan upon Usk In some Welsh traditions, Caerllan upon Usk (or Caerleon-onUsk) was King Arthur’s court, a few miles north of Newport.

While Arthur sleeps, his knights tell tales. These knights include Kynon (or Cynan), son of Clydno Eiddyn. His tale – of a quest that leads to humiliation – inspires Owain to find the Lady of the Fountain.

Peredur and the Serpent of the Mound of Mourning Peredur is the Perceval of the Arthurian legends, and the Parsifal of Wagner’s opera, famous for his involvement in the quest for the Holy Grail. In Welsh mythology, Peredur is the brother of Arddun, the last of the Children of Don. His adventures include the destruction of the Serpent at the Mound of Mourning.

11.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

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During the course of the First World War, it gradually became clear that artists could make a significant contribution to the efforts of the allies – by taking various forms of immediate action and commemorating the people and places involved. Furthermore, they could help create a sense of united purpose within and across nations, while demoralising the enemy, through the universal language of images.

Louis Raemaekers soon gained an international reputation with cartoons that charted the political situation, which he published and exhibited both at home, in Holland, and abroad. Combining reportage, caricature and allegory, his drawings proved so powerful that, in 1917, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, invited him to win over American opinion to allied interests.

By then, William Rothenstein had encouraged the War Office to adopt the idea of official war artists to compete with a similar scheme instigated by the Germans. Muirhead Bone became the first Official War Artist in 1916, and drew both on the Western Front and with the fleet. Rothenstein himself worked on the Front from 1917, though both his German name and his defiant manner led him to be treated with suspicion. Other countries introduced the role of the official war artist, including Canada, which employed Alfred Bastien and Charles Walter Simpson, among others.

Some artists were able to apply their artistic skills while on active service. Harry Van der Weyden served as a camouflage officer with the Royal Engineers, while Edward Handley-Read organised a studio for diagrams and models for the Machine Gun Corps. Additionally, these artists produced symbols of enemy devastation, in their images of ruined buildings.

Handley-Read managed to mount a solo show of his watercolours of ‘The British Firing-Line’ in London as early as 1916. Others shared their records of experience following the Armistice of 1918. In 1920, the Franco-Belgian artist, Fernand Lantoine, mounted an exhibition of the drawings and watercolours that he had made while serving as a prisoner of war. Then, in 1926, the Belgian artist, Alfred Bastien, displayed his large-scale, Panorama de L’Yser, which had been suggested by King Albert as early as 1914.

Some of the artists who had engaged in the First World War, were still active at the outbreak of the Second. These included not only Bone and Rothenstein, as official war artists, but also the cartoonist, William Heath Robinson, who aided the war effort by provoking laughter.

L OUIS R AEMAEKERS Louis Raemaekers, HRMS (1869-1956) The Dutch artist, Louis Raemaekers, gained an international reputation for his innovative political cartoons, which provided bold and unsparing criticism of German atrocities during the First World War. The son of a newspaper editor, Louis Raemaekers was born on 6 April 1869 in Roermond, in the Dutch province of Limburg, on the German frontier. Having attended the local lower and middle schools, from 1879 to 1889, he studied art at the Rijksnormaalschool, Amsterdam, under Jacobus Roeland de Kruijff and Theo Molkenboer, in the years 1891-93. He then went on to Brussels to study at the Académie Royale des BeauxArts and in the studio of Ernest Blanc-Garin. He began his career as a painter of landscapes and portraits, and also a teacher, rising to become the director of the evening drawing school for craftsmen at Wageningen in Gelderland. In 1902, he married Johanna Petronella van Mansvelt, and settled in her birthplace of Haarlem; together they would have one son and two daughters.

In 1907, Raemaekers started to produce political cartoons and posters, and two years later joined the staff of the Amsterdam Telegraaf. Following the outbreak of the First World War, he gained international recognition with powerful chalk drawings charting the European political situation. Originally

appearing in the Telegraaf, they were widely reproduced, being published in Britain in Land and Water and the Daily Mail, and then collected in volumes. His bold and unsparing criticism of German atrocities was something new and his style has been compared to that of Steinlen. His achievements during the war were widely exhibited and gained him many international honours.

From 1916, Raemaekers lived at ‘Woodthorpe’, a house in Sydenham Hill Road, in southeast London, and involved himself in English artistic circles, exhibiting at the Fine Art Society (almost annually between 1915-20) and being elected an honorary member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters (1916). In 1917, he accepted the request of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, to travel to the United States to win over American opinion to the interests of the Allies.

Following the end of the war, Raemaekers lived in Brussels and worked for French language newspapers.

He campaigned in favour of the League of Nations and attempted to raise awareness of the dangers of Nazism to world peace. Spending most of the Second World War in the United States, he died at Scheveningen, the coastal resort close to The Hague, in The Netherlands, on 26 July 1956.

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‘In the picture [below right] the best elements of the great cartoonist’s genius have full scope.

One has the biting satire, the humour and the extraordinary gift of representing facial expressions with an economy of line reminding one of the best work of the late Phil May, that prince of humorous British caricaturists.

Raemaekers does not even spare even his own countrymen when he discovers a situation inimical to the welfare of the Allied cause, or one which involves an obvious absurdity.

Here we have such a situation. In the early days of the War of far greater frequency that at present, thanks to the ever tightening “strangle hold” of the British Fleet. There can be no doubt that for many months Holland (greatly to her material gain) turned herself into a conduit pipe for the supply of contraband of War to the Central Empires and more especially to Germany.

Daily there were scenes such as that depicted, though possibly veiled with some thin veneer either of legality or subterfuge.

Dutch peasants (as well as the agents of the rich merchants and the resident German smugglers) of all ages and grades flocked to the frontier if not literally to drop their bags of contraband over the slenderly marked line which divides Holland from Germany.’

(Clive Holland, in Raemaekers’ Cartoons, London: Land and Water, 1916, vol I, page 274)

172 Father, is it still a long way to the Beresina?

Signed Charcoal and watercolour, 16 x 11 1⁄2 inches Illustrated: Raemaekers’ Cartoons, London: Land and Water, 1916, vol I, page 137 Father, is it still a long way to the Beresina?

Kaiser Wilhelm II and his heir, Crown Prince Wilhelm, follow in the footsteps of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose army suffered heavy losses on crossing the River Berezina in November 1812, during the retreat from Moscow. From that time, ‘Berezina’ was used in French as a synonym for catastrophe.

173 Idyllic Neutrality A daily smuggling scene on the Dutch Belgian frontier Signed Charcoal and watercolour 19 x 13 inches Illustrated: Raemaekers’ Cartoons, London: Land and Water, 1916, vol I, page 275

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H ARRY VAN

DER

W EYDEN

Harry Faulkner Van der Weyden, ROI (1868-1952) Having worked in France as an American Impressionist, Harry Van der Weyden then reinvented himself as a British painter, serving as a camouflage officer with Royal Engineers during the First World War, and producing a notable series of war subjects.

At some point, Van der Weyden returned to London to study under Fred Brown, and established himself there, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and becoming a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils.

Harry Van der Weyden was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 8 September 1868, the son of Henry Van Der Weyde, the Dutch-born American painter and photographer. Henry Van Der Weyde married Mona Wetherbee at the Swedenborgian Church in Boston in 1867, and migrated to London in 1870. The family was living at The Birches, Jasper Road, Norwood, in 1871, and possibly at Van Der Weyde’s studio at 182 Regent Street, Westminster, in 1882.

Between the turn of the century and the First World War, Van der Weyden and his family lived at the hotel d’Acary de la Riviere, a large house in Montreuil-surMer, Pas de Calais. This gave him access to the Normandy coast, which he painted in an Impressionist or ‘tonalist’ manner, alongside such members of the Etaples artists’ colony as Max Bohm and Irving Couse.

He exhibited the results in solo shows at the Galerie des Artistes Modernes, from 1904, and as a member of both the Paris Society of American Painters and the American Art Association of Paris.

In 1887, Harry won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied under Alphonse Legros. In 1890, he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian under Benjamin Constant, Jean-Paul Laurens and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Exhibiting at the Paris Salon from 1891, he won a third class gold medal in that year. Having altered his name to Van der Weyden, he was soon showing his work at a range of venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago between 1896 and 1913, and winning medals at international expositions. His visits to the United States seem to have led to romance, for on 31 May 1893, he married Florence Victoria Moore at St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

With the threat of war in 1914, Van der Weyden and his family left France and settled in Rye, Sussex, living at 15 Market Street. Between 1916 and 1918, he served as a camouflage officer with the Royal Engineers at Etaples, when it was a major transit point and storage depot. Responding to these experiences, he developed a reputation for his scenes of the war. While maintaining his house in Rye until at least 1922, he and his four children were living at 22 Temple Fortune Hill, Hendon, in 1919, when they began the process of naturalisation to become British subjects. Five years later, his father died at that address. From the end of the decade, he lived at 26a West End Lane, West Hampstead. He died in London on 23 September 1952.

174 A Bombed Town Signed and dated 1919 Pastel on tinted paper 10 1⁄4 x 14 inches

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E DWARD H ANDLEY-R EAD Edward Henry Handley-Read, MBE RBA (1870-1935) Establishing himself as a wide-ranging artist and illustrator during the 1890s, Edward Handley-Read produced pioneering images of the front line during the First World War.

They would have one son and one daughter. (Their son, Charles, would become a noted architectural writer and collector, with a pioneering interest in William Burges, and an inspiring teacher, at Bryanston.)

Edward Handley-Read was born Edward Read, probably in Kensington, London. He was educated at Kensington Grammar School and first studied art at the National Art Training School (more popularly known as the South Kensington Schools). He then progressed to the Westminster School, where he worked under Fred Brown, and the Royal Academy Schools, where he won the Creswick Prize for landscape painting. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the Royal Society of British Artists, becoming a member of the last in 1895. He also contributed illustrations to various books and magazines, including The Graphic and The Illustrated London News. During the 1890s, he gave as his addresses the Ranger’s Lodge, Hyde Park (1890-94), and 1 Camden Studios, Camden Street (1893-98).

During the First World War, Handley-Read served in the Machine Gun Corps, first as a sergeant-instructor and later a Captain. In that capacity, he organised an army studio for diagrams and models for instruction on military matters, instructed on camouflage, and invented published sets of coloured diagrams for the teaching of machine-guns. He also produced several hundred watercolours of life on the front line, some of which were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in May 1916, in a solo show entitled ‘The British Firing-Line’.

In 1910, Edward Read married the suffragette and pioneering woman dental surgeon, Eva Handley, and changed his surname by deed poll to Handley-Read.

His work is represented in the collections of the Imperial War Museum.

A Famous Château Home to the Flemish noble family, De Thibault de Boesinghe, the eighteenthcentury château of Boesinghe stood close to the village of the same name, north of the city of Ypres, in Belgium. A shelter to refugees from early in the First World War, Boesinghe was attacked during the First Battle of Ypres, in October-November 1914, and almost destroyed in the Second Battle in April 1915.

Close to the Allies’ front line, the area remained central to further action, and the damaged château became symbolic of the devastation of war through the dissemination of its photographed and painted image. It was rebuilt after the war and still remains in the De Thibault family.

After the war, Handley-Read produced a variety of figure subjects and landscapes. Living at Chantry Lodge, Chantry Lane, Storrington, Sussex, until at least 1932, he died at the House of Steps, 41 High Street, Salisbury, on 6 December 1935.

175 A Famous Chatêau Near Ypres – Boesinghe – 1916 quite demolished later Signed and inscribed with title Watercolour and charcoal on laid paper watermarked Vidalon Ingres 19 x 24 1⁄2 inches

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W ILLIAM H EATH R OBINSON William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) Heath Robinson is a household name, and a byword for a design or construction that is ‘ingeniously or ridiculously over-complicated’ (as defined by The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998, page 848). Yet, he was also a highly distinctive and versatile illustrator, whose work could touch at one extreme the romantic watercolours of a Dulac or Rackham, at another the sinister grotesqueries of a Peake, and at yet another the eccentricities of an Emett.

For a biography of William Heath Robinson, and further works, please refer to pages 114-117.

176 A ‘Grouse as usual’ outrage by a German Officer Signed and inscribed with title Signed and inscribed with artist’s address on reverse Pen ink and monochrome watercolour 15 x 11 inches Illustrated: The Sketch, 1 September 1915, ‘German Breaches of The Hague Convention’ Exhibited: ‘W Heath Robinson (1872-1944)’, 4-27 March 1987, no 9; ‘William Heath Robinson 1872-1944’, 25 May-22 June 2011, no 122

177 ‘Loot’ A tip from the Huns signed and inscribed with title Watercolour 15 3⁄4 x 11 inches Illustrated: The Graphic, Christmas Number, 1918 Exhibited: ‘William Heath Robinson 1872-1944’, 25 May-22 June 2011, no 128

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W ILLIAM R OTHENSTEIN Sir William Rothenstein, RP IS NEAC (1872-1945) William Rothenstein was a significant force in the British art world of the first half of the twentieth century, proving influential as an administrator, dealer, teacher and writer. As an artist, he is best remembered for his portraits and for the images that he produced at home and abroad during the First and Second World Wars.

William Rothenstein was born at 4 Spring Bank, Bradford, Yorkshire, on 29 January 1872, the fifth of six children of a prosperous German Jewish wool merchant.

Though an indifferent pupil at Bradford Grammar School, he was a precociously talented artist, and left for London at the age of 16 in order to study at the Slade School of Art. Working there under Alphonse Legros, he developed a strong enthusiasm for French art even before he went to Paris.

While a student at the Académie Julian (1889-93), he first attracted attention for his portrait drawings, and soon became a focus for anglophone artists of his generation. He also made many acquaintances among advanced French writers and painters, including Degas and Pissarro, who influenced his focus on subjects of modern life.

On returning to England, Rothenstein made his name as a draughtsman and social observer, and exhibited mainly at the New English Art Club (a member from 1894). He also helped to spearhead the fashion for bravura Spanish painting, even publishing a book on Goya (1899) with the encouragement of John Singer Sargent. Founding the Carfax Gallery with John Fothergill in 1898, he took an important and increasingly official, even conservative, role in artistic politics.

In 1899, Rothenstein married Alice Mary Knewstub, who had appeared on stage as Alice Kingsley. In 1902, they settled in Hampstead, in north London, and there brought up two sons and two daughters. During the decade, Rothenstein worked on an important series of scenes of Jewish religious life in a restrained palette.

In other paintings, he made use of brighter colours, which undoubtedly reflected the influence of PostImpressionism, despite his expressing reservations about the movement. In 1910, he took up the cause of Indian art and artists, helping to found the India Society and then visiting the country at the end of that year.

While retaining their flat in Hampstead, Rothenstein and his family moved to Gloucestershire in 1912, and

settled at Iles Farm, Far Oakridge, near Stroud. With the outbreak of the First World War, he encouraged the War Office to employ official war artists, and in December 1917 was himself appointed to go to the Western Front, though his German name led him to be treated with some suspicion.

Through the influence of H A L Fisher, Rothenstein would take up the chair of civic art at Sheffield University (1917-26) and become the Principal of the Royal College of Art (1920-35). He also acted as a trustee of the Tate Gallery (1927-33). He was knighted in 1931 and received an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1934. His numerous books include the memoirs, Men and Memories (1931-32) and Since Fifty (1939).

During the Second World War, Rothenstein produced portrait drawings of members of the RAF on their bases in England.

He died at his home in Far Oakridge on 16 March 1945.

At his memorial service, his old friend, Max Beerbohm, gave the address.

Of his two brothers, Charles became a significant collector, and Albert a painter and illustrator. Both changed their surname to Rutherston during the First World War. Of his two sons, John became director of the Tate Gallery, and Michael an artist best known as a printmaker.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate; and Bradford Museums and Galleries, Manchester Art Gallery and Museums Sheffield.

Further reading: Mary Lago, ‘Rothenstein, Sir William (1872-1945)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 47, pages 896-898; John Rothenstein, ‘Rothenstein, Sir William (b Bradford, 29 Jan 1872; d Far Oakridge, nr Stroud, 14 Feb 1945)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 27, pages 218-219; Robert Speaight, William Rothenstein: The Portrait of an Artist in His Time, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962

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‘[Rothenstein] and Kennington were both stationed at Montigny farm, near Roisel, about ten miles from Peronne and twenty from Cambrai, only three to three and a half miles behind the front lines. The troops and their transport were too difficult to draw, so William concentrated on the ruined villages and the landscape under snow. It was often so cold that his brush froze between water-flask and paper, but his energy could still leave a mess-room limp with exhaustion; and Kennington – who was ostensibly in charge of him – found him a law unto himself, refusing the precaution of a gas mask and dealing with superior officers according to his own ideas of their superiority ... William insisted on sketching under fire, and roamed as widely as he could to discover the ruins that so vividly excited his imagination.’

(Robert Speaight, William Rothenstein: The Portrait of an Artist in His Time, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962, page 292-293)

178 Montigny Farm Signed, inscribed with title and dated ‘Dec 1917’ Also signed ‘Passed by Censor A N Lee’ and dated 29/3/18 by Major Arthur Neale Lee, the Chief Censor for France Pencil and pastel on tinted paper, 14 1⁄4 x 20 3⁄4 inches

A LFRED B ASTIEN Alfred-Théodore-Joseph Bastien (1873-1955) The Belgian realist painter, Alfred Bastien, tackled a wide-range of subjects, and became famous for his scenes of the First World War. These culminated in his large-scale Panorama de L’Yser, which was exhibited in Ostend to some acclaim in 1926, and widely disseminated through various forms of reproduction.

One of nine children of a politically liberal calligrapher, Alfred Bastien was born in the Brussels suburb of

Ixelles on 16 September 1873. The Spanish free-thinker, Francisco Ferrer, lodged with them during Alfred’s youth. He was educated at the local primary school and, following the family’s move, at the Athenée in Ghent.

Bastien studied under Jean Delvin at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Ghent and, from 1891, under JeanFrançois Portaels at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. While still a student, in 1893, he helped to found the artists’ group, Le Sillon, which means ‘the

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furrow’ (perhaps suggestive of the members’ presentation of realist imagery through impasto handling). He travelled to Paris with fellow members, Maurice Blieck, Frans Smeers and Maurice Wagemans, and while there copied works by Courbet and Delacroix in the Louvre.

He won a number of prizes, and most significantly the 1897 Prix Godecharle for his painting of Symbole de l’humilité chrétienne. It is believed that he entered into an unsuccessful marriage with an opera singer in 1900.

Developing as a painter and teacher, Bastien travelled widely in Europe, and also Asia (1905-8) and Africa (including a visit in 1913 to the Belgian Congo with Paul Mathieu, another member of Le Sillon). In 1911, he and Matheiu were among those who contributed to a Panorama of the Congo, commissioned at the instigation of King Albert for the Exposition universelle et internationale held in Ghent in 1913.

Bastien fled to England after the fall of Antwerp in October 1914. Having served in the Garde Civique, he volunteered for the Belgian army, and was soon transferred to the Section Artistique in Nieuport.

He received the opportunity to paint many oils of the Western Front, and most notably the Panorama de L’Yser. Suggested by King Albert as early as 1914, it was produced from 1920, in collaboration with his former students, Jef Bonheur, Charly Léonard and Charles Swyncop, and exhibited in Ostend in 1926.

In July-August 1918, he was also attached as a war artist to the Canadian 22nd Battalion.

Following the war, Bastien lived in the Maison de Meunier, at Rouge-Cloître, a former Augustinian Abbey in Auderghem, to the southeast of Brussels. Here he was involved in an informal group of painters and, influenced by the landscapist, Amédée De Greef, painted many memorable views of the nearby Fôret de Soignes. Then, on moving to Godecharle in the early 1920s, he rejected all manner of novel ‘isms’ in favour of what he considered was natural and traditional. During the 1920s, he entered a second marriage with Alice Johns, an English nurse, known affectionately as ‘Johnnie’. They would adopt a number of children.

A teacher at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1927 to 1945, Bastien became a professor of painting and served as Director three times during these years. He was also elected Honorary President of the Association des artistes professionnels de Belgique.

Following the Second World War, he became a member of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, in 1952, he was made a member of the Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique. He died in Uccle, to the south of Brussels on 7 June 1955.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Museum voor Schone (Ghent); and the Canadian War Museum (Ottawa).

A Wounded Officer at Nieuport 1917 The dedicatee of this watercolour may have been Major Archibald Alexander Gordon, who, in 1917, was Secretary of the Belgian Relief Fund.

179 A Wounded Officer at Nieuport 1917 Signed, inscribed ‘Nieuport’ and dated ‘14 Juillet 1917’ Inscribed ‘To my dear friend Major Goredon 22.9.17’ below mount Watercolour, bodycolour and pastel on tinted paper 16 x 21 1⁄2 inches

132 | 11: THE FIRST WORLD WAR

F ERNAND L ANTOINE Fernand Désiré Louis Lantoine (1876-1955) Fernand Lantoine’s first experience of the light of the Mediterranean transformed his painting style from austere realist to vibrant colourist. This would provide the foundation of his later career, in which he worked for extended periods in Africa and produced striking Orientalist images.

However, this development was interrupted during the First World War, when he became a prisoner of the Germans and forced to work on the Russian front. Even this distressing experience inspired his art, as he recorded camp life in acclaimed drawings and watercolours.

The son of a doctor, Fernand Lantoine was born in Maretz, in northern France, on 13 April 1876. At the age of 15, he moved to Belgium, and settled in Uccle, south of Brussels. It remained his base for five decades.

Between 1894 and 1897, he undertook military service in the 4th Infanterie de Marine at Brest. From about 1897, he studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and while in the city befriended the pointillist, Paul Signac. Returning to Brussels, he joined the realist artists’ group, Le Sillon, and exhibited at the Salon de la Libre Esthétique and, in 1903, at the Salon triennal des Beaux-Arts. From 1907, he also exhibited in Paris, at the Salon des Indépendants. Travel to the Côte d’Azur and the Balearic Islands opened his eyes to the light of the Mediterranean, and led him to adopt a pointillist style, which he later modified with an increase of structure.

Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, Lantoine was caught up in the siege of Maubeuge, on the French-Belgian border, and became a prisoner in

that town. Subsequently, he was moved to the Rhine, and then to the Neman, which marked the Russian front. There he was made to dig trenches and roads.

Nevertheless, he managed to produce drawings and watercolours of his experience, and these became the subject of an important and successful exhibition in 1920. In the following year, he published Histoire complète de la guerre en 25 planches gravées sur bois.

From 1922, Lantoine sailed with the French fleet, as a ‘peintre de la Marine’, during their missions in the Mediterranean and to North Africa. In 1925, he encountered the Belgian Congo, and responded with works that were strikingly simple, in contrast to the mannerism of many contemporary Orientalists. The success of these paintings – exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1927 – led to his receipt of a commission from the Compagnie Maritime Belge to decorate the ships, Léopoldville and Albertville. He was made a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur et de l’Ordre belge de la Couronne.

In 1934, Lantoine turned his attention to the north, participating in an exploration of the Arctic and painting the fjords in Norway. The results were exhibited at the Salon in the following year. However, he remained drawn to the south and, in 1936, won the Prix de l’Afrique Occidentale Française. His painting tours were halted during the Second World War, when he lived in Nice, but afterwards resumed, and he explored French West Africa, Somalia, Madagascar and Oceania.

Lantoine died in Maretz, his native village, in 1955.

180 Prisoners of War Signed and dated 1917 Watercolour and pencil 12 1⁄2 x 19 inches

11: THE FIRST WORLD WAR | 133

M UIRHEAD B ONE Sir David Muirhead Bone, HRSA HRSW HRWS HRIBA IS NEAC (1876-1953) The Scottish painter and printmaker, Muirhead Bone, specialised in architectural subjects, and loved to depict buildings in states of construction, restoration or demolition. As a result, he made a good choice for the first Official War Artist, and was able to capture a range of environments affected by the uncertain conditions of combat.

The fourth of eight children of a journalist, Muirhead Bone was born at 1a Hamilton Terrace West, Partick, near Glasgow, on 23 March 1876. An early architectural training gave him a deep structural knowledge of what would become the best known subject matter of his paintings and prints. For he soon devoted himslf to fine art, taking evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art under Archibald Kay. He began to exhibit at the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts in 1897 and, three years later, just before his move to London, first showed at the Royal Academy. He was elected to the New English Art Club in 1902, and also became a member of the International Society and the Society of Twelve. He made a particular mark as a topographical etcher and, accompanied by his wife, Gertrude Dodd, made extensive tours of Britain and Europe in search of suitable motifs. He produced a number of books with etched illustrations for which Gertrude provided the texts. As a complement to the strong contrasts of his prints, his watercolours have a lightness and delicacy.

During both the First and Second World Wars, he

181 First World War Landscape Watercolour and pencil 10 x 14 inches

produced some of his best work as an Official War Artist: on the Western Front and with the fleet (191618); for the Admiralty (1940-43). In the latter part of his career, he acted as a trustee for the National Gallery, Tate Gallery and Imperial War Museum, and received a number of honours: he was knighted (1937) and became an honorary member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (1937), the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (1943) and the Royal Scottish Academy (1951). He died at Grayflete, Ferry Hinksey, Oxford, on 21 October 1953. He was the father of the artists, Stephen and Gavin Bone.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museum and Tate; The Hunterian (University of Glasgow); and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Further reading: David Cohen, ‘Bone, Sir (David) Muirhead (b Partick, nr Glasgow, 23 March 1876; d Oxford, 21 Oct 1953)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 4, pages 314-315; Gordon Cooke, ‘Bone, Sir Muirhead (1876-1953)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 6, pages 530-532; Peter Trowles, Muirhead Bone: Portrait of an Artist, University of St Andrews, 1986

134 | 11: THE FIRST WORLD WAR

C HARLES WALTER S IMPSON Charles Walter Simpson, RCanA (1878-1942) The prolific and versatile painter and illustrator, Charles Walter Simpson, became one of Canada’s first official war artists, following the country’s entry into the First World War in 1914.

Charles Walter Simpson was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 16 April 1878. He studied at the Art Association of Montreal under William Brymer and Edmond Dyonnet, and also with Maurice Cullen. Early in his career, he worked as a newspaper illustrator, first on the Montreal Star (1899-1901), where he was encouraged by Henri Julien, and then in Nova Scotia on the Halifax Chronicle (1902-3). On returning to Montreal, he spent some time as a commercial artist before deciding to undertake further studies, which he did at the Art Students League, in New York, under G B Bridgman and W A Clark. As a result, he established himself as a painter, producing a number of marine subjects (1912-15) and

being elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Artists (ARCanA 1913; RCanA 1920).

On the entry of Canada into the First World War, Simpson became one of the country’s first official war artists and, in 1918, he contributed to the Canadian War Memorials. Among his war paintings in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, in Toronto, are scenes of the Royal Canadian Artillery based at Witley Camp, in Surrey.

During the mid 1920s, Simpson executed murals at his alma mater, the Art Association of Montreal. Yet, from that time, he seems to have worked mainly as illustrator on a range of books, including William Smith’s The Evolution of Government in Canada (1928) and Victor Morin’s Old Montreal with Pen and Pencil (1929), and Katherine Hale’s Canadian Cities of Romance (1933).

He died in Montreal on 16 September 1942.

182 Military Ambulance, First World War Bodycolour 21 x 14 1⁄2 inches

INDEX | 135

I NDEX Volume numbers are expressed in Roman numerals, with page numbers following in Arabic numerals, the two being divided by a colon.

Abbott, John White

I: 8-9

Alexander, William

I: 10-11

Kilburne, George Goodwin

II: 52

Allingham, Helen

II: 21-24

Lantoine, Fernand

II: 132

Bastien, Alfred

II:130-131

Lear, Edward

I: 54-55

Beardsley, Aubrey

II: 76-80

Marshall, Herbert Menzies

II: 93

Beerbohm, Max

II: 88-89

May, Phil

II: 90-92

Bone, Muirhead

II: 133

Menpes, Mortimer

II: 70-71

Bool, Alfred Henry

II: 11-12

Millais, John Everett

II: 44-45

Boys, Thomas Shotter

I: 24-25

Muschamp, Francis Sydney

II: 53

Brabazon, Hercules Brabazon

I: 58-62

Nixon, John

I: 37-38

Bright, Henry

I: 51

North, John William

I: 72-73; II: 100-101

Howard, George

I: 74-75

Buckley, John Edmund

II: 41

Orrock, James

II: 98-99

Callow, William

I: 56-57

Ospovat, Henry

II: 72-73

Coïdé (James Tissot)

II: 82-83

Parsons, Alfred

I: 76-77

Cox, David

I: 18-19

Parsons, Beatrice

II: 103-105

Crane, Walter

II: 67-68

Paton, Joseph Noel

II: 39-40

Cromek, Thomas Hartley

I: 52-53

Potter, Beatrix

II: 108-110

Crouch, William

I: 26

Pyne, George

II: 14

Cruikshank, George

I: 40-42

Pyne, James Baker

I: 48-49

Cruikshank, Isaac

I: 39, 41-42

Rackham, Arthur

II: 111-113

Dixon, Henry

II: 11-13

Raemaekers, Louis

II: 124-125

Doyle, Charles

II: 46-48

Reed, Edward Tennyson

II: 86-87

Doyle, Richard

II: 42-43

Roberts, David

I: 44-47

Du Maurier, George

II: 60-63

Roberts, Henry Benjamin

II: 51

Elgood, George Samuel

II: 56; 102

Robinson, William Heath

II: 114-117; 128

Emerson, Peter Henry

II: 30-32

Rothenstein, William

II: 129-130

Foster, Birket

II: 49-50

Rowlandson, Thomas

I: 32-36

Frost, William Edward

II: 34-35

Shepherd, Thomas Hosmer

II: 8-10

Garden, William Fraser

II: 28-29

Sheringham, George

II: 119-122

Gibson, Charles Dana

II: 74-75

Simmons, John

II: 49

Gillray, James

I: 28-31

Simpson, Charles Walter

II: 134

Glover, John

I: 12-13

Simpson, William

I: 63-66

Goodwin, Albert

I: 83-91

Smith, John ‘Warwick’

I: 6-7

Gow, Mary

II: 54-55

Spy (Leslie Ward)

II: 84-85

Green, Charles

II: 54

Talmage, Algernon

II: 104-105

Greenaway, Kate

II: 69

Tenniel, John

II: 36-38

Handley-Read, Edward

II: 127

Tissot, James (Coïdé)

II: 82-83

Hare, Augustus

I: 67-71

Tyndale, Walter

I: 78-82

Hare, St George

II: 58

Van der Weyden, Harry

II: 126

Harrison, Florence

II: 118

Varley, John

I: 14-17

Hennessy, William John

II: 64-66

Leslie Ward (Spy)

II: 84-85

Henshall, John Henry

II: 57

Walcot, William

II: 94-96

Henshaw, Frederick

I: 50

Warren, Edmund George

I: 20-21

Housman, Laurence

II: 71-72

Weatherill, George

II: 15

Hunt, Alfred William

II: 16-19

Wyllie, William Lionel

II: 25-27

Hunt, William Henry

I: 20-23