Pages

The Aesthetic Movement





The Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition of the 'Cult of Beauty' reflects how art spread into everyday life in the Victorian period

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/26/aestheticism-exhibition-victoria-albert-museum

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Bottles




Oil on board mounted on panel

14 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches

Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

Charles Fairfax Murray - Helga and Gunnlaug, c. 1880-85




Oil on board

9/16 x 12 x 26 1/2 inches

Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

John Everett Millais - The White Cockade, 1862



Oil on panel

24 x 17 3/4 inches

Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

John Everett Millais - A Highland Lassie, 1854




Oil on board

8 1/2 x 6 5/8 inches

Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Elizabeth Ellen Houghton - Reflections, 1895



Elizabeth Ellen Houghton (1853-1922)
Watercolor on paper adhered to wood backing

16 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

Aelfred Fahey - Within the Beguinage, c. 1905



Aelfred Fahey (1876/7-after 1909)
Oil on panel
11 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches

Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

Philip Burne-Jones - Beside a Summer Sea, 1896




Watercolor on paper

18 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches

Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

Friday, March 25, 2011

Tile panels






[Twelve William De Morgan pottery square tiles decorated in blue and green with flowering thistles on an off-white ground, each 6ins square (various impressed marks to backs - mostly crazed to glaze)]

[A pair of late Victorian oak framed blue and white three tile panels, each decorated with standing figure of a woman in the pre-Raphaelite manner, tiles 6ins square (one tile cracked)]

http://www.thecanterburyauctiongalleries.com/catalogue/39

Marie Stillman





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Spartali_Stillman

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=67037101




with inscription 'A Study of/Kelmscott Manor/by Marie Stillman' (on the reverse)
pencil and watercolour heightened with bodycolour, on Whatman watercolour board, unframed
10 5/8 x 14½ in. (27 x 36.8 cm.)

William Michael Rossetti and by descent in his family to the present owner.

Marie Stillman made many studies of Kelmscott Manor, the sleepy old Cotswold house on the upper Thames of which William Morris and D.G. Rossetti became joint tenants in 1871, and where Rossetti and Jane Morris enjoyed the happiest phase of their liaison during the next few years. An example almost identical to the present watercolour is at Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton (illustrated in John Christian, 'Marie Spartali: Pre-Raphaelite Beauty', Antique Collector, March 1984, p. 46, fig. 7). Another was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1905.


http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/LotDetailsPrintable.aspx?intObjectID=5396359

James Smetham



[Hugh Miller 1860]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Smetham



[The Days of Noah 1860]



[The Lord of the Sabbath 1861]



[Forsake Not the Law of Thy Mother]

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Flaming libertines: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his muses




A new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum illuminates the lives of the daring women who inspired Rossetti and the Aesthetic Movement

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8395330/Flaming-libertines-Dante-Gabriel-Rossetti-and-his-muses.html#

1848




I've not often see it emphasised that 1848, the year the PRB formed was a revolutionary year throughout Europe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

and perhaps deliberately was designed to shake the art establishment. There are still critics who dismiss the pre-raphaelites as some sot of temporary madness or aberration that filled in the gap till Impressionism arrived (late in their opinion) in Britain.

For me the PRB were about SEEING and feeling what they saw.

Walter Crane wrote "by their resolute and enthusiastic return to the direct symbolism, frank naturalism and poetic or romantic sentiment of medieval art, with the power of modern analysis superadded, and the more profound and intellectual study of both nature and art which the severity of their practice demanded, and last, but not least, their intense love of detail, turned the attention to other branches of design than painting.'

Fortnightly Review, Dec 1892

The work of the PRB, particularly Rossetti and Burne-Jones profoundly affected the French Symblists and on to Picasso and Kadinsky.

George Frederic Watts - Ariadne in Naxos




Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, reclines on a hillside with a female attendant and two panthers.

Watts considered this his most complete picture and painted a number of copies / versions of which this one is in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University painted in 1890.





Monday, March 21, 2011

Blog Update



I'm changing all my blogs but this one only slightly. There will be several pictures and a short feature all published at 6am (UK time) each day.

*** later update ***

Because of my health I'm going to have to move, so updates may be errratic over the next few months - especially if I lose my internet connection.