Showing posts with label James Collinson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Collinson. Show all posts
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Monday, May 7, 2012
Monday, November 1, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
James Collinson - The Holy Family
Price Realized £20,315
with inscription 'This is to certify that this picture of the/Holy Family was painted by my father/the late James Collinson, one of the/original PreRaphaelite brothers and/later a member of the society of British/Artists who had a gallery in Suffolk Street./Robert V. Collinson.' (on an old label on the reverse)
oil on canvas, painted arch
43½ x 33½ in. (110.5 x 85.1 cm.)
Valerie A. Cox, 'The Works of James Collinson: 1825-1881', The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, vol. IV, no. 3, 1996, p. 12.
James Collinson was one of the founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was briefly engaged to Rossetti's sister, Christina, in 1849-50. He was also intensely religious, and abandoned painting for the Catholic seminary at Stoneyhurst in 1851. He left his novitiate in 1854 and resumed painting but never lost his religious fervour.
The subject is conceived as the Return from the Flight into Egypt, a theme often treated by the Old Masters. Christ is no longer an infant and the Holy Family are being visited by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. An Egyptian temple can be glimpsed in the background, on the far bank of the Nile. The foreground however is scattered with plants more often found in an English country garden: hollyhocks, foxgloves and dandelions can be be seen on a lawn strewn with daisies while a sycamore, and a cedar of Lebanon are included, as well as a beehive to the left. These are painted with extraordinary care, and though the painting is executed in 1878, surely betrays Collinson's sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite movement started thirty years previously.
The painting hung for many years, along with others by Collinson, in the convent of the Sisters of Charity in Manchester Square, Marylebone.
Monday, September 6, 2010
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Sunday, September 5, 2010
James Collinson - Answering the Emigrant's Letter
1850
oil on panel
70 x 89cm
Manchester City Art Gallery
Friday, August 27, 2010
James Collinson - To Let
Price Realized £59,750
oil on canvas, painted oval
24¼ x 18½ in. (51.5 x 47 cm.)
London, Royal Academy, 1857, no. 102.
Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, 1919.
Dublin, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1920.
Collinson was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and this is perhaps his best known picture. Though dextrous and with a brilliant finish it shows little intellectual Pre-Raphaelite purpose however, and presents instead as an exemplary, if ambiguous, piece of Victorian domestic genre, much in the manner of William Powell Frith. A married lady draws a Venetian blind to reveal a sign in the window offering furnished appartments 'To Let'. However, the relationship of the title to the contents of the painting is not immediately obvious, and as the Art Journal commented, 'the point of the title is not very clear'. The picture has always been open to diverse interpretation. When lent to an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries eighty years after it was painted, along with its pendant For Sale, a smaller version of which is offered as the following lot in this sale, the critic of the Times observed: 'There are hints ... in the pair of pictures For Sale and To Let by James Collinson ... that some Victorian artists had pretty shrewd notions about comparative iniquity'. Would a Victorian audience, alert to the 'language of flowers' and the pots containing a lily and a 'Bleeding Heart', have interpreted the subject as a variation of Mr Pickwick's amorous landlady, Mrs Bardell, as popularized by Dickens? The extent to which Collinson was attempting a double-entendre, or any moral purpose, is unclear.
Born in Mansfield, the son of a bookseller, Collinson entered the Royal Academy Schools and exhibited there for the first time in 1847. The attention to detail in The Charity Boy's Debut, so impressed Rossetti that he pronounced Collinson 'a born stunner' and invited him to join the Brotherhood. Collinson later became engaged to Rossetti's poet sister Christina, but she broke it off prior to his return to the Catholic faith, and his entry to Stoneyhurst in 1850. Having been nicknamed 'the doormouse' by fellow members of the P.R.B., and teased by Hunt for needing 'to be waked up at the conclusion of the noisy evenings to receive our salutations', Collinson resigned his membership on the grounds that he could not 'as a Catholic, assist in spreading the artistic opinions of those who were not'. Collinson failed to complete his novitiate, and left the monastery and resumed painting in 1854. He later married the sister-in-law of another Catholic convert, John Rogers Herbert. Between 1847 and 1870 he exhibited seventeen paintings at the Royal Academy and also contributed to the Society of British Artists where he was secretary from 1861 to 1870, and the British Institution. Though principally resident in London, he made frequent visits to Brittany where his son Robert was a seminarian, and it was there that he executed a painting of The Holy Family.
Well known through engravings, a smaller version of this picture exists in the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
James Collinson - The writing lesson
1855
oil on panel
exhibited at the RA in the same year
It was Rossetti who admired Collinson's first exhibited picture The Charity Boy's Debut (1847) that recommended Collinson to be part of the PRB. It helped no doubt that at the time he was engaged to Christina Rossetti.
It is debatable whether this picture is really influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite ideals, its sentimental, domestic tone reminiscant of many 'ordinary' Victorian pictures.
Collinson abandoned the priesthood in 1854, and though he tried to re-enter the art world never achieved any great recognition, not helped by his narcolepsy, a condition that caused him to fall asleep at any moment without warning.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
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