Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale - The deceitfulness of riches

[Love and his Counterfeits]
Pencil and Watercolor w/scratching out, laid down on canvas
26 x 52.4 in.
Signed



[The deceitfulness of riches]

Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 661,500 GBP (1998)
signed and dated l.r.: ELEANOR/F-BRICKDALE/1901; signed and inscribed with artist's address 38 Norland Square W on the reverse
oil on canvas
85 by 110 cm., 33 1/2 by 43 1/4 in.

The present richly coloured allegorical subject, The Deceitfulness of Riches, is one of the most ambitious of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's early paintings. It was first exhibited in 1901 at the Royal Academy, and then subsequently included in the exhibition of her oils and watercolours held at Leighton House in February 1902. This exhibition was entitled ''Such Stuff as Dreams are made of!'' (a loose quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest).
The majority of Fortescue-Brickdale's paintings have literary themes and she was of course also well known as an illustrator of poems, legends and folktales. However, on the present occasion both the painted subject and the words of the title were of the artist's own devising. When first exhibited, there was much debate as to the purpose of the allegory, which, according to M.H. Dixon, was 'translated into a hundred meanings and tortured by the spring visitor to Burlington House into symbols little dreamed of by its originator.' In the same article in the 1902 Magazine of Art the following interpretation was offered: 'A mighty princess, clothed in orange garments, is pictured for us so closely guarded by jealous attendants as to be shut out altogether from the outside world. No harsh breath from the common air may touch the lady's cheek. The orphan and the widow are turned from her gates in order that she may not look upon the face of sorrow. Not willingly hard or callous is this prisoner of a luxurious place, only oblivious from force of circumstances. ... ''The Deceitfulness of Riches'' is a lay sermon on the tyranny of soft environment and on the unwitting cruelty which lurks in ignorance.' The subject of a young woman leading a sequestered existence - being offered flowers and fruit by attentive servants and serenaded by a musician with a lute, is entirely in character with the other-worldly and historicist instincts of the artists who revived the principles of Pre-Raphaelitism at the turn of the century.

The Deceitfulness of Riches represents the type of painting that led Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale to become one of the admired and talked-about painters of the day. In 1901, on the occasion of an exhibition of her watercolours at Dowdeswells Gallery in New Bond Street, she was described by one critic as a 'Pre-Raphaelite revivalist', and by another as an exponent of 'Neo-Pre-Raphaelitism'. These terms indicate that the artist was recognised as one of the younger generation of artists who at the turn of the century were consciously reviving the meticulous techniques and luminous colour of Ford Madox Brown, Holman Hunt and Rossetti. In the same year Canon Scott Holland wrote ecstatically of Fortescue-Brickdale's appearance on the artistic scene: 'We are not all dead. There is a new force to be felt. There is a new lamp kindled. Some one can still see visions: and can embody what is seen in the glory of colour ...' Commenting on the Dowdeswell exhibition, Holland was struck by the richness of the work, exclaiming: 'Colour? The room glows with it, as if it were flung out of live jewels. The flaming crimsons, the crisp greens, the sheen of rose, speak and sing out of their frames; and you find yourself laughing aloud unawares, for sheer delight, in response. The pictures recall the small gems that Rossetti painted ... They are vivid and delicate like young Millais' ''Ferdinand''.' The rich colour, as well as the technical elaboration, of The Deceitfulness of Riches, was commented upon in the Spectator's review of the 1901 Royal Academy: 'Gorgeous and beautiful in colour, its execution seems to suggest that the artist, not having quite realised the conditions of oil paint, has been trying after the effects of enamel and coloured relief.'

http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?sale_number=LN8683&live_lot_id=46

G F Watts - Love and Death

a study
35.5 x 16.5
painted c. 1870's - 1880's.

One of Watt's most important pictures inspired by the slow, wasting disease of Lord Lothian. There are a number of finished versions. Laege scale pictures are at the Whitworh Gallery, the Tate and in Adelaide, moderately sized ones are in Bristol and Melbourne, and a small one is in Liverpool.

G F Watts - Portrait of Aglaia Coronio (nee Ionides)

oil on canvas
24 x 20"

Aglaia was the second child and eldest daughter of the family, born in 1834. She married Theodore Coronio in about 1855 and they had one daughter Calliope, who was also painted by Watts. This portrait seems to have been painted in the 1870's when she was about 40 - she died in 1906. She was a friend to many painters, including Burne-Jones (she is one of the dancing girls in The Mill). She also advised him on fabrics and props. She was also friends with William Morris and Rossetti.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Dante's Dream

1871

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/19c/rossetti.aspx

Oil on canvas, 216 x 312.4cm

Rossetti had a life-long interest in the Italian poet Dante. This painting shows an episode from the 'Vita Nuova'. In it Dante dreams that he is led by Love to the death-bed of Beatrice Portinari, the object of his unrequited passion.

This is Rossetti's largest ever painting. In it he creates a visionary world through soft, rich colours and complex symbols. The attendants wear green for hope, while the spring blossoms signify purity. The red doves indicate the presence of love and the poppies symbolise the sleep of dreams and death.

The model for Beatrice was Jane Morris, with whom Rossetti had a long-term affair.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Angels ...

[Angels watching the Crown of Thorns and the Rod with which Christ was scourged]
oil on canvas laid down on board
19 x 13.5"

Rossetti painted this whilst working at Ford-Madox's studio in 1848. It is unfinished.

G F Watts - Portrait of Miss Chariclea Ionides

[Portrait of Miss Chariclea Ionides,later Dannreuther]

oil on canvas laid on panel, oval
12 x 10.5"

Chariclea was the fifth, and last, child of Alexander Constantine and Euterpe Ionides. Alexander was an important patron of Watts and friend. She married, initially against her families wishes, the pianist Edward Dannreuther who was a great champion of Wagner.

Edward Burne-Jones - The Mill

1882
Oil on canvas
35.83 × 77.56 in
Victoria and Albert Museum

The dancers were modelled by (left to right) Maria Zambaco, Marie Spartali Stillman and Aglaia Coronio.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/paintings/galleries/further/essay/pre-raphaelites/index.html
Begun in 1870 and completed in 1882, Burne-Jones's painting The Mill depicts the three Graces dancing to the music of Apollo. The models were friends and relatives of Constantine Ionides, who commissioned the painting. His cousin Mary Zambaco, who posed for the woman on the far left, was Burne-Jones's lover.

The Mill displays what Ruskin termed 'the subtlest mythologies of Greek worship and Christian Romance', as well as acquaintance with Giorgione's poetic scenes and Botticelli's Primavera. 13. In 1891 Burne-Jones met the young Aubrey Beardsley, and encouraged him to pursue an artistic career

The painting belonged to Aglaia's brother Constantine and is now part of the Ionides collection at the V&A.

William Holman Hunt - Portrait of a Young Woman, perhaps Isabella Waugh

inscribed: [F]or Slubby/[with lo]ve from/Edith H[o]lman Hunt/[S]tudy of .../by W.H.[Holman Hunt]/.../[ma]de... [Cam]pden
oil on canvas
21 1/4 x 14"

This seems to be an unfinished portrait, rather than a study.
The torn inscribed label is in Edith Holman Hunt's hand indicating it was painted at 1 Tor Villa where the Hunts lived in the Spring and Summer of 1886 (before he left for the Holy Land), and it is supposed he ran out of time before his departure. At some later stage an extra strip of canvas was added to the lower edge.

Hunt had it framed to his own design which incorporated disks representing the phases of the moon. The pattern og the frieze is a drawn study Hunt made in 1876 inscribed 'Arab ornamental frieze on doorway of Mosque Jerusalem' now in the Birmingham Museum. Sopeculation has been that the picture was intended to represent Artemis.

But the original subject was a member of the Waugh family (Hunt was married first to Fanny Waugh, who died in 1866, and later to her suster Edith). The portrait resembles most another sister Isabella (b. 1843).

'Slubby' is Sir John Macdonell to whom Edith gave the picture.

John Everett Millais - study for 'A Huguenot'

pencil, arched top
2 3/4 x 2"

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

Milais based the subject on Tennyson's poem Circumstance - which describes two lovers whispering by a garden wall - but it was Holman Hunt who encouraged Millais to use a specific historical setting. Millais worked on the subject 1851-2. He set the painting in 16th C France showing a Huguenot refusing to wear a Roman Catholic badge to protect him from persecution. Millais may have been inspired by Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots which includes a similar theme.

The painting was finished in 1852 and was exhibited at the RA.

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale - In the Spring Time

1901
Watercolour
15.5 x 10 3/8"



http://spiritoftheages.com/Eleanor%20Fortescue-Brickdale%20Collection.htm