Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale - Lady Chapel

The Lady Chapel altarpiece by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale in the Forest of Dean. Showing the three mothers appropriate to a Lady Chapel : Mary & Jesus in centre flanked by St Anne (Mary's mother) with distaff on the right and St Elizabeth with John Baptist on the left. A rose wall or hedge behind all. 

courtesy:
http://janmarsh.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/eleanor-fortescue-brickdale.html

The Lemprière Family 1847 by Millais

John Everett Millais had Ewell friends in the Lemprieres, who like the Millais family, had come to England from Jersey. As a boy, Millais stayed with Captain Lempriere and his large family in Cheam Road. The Manor House, which stood where Staneway turns out of Cheam Road, was one of the largest houses in Ewell. Millais made a record of this family life in two drawings. One is a rough sketch of the family watching Harriet cutting a twelfth night cake; Mary has her pull-along horse on the bare floorboards while the family dog sits waiting for a titbit. The other is a more worked-up version; it shows the family in a more formal way and was possibly done as a gift for them.

The Old Church, Ewell by William Holman Hunt 1847

Arthur Hughes - Aurora Leigh's Dismissal of Romney ('The Tryst') 1860

Miss Ellen Heaton, a patron of Rossetti, commissioned this painting for thirty pounds on the recommendation of the critic John Ruskin, who told her that Hughes was 'quite safe - every-body will like what he does ... his sense of beauty is quite exquisite' (Surtees, p.175). The subject is taken from the narrative poem 'Aurora Leigh' (1856) by Elizabeth Barret Browning, who was a friend of Miss Heaton. Aurora, an orphan raised by her aunt, aspires to be a poetess. On the morning of her twentieth birthday she rejects a marriage proposal by her cousin Romney Leigh. She chooses to devote herself to her vocation in defiance of Romney, who disparages her verses and wants her to dedicate herself to his philanthropic causes. Aurora tells Romney that what he loves 'Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: | You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir. | A wife to help your ends, - in her no end!'

The painting depicts the moment when Romney has been refused and is about to take his leave. Aurora holds a book of her verses which Romney has found in the garden and made fun of. Miss Heaton and Hughes disagreed over which scene in the poem should be depicted. The patron had wanted an earlier incident, but in a letter dated 14 December 1860, Hughes said, 'The moment I chose to paint was the best - Romney turning away ... If I had not chosen that moment, the story as Romney's dismissal would I think have been confused - it would rather have seemed a quarrel of which we did not see the end nor know the cause' (Mander, p.222). Ruskin sided with the artist. Miss Heaton also wanted Aurora shown in a white dress as in the poem, but Hughes felt that a sea-green dress would better complement the landscape. He had trouble with the composition, and asked Miss Heaton in the December letter 'kindly to pay me the price of the frame 632 - separate from the thirty guineas for the painting, as it has really cost me a great deal more time than I thought such a subject would have' (Mander, pp.222-3). He painted out Romney's hat twice; the overpainting has since become transparent, and traces of the two hats can be seen. He may have used himself and his wife, Tryphena, as the models for the figures. Miss Heaton must eventually have become reconciled to the picture, as the same month she commissioned from Hughes another painting, That was a Piedmontese ... (1862, Tate Gallery N05244), which again required Ruskin's intervention to mediate between the two parties.

Aurora Leigh's Dismissal of Romney was never exhibited in Hughes's lifetime, and remained virtually undocumented and the subject unidentified until Rosalie Mander's 1964 article '"The Tryst" Unravelled', in Apollo.

Further reading:
Rosalie Mander, '"The Tryst" Unravelled', Apollo, vol.79, March 1964, pp.221-3, reproduced
Virginia Surtees (ed.), Sublime & Instructive. Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden and Ellen Heaton, London 1972, pp.227-9
Leslie Parris (ed.), The Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1984, reprinted 1994, pp.189-90, reproduced in colour
Leonard Roberts, introduction by Stephen Wildman, Arthur Hughes: His Life and Works, a Catalogue Raisonné, Woodbridge, Suffolk [to be published 1997]

Terry Riggs

William Holman Hunt - The Haunted Manor 1849

Most of this landscape was painted in the open air in Wimbledon Park, in south-west London. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed strongly in painting directly from nature.The picture has a low view point, filled with close and fastidious studies of plants, rocks and water. The murky tones of the waterfall and tangled vegetation contrast strongly with the narrow, brightly-lit strip of landscape at the top of the picture. It is likely that this and the deserted manor house in the top right were added later, to give the scene a mysterious atmosphere.

Ford Madox Brown - Carrying Corn 1854-5

This intensely coloured painting captures a harvest field just before sunset. Each landscape element is faithfully recorded in jewel-like colours. This is a nostalgic view of rural England, untouched by industrialisation and modern city life. Ford Madox Brown’s view is typical of idealists of the time who believed that an engagement with nature offered spiritual redemption from urban corruption. Brown and his family were facing financial hardship at the time this picture was painted. It was one of a number of ‘potboilers’, modest and straightforward landscapes he hoped would sell easily.

Ford Madox Brown - The Brent at Hendon 1854=5

Brown was born at Calais and studied in Antwerp and Paris before settling in London in 1844. A growing interest in painting subjects in daylight was reinforced by a visit to Italy in 1845-6. Brown was close to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood though never a member of it. Millais' example inspired him to try his hand at painting small landscapes outdoors. This one and 'Carrying Corn' were worked on at the same time, one in the mornings and the other in the afternoons. The Brent picture, the morning work, took Brown most of September 1854 and was then finished in the studio.

John William Inchbold - Two Men Scything 1861

The image is painted in watercolour with detail in gouache applied over a pencil underdrawing on blue wove paper. It has suffered some discolouration and mount burn.

On acquisition the work was removed from its mount prior to being pressed, inlaid and mounted onto white museum board.

Shulla Jaques

Ford Madox Brown - The Hayfield 1855-6

In keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of 'truth to nature', much of this landscape was painted entirely on the spot. It offers a twilight view, looking east across rolling green fields on the Tenterden estate at Hendon in Middlesex. To the left of the picture, a farmer on horseback addresses the haymakers, who have almost completed the day's work. Another farm worker tends the horses, while a group of children await a lift home in the haycart. In the left foreground the artist himself rests against a small haystack, his equipment scattered about him. A full moon has just risen, and the setting sun strikes a distant house on its west side. Brown's aim in this picture was to achieve the effect of evening light, 'the wonderful effects…in the hayfields, the warmth of the uncut grass, the greeny greyness of the unmade hay in furrows or tufts' (Surtees, p.145). To this end, he began work at 5pm each evening, returning to the same spot about twice a week from the end of July until early September 1855. In October, after moving from Finchley to Kentish Town, he returned on several more occasions, and was sometimes forced to walk the fourteen miles there and back.

During the winter months Brown worked in the foreground details. He sketched a haycart at Cumberland market. He then painted in the artist and his props, working from a set in his conservatory, but he apparently used no models for the farmer, workmen and children. Many of these later features lack the freshness of the landscape setting.

The picture attracted criticism because of its unusual palette. In his 1865 catalogue Brown explained that 'the stacking of the second crop of hay had been much delayed by rain, which heightened the green of the remaining grass, together with the brown of the hay. The consequence was an effect of unusual beauty of colour, making the hay by contrast with the green grass, positively red or pink, under the glow of twilight' (quoted in Parris, p.134).

Brown's dealer, White, refused to buy the picture, claiming that the hay was too pink. Brown retouched the picture and later sold it to his friend and fellow artist, William Morris (1834-96), for 40 guineas.

Further reading:Leslie Parris (ed), The Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1984, reprinted 1994, pp.133-4, reproduced p.133, in colour.
Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, London 2000, p.158, reproduced p.161, in colour.
Virginia Surtees, The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, New Haven and London, 1981, p.145.

Frances Fowle

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope - Thoughts of the Past exhibited 1859

houghts of the Past, shown at the Royal Academy in 1859, was the first work exhibited by Stanhope. It belongs to the early phase of his career when he was imitating the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and displays a characteristic use of strong colour. Around 1870, Stanhope turned to painting allegories inspired by the Italian Renaissance in the manner of Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98), of whom he is considered to be the most important follower.

Thoughts of the Past, a modern-life subject, was painted in the studio below that of D.G. Rossetti (1828-82) beside the Thames at Chatham Place, London. Stanhope's portrayal of a prostitute in her lodging, who is suddenly overcome with remorse for her situation, reproduces the theme of the guilt-ridden prostitute that was prevalent in literature and paintings of the 1850s and 1860s, especially among the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers. Holman Hunt's (1827-1910) The Awakening Conscience (1853-4) (Tate N02075), is another example. A study for Thoughts of the Past (Tate N03232) reveals that Stanhope had originally conceived the woman with her eyes raised skyward, as if in silent prayer, thus emphasising the idea of her repentance.

Thoughts of the Past may be viewed in terms of what the art historian Lynda Nead has identified as the 'seduction to suicide mythology', that was built around the figure of the prostitute in the nineteenth century (Nead, p.169). The interior of the room is replete with signs of a fall from virtue ; the gaudy cloak and shabby dressing table, the jewellery and money strewn across it, and the man's glove and walking stick on the floor. A number of sickly-looking plants reach up to catch the light from a window, which is open and threatens to let in a plume of black soot from outside. The view, which looks out towards Waterloo Bridge, with the Strand (a popular haunt of prostitutes) on the right, alludes to both the woman's corruption and her impending doom. The woman's red hair may associate her with images of Mary Magadalen, the archetypal prostitute. Prostitution was seen to pose a threat to the domestic core of Victorian society and representations engage in a complex language of urban filth and disease, of which the Thames, chronically polluted and stinking at the time this work was painted, was a familiar image. Death was assumed to be the only means of redemption for the prostitute and suicide by drowning, the most commonly imagined scenario, was implied through the depiction of the River and its bridges.

Further reading:Jonathan P. Ribner, 'The Thames and Sin in the Age of the Great Stink: Some artistic and Literary Responses to a Victorian Environmental Crisis', British Art Journal, vol.1, no.2, Spring 2000, pp.38-46.
Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, Oxford 1988, p.130, reproduced front jacket in colour and plate 24.
Leslie Parris (ed), The Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1984, p.174, no.98, reproduced p.174 in colour.

Rebecca Virag