Frank Dicksee, Portrait of Agnes Malliam (Mrs Edward Foster)

Portrait of Dora. Sir Frank Dicksee

Frank Dicksee, The Magic Crystal

Women With Water Jugs Sir Frank Dicksee

An Offering, Sir Frank Dicksee

Leila 1892. By Frank Dicksee

Frank Dicksee - The Mother

Frank Dicksee

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

The Daughters of Eve

Cleopatra

The House Builders

Price Realized
£145,250
($234,434)

signed and dated 'FRANK DICKSEE/1880' (centre left) and inscribed 'AWB 1879' (lower centre, on a sheet of paper) and further signed, inscribed and dated 'The House Builders/(Portraits of Sir W.E. & The Hon. Lady Welby-Gregory)/Frank Dicksee/-1880-2 Fitzroy Square/W.' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
54½ x 61½ in. (138.4 x 156.2 cm.)
in the original frame

This evocative picture, much written about and exhibited in the context of late Victorian domestic architecture and the Aesthetic movement, was unveiled at the Royal Academy in 1880. Dicksee was then twenty-seven and a rising star in the ranks of the Academy, which elected him to associate membership that very year. The picture shows Sir William Welby-Gregory, fourth baronet (1829-1898), and his wife Victoria, only daughter of the Earl of Wharncliffe, poring over the architect's model and drawings for Denton Manor, the house they were building near Grantham in Lincolnshire. When the picture was exhibited the house had been in progress a year, and it would be completed four years later. Like so many projects of the kind, it was destined to be short-lived, falling victim to rapidly changing social conditions. Apart from the stable-block, the house was demolished shortly before the Second World War, thus existing for little more than half a century.

Denton Manor was designed by A.W. (later Sir Arthur) Blomfield in a 'domestic Gothic' style which, as Gervase Jackson-Stops observed in cataloguing the picture for the great Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition held in Washington, D.C., in 1985-6, 'looks back to Augustus Welby Pugin's country houses of the 1840s and 1850s, such as Bilton Grange in Warwickshire'. The style represented 'a cautious and conservative approach compared to the polychrome fantasies of William Burges and S.S. Teulon, but one that might have appealed to a squire who was already fifty, and who was rebuilding his family seat not so much to make his mark in the country as to provide a home for the pictures, furniture and other works of art inherited from his father's cousin, Gregory Gregory of Harlaxton'. The model that the baronet and his wife are discussing is seen from the same viewpoint as a perspective drawing published in The Building News on 10 October 1879 and it is conceivable that Dicksee used this as source material, although there are minor differences in the fenestration of the model as he represents it. The drawing held by Lady Welby-Gregory shows the two-storey oriel window over the front door, and bears Blomfield's signature and the date 1879. A portfolio of further drawings seen beyond her right arm conceals the immense service wings that were built round two courtyards, a far bigger space than the family's own quarters.

Lady Welby-Gregory belonged to the group known as 'The Souls', an aristocratic coterie devoted to intellectual and artistic pursuits and disdainful of the more worldly pleasures indulged in by the Prince of Wales's Marlborough House set. Her father, the Earl of Wharncliffe, was a patron of Edward Poynter, who painted enormous mythological subjects round the billiard room at Wortley Hall, the Earl's country house near Sheffield, in the 1870s. Other 'Souls', such as Violet, Duchess of Rutland and Lady Brownlow, were either related to or neighbours of the Welby-Gregorys, and their daughter, Nina, married yet another member of the circle, Harry Cust. Lady Welby-Gregory herself was something of a bluestocking. She wrote obscure philosophical works, possibly under the influence of Arthur Balfour, a pre-eminent 'Soul' who published more than one treatise of this kind. She was also an accomplished needlewoman, founding the Decorative Art Needlework Society, an offshoot of the Royal School of Needlework at South Kensington.

Lady Welby-Gregory's tastes and talents are amply alluded to in the picture. She is dressed lavishly but in the Aesthetic style, and her surroundings are eminently cultured. She sits on an ebony chair of a seventeenth-century Goanese type, generally thought of by the Victorians as 'Elizabethan'. Behind her are an old lacquered cabinet and a large blue porcelain vase, the latter the quintessential symbol of Aesthetic sensibility since Rossetti, Whistler and other trendsetters had pioneered the taste for 'blue-and-white' in the 1860s. As for Lady Welby-Gregory's needlework skills, these are reflected in the table-cover, richly embroidered with a swirling naturalistic pattern that could easily have been designed by one of the moving spirits behind the Royal School of Needlework, William Morris. It is complemented by the spray of chrysanthemums on the table and the lilies in the vase, further tokens of Aesthetic credibility and reminders that art depends on the painstaking study of nature, a theory that had long since gained currency thanks to Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites.

In 1880 the R.A. was a newcomer to Burlington House, having moved there from Trafalgar Square only the previous year. Placed prominently in Gallery 1, Dicksee's picture won almost universal acclaim. As always, there were quibbles. F.G. Stephens, writing as usual in the Athenaeum, thought the effect a little 'hard' and complained that the table-cover, though 'brilliantly painted' and 'a tour de force', was 'much too obtrusive and vivid'. But the general view, as the Spectator put it, was that this was 'the greatest work yet produced by (the) artist,' even surpassing his immensely popular Harmony (Tate Britain), shown at the R.A. in 1877 and bought for the Chantrey Bequest. Several critics agreed with the Illustrated London News that the 'care and skill' that Dicksee had lavished on the details of the composition, giving it an 'almost illusory' presence, were reminiscent of the old masters. Stephens described the picture as being 'in the manner of Moroni', and for the Times it was 'a very potent and rich piece of colour, of Venetian audacity.'

According to E. Rimbault Dibdin, writing on Dicksee in 1905, the success of The House Builders caused the artist to receive portrait commissions 'in embarrassing profusion', but this was not the path he wished to follow and he did not exhibit another portrait at the R.A. until 1901. This may be true, but in later years, as the subject pictures that had sustained the Victorian art economy for so long finally went out of fashion, Dicksee was glad enough to turn to portraiture for a living.

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/sir-frank-dicksee-pra-the-house-builders-5631467-details.aspx?from=salesummary&intObjectID=5631467&sid=b8a8290e-93a4-4557-9a41-131a273ab743

Chivalry

Price Realized
£577,250
($931,682)

indistinctly signed and dated 'FRANK DICKSEE/-1885-' (lower right) 
oil on canvas 
71 7/8 x 53¾ in. (182.7 x 136.6 cm.) 

Dicksee came from a family of artists: his father, Thomas Francis Dicksee, uncle, brother and sister were all painters. Like many other artists of the time, they lived in Bloomsbury, the bohemian quarter of the day, where Dicksee received his formal education at the Rev. George Henslow's school. After a year working with his father, he entered the Royal Academy schools in 1870, being taught by Millais and Leighton and proving a model student who won gold and silver medals. He also had a formative period assisting Henry Holiday with stained glass.

In the 1870s and 1880s much of Dicksee's creative effort was channeled into illustration, both for magazines - Cassell's, the Cornhill, the Graphic, etc - and books, notably Longfellow's Evangeline (1882) and two editions of Shakespeare's plays (1883-92), all published by Cassell's. A number of these designs were later developed as easel paintings. Dicksee began to exhibit at the R.A. in 1876. It was always his spiritual home, although he also supported the Grosvenor Gallery and other institutions. His name was made with Harmony (Tate Britain), exhibited in 1877; a winning combination of sentimental theme, 'aesthetic' decor and academic technique, it was hailed as the 'picture of the year' and became one of the first works bought for the Chantrey Bequest.

Dicksee was elected A.R.A. in 1881 and R.A. ten years later. In addition to literary and historical subjects, he specialized in the relatively new genre of the psychodrama, examples being The Crisis of 1891 (Melbourne) and The Confession of 1896 (private collection). Many of his pictures were widely disseminated through engravings, and in 1900 he scored another great success with The Two Crowns (Tate Gallery), which again became a Chantrey purchase. However, the fashion for such costume pieces was waning, and increasingly he turned to portraiture and landscape. Never marrying, he settled in 1898 at 3 Greville Place in St John's Wood, an area then popular with academic artists.

In later years Dicksee received many honours, both at home and abroad. The climax of his career was his election as President of the Royal Academy in 1924 in succession to Sir Aston Webb. He held the post with distinction and tact, and it brought him a knighthood in 1925 and a KCVO two years later. However, the advent of the Modern Movement, of which he was an outspoken critic, had left him an isolated figures. By the time he died, his art, once so popular, was generally dismissed as outmoded and irrelevant.

The present picture is one of his most attractive, a wonderful embodiment of late Victorian romanticism at its most theatrical and uninhibited. As Mark Girouard has shown in his book The Return to Camelot (1981), the ideal of chivalry preoccupied the Victorians. It is no accident that the concept was central to the frescoes in the new Palace of Westminster that were conceived as a great expression of national pride and sentiment. First embodied in Maclise's Spirit of Chivalry, painted in the House of Lords in the 1840s, the theme was taken up again in the Arthurian subjects in the Queen's Robing Room that engaged William Dyce for the last sixteen years of his life. The obvious literary parallel is Tennyson's Idylls of the King, in which the Poet Laureate retold the national epic in terms which were intended to have direct reference to contemporary mores. Not for nothing did Swinburne wickedly refer to the cycle of poems as the Morte d'Albert.

But chivalry was not the preserve of national or public aspirations. It could also be the focus of the Pre-Raphaelites' essentially private response to the Middle Ages. One thinks, for example, of Rossetti's Death of Breuse sans Pitié (private collection), one of the 'Froissartian' watercolours that he painted for William Morris in the late 1850s; of Burne-Jones's St George and Perseus series, executed for domestic settings a decade or more later; or of Millais' The Knight Errant (Tate Britain), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870. It was typical of Dicksee to seek to express a Pre-Raphaelite subject in terms of a lush academic style; in this respect Chivalry is a sequel to the Harmony of 1877, while equally looking forward to a late painting such as The End of the Quest (Leighton House, Kensington), a re-interpretation of the theme of courtly love dating from 1921. When Chivalry was exhibited in 1885, more than one critic made the comparison with Millais' Knight Errant which, perhaps significantly, had been exhibited the very year that Dicksee entered the R.A. schools. Certainly the comparison is valid in so far as Millais's picture too represents an accommodation between Pre-Raphaelite sentiment and an academic idiom, including the monumental scale on which both pictures are painted. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that Millais dares to flirt with the issue, so fraught for the Victorians, of nudity, while Dicksee opts for a safer 'off-the-shoulder' solution in which revelation is nicely balanced by concealment, modesty by display.

Critics often described the picture's handling and colouring as Venetian - justifiably, since Dicksee was a great admirer of Venetian painting. He visited Venice in 1882, three years before the exhibition of Chivalry, and he told his students at the R.A. Schools to 'revel in the joyous company of Titian and Giorgione, Tintoretto and Veronese; all their windows are open to the sunny south and a golden light pervades them'. It is tempting to link Chivalry specifically with Tintoretto's St George and the Dragon in the National Gallery, London, which is comparable in terms of theme and composition. The picture had been in the collection since 1831, and Dicksee must have known it. But it would not be a case of straightforward borrowing for, as Amanda Kavanagh has shown, Dicksee's design is developed from an earlier illustration of his own to a modern story - R.D. Blackmore's novel Emma; or My Father's Sin, published in the Cornhill Magazine in January 1877. Kavanagh also convincingly suggests that the elegant poses of the figures owe something to sculptural prototypes, citing examples by Cellini, Mercié, Alfred Gilbert and G.F. Watts.

Not only the 'Venetian' palette but the rich, soupy texture of the paint and the feeling for dramatic yet subtle lighting are typical of Dicksee's style. Crepuscular light, as here, or the warm glow of light filtering through stained-glass windows, as in Harmony, are particularly characteristic. This willingness to explore the possibilities of light may well have been encouraged by Dicksee's early experience of working in stained glass with Henry Holiday.

The picture was commissioned by Sir John Aird, a wealthy contractor whose career embraced the removal of the Crystal Palace to Sydenham, the completion of the Manchester Ship Canal, and the building of the great dam at Aswan, finally opened after four years' labour in 1902. Aird's achievements brought him a baronetcy, a seat in Parliament and a handsome house at 14 Hyde Park Terrace, furnished with a fine collection of modern British pictures. Like the Liverpool shipowner F.R. Leyland, he tended to like large imposing works of obvious importance, but whereas Leyland favoured the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic masters, Aird's taste was more academic. Leighton, Poynter, Alma-Tadema, Orchardson, Waterhouse, Marcus Stone and Luke Fildes were represented in the collection in addition to Dicksee, whose Chivalry hung over the fireplace in the back drawing room at Hyde Park Terrace.

The two great Alma-Tademas in the Aird collection, The Roses of Heliogabalus and The Finding of Moses, have both appeared on the market in recent years.

Frank Dicksee - Portrait of Elsa

Frank Dicksee

Frank Dicksee

by and published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, after Joseph Parkin Mayall
photogravure, 1883; published 1884

Oriental Pastime - Frank Bernard Dicksee

Oriental Pastime - Frank Bernard Dicksee

The Two Crowns - Frank Bernard Dicksee

Romeo and Juliet - Frank Bernard Dicksee 1876

Beatrice - Frank Bernard Dicksee

Beatrice Stuart - Frank Bernard Dicksee 1912