Showing posts with label John Melhuish Strudwick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Melhuish Strudwick. Show all posts
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Friday, February 8, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Study of the Head and Shoulders of a young Girl (recto) and studies of a draped Female Figure (verso)
This drawing probably dates from the 1870s before Strudwick developed his highly stylised and decorative characteristic drapery style. It may be an early study for the figure of Love in 'Love and Time'
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Isabella 'Piteous she looked on dead and senseless things, Asking for her lost Basil piteously [sic]'
John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)
Isabella 'Piteous she looked on dead and senseless things, Asking for her lost Basil piteously [sic]'
Price Realized
£443,750
($628,350)
1879
oil with gold paint on canvas
39¼ x 24 in. (99.7 x 61 cm.)
Percy Bate, The English Pre-Raphaelites, Their Associates and Successors, 4th ed., London, 1910, illustrated facing p. 110.
Strudwick was born in Clapham, and educated there at St Saviour's Grammar School. Refusing to contemplate a career in business, he studied art at South Kensington and the Royal Academy Schools, but was a singularly unsuccessful student. The only visitor to the RA Schools who encouraged him was the Scottish artist John Pettie (1839-1893), whose fluent brushwork, typical of the pupils of Robert Scott Lauder at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, he emulated for a time. A picture illustrating the ballad of 'Auld Robin Gray', exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1873 and sold in these Rooms on 5 November 1993, lot 181, is an interesting record of this early phase.
Strudwick eventually found his feet in the mid 1870s when he acted as a temporary assistant first to J.R. Spencer Stanhope and then to Burne-Jones. Songs without Words, the picture with which he made his first and only appearance at the Royal Academy in 1876, shows his mature style fully formed, and it underwent little development from then on. Like so many of the younger Aesthetic painters and Burne-Jones followers, he exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, at the Grosvenor Gallery from its dramatic opening in 1877, and finally at the New Gallery, which inherited the mantle of the Grosvenor in 1888. Despite his inauspicious start, he enjoyed considerable success; as George Bernard Shaw was to write in an article on him in the Art Journal for April 1891, 'there is no such thing in existence as an unsold picture by Strudwick'. Songs without Words was bought by Lord Southesk, a Scottish peer with antiquarian interests; A Golden Thread (1885) was acquired for the Chantrey Bequest as part of the Royal Academy's current campaign to woo the Burne-Jones school; and two wealthy Liverpool collectors, William Imrie and George Holt, became long-standing patrons. Bernard Shaw's article was a further sign of success. Shaw's main thesis is that Strudwick's very incapacity as a student was the making of him as an artist; he quotes his comment that he 'could not draw - never could', and interprets this as 'a priceless gift', saving him from the empty virtuosity - 'execution for execution's sake' - which had become so common among young artists, especially those who had spent 'a couple of seasons in Paris.' Shaw also recorded that the artist had 'a fine sense of humour', something one would hardly guess from his pictures, and that he had never visited Italy, although critics often complained that his pictures were mere pastiches of early Italian work.
Strudwick lived all his adult life in Hammersmith or Bedford Park, not far from Burne-Jones and his fellow assistant in Burne-Jones's studio, T.M. Rooke. His daughter Ethel, born in 1880, was to become High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School, situated locally, in 1927. Strudwick was still contributing to the New Gallery in 1908, when it held its last but one exhibition, but he seems to have ceased painting about this time although he lived on until 1937. His Times obituary descibed him as 'a beautiful old man... (and) a charming personality, exceedingly kind to young artists.'
Isabella has been exhibited so widely in recent years (from Denver to Tokyo, Newcastle to Madrid) that it must be Strudwick's best known picture. It appeared first at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879, one of two works by the artist of which the second was the illustration to the Song of Solomon mentioned below in connection with lot 6. The subject is taken from the well-known poem by Keats, Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, which in turn derives from one of the stories in Boccaccio's Decameron. A couplet from Keats's poem was quoted in the Grosvenor catalogue, but the word 'amorously' at the end of the second line was changed to 'piteously'. No doubt this slip of the pen was due to the fact that the word 'piteous' had already occurred a line earlier. All hard-pressed cataloguers will recognise the phenomenon.
Set in medieval Florence, the story tells how Isabella falls in love with Lorenzo, an employee in her brothers' business. Having hoped she would make a profitable marriage, the brothers are angry and murder Lorenzo, burying his body in a forest and telling Isabella that he has been sent away on urgent affairs. When Lorenzo's ghost appears to Isabella and reveals his true fate, she exhumes the body and cuts off his head, concealing it in a pot beneath a basil plant which she waters with her tears. Eventually the brothers discover and steal it, and Isabella dies of a broken heart.
The story's theme of unhappy, frustrated love, laced with a strong element of sadism and set against an Italian medieval background which was not only colourful in itself but tied up with their interest in early Italian painting - all this made a powerful appeal to the Pre-Raphaelites. It inspired John Everett Millais' first major work in the Pre-Raphaelite style (fig. 2). Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, only a year after the Brotherhood was founded, the picture shows Isabella, Lorenzo and her brothers all seated at table. Gazing at her intently, Lorenzo offers Isabella a blood-orange while one of her brothers aims a savage kick at her dog, just two of the many details symbolic of impending doom which the picture incorporates. Nineteen years later, visiting Florence with his new and pregnant wife Fanny, Holman Hunt embarked on a large picture of Isabella cradling the pot in which her lover's head is buried, a subject somehow curiously appropriate to his tortured, obsessive genius (fig. 3). The picture was exhibited by the dealer Ernest Gambart at his premises in King Street, London, in 1868, and sold to a Newcastle collector two years later.
Strudwick would undoubtedly have known both these compositions. Millais' painting, a key work for any young artist intent on following the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, had appeared at Christie's in 1862, 1868 and 1875. The Hunt had not only been exhibited in 1868 but was so familiar through Blanchard's engraving of 1871 that in 1886 the Times could describe it as having 'long since become the classic rendering in art of the last episode of Keats's poem'. For his own picture, however, Strudwick chose a different theme to that of either of his precursors. The brothers have just stolen the pot of basil, and can be seen through the lattice window making their escape in the streets of Florence. Isabella stands forlornly in her chamber, hand on palpitating heart as she contemplates her terrible loss. To her left stands the elaborate wrought-iron stand on which the pot formerly reposed, while the floor is strewn with basil leaves, hinting that she has struggled to prevent the rape of her lover's severed head.
It was typical of Strudwick to hint at drama rather than making it explicit. No artist was ever less endowed with the dramatic gift. His talent lay almost exclusively in portraying wistful, love-lorn maidens in spaces pervaded by Aesthetic shadows and so encrusted with gem-like surfaces as to suggest that a jeweller has been the interior decorator. Isabella's chamber is typical, and so is the imagery of the marble or bronze reliefs. The more robust Millais and Hunt had employed a whole range of symbols to emphasise the horrific nature of the story. Millais not only goes in for blood-oranges and brutalised dogs but a majolica plate painted with a scene of execution by beheading and a hawk tearing up a white feather. Hunt gives Isabella's pot death's-head handles to suggest its grisly contents. Strudwick's reliefs, by contrast, seem to show only playful amorini and two scenes which hint vaguely at the story of Cupid and Psyche. This subject, which Burne-Jones had treated in the mid 1860s in his illustrations to Morris's Earthly Paradise, would indeed be appropriate in that Psyche loses Cupid, her celestial lover. However, she also regains him after many trials and tribulations. Was Strudwick being true to his gentle vision by opting for a story with a happy ending, or was he suggesting that Lorenzo and Isabella would also be re-united in death?
The picture was well received by the critics. Joseph Comyns Carr, who had an interest in the matter in that he was one of the directors of the Grosvenor, wrote in the Academy that Strudwick was
an artist who brings a system of highly-wrought and delicate workmanship to the rendering of ideas that are far removed from contact with the passing life of our time. Mr Strudwick has always been inspired by a fine poetical fancy, and his present performance shows that he is rapidly gaining the resource and power needed to do full justice to his ideas. There is still something to desire in the drawing of the figure; but all the subordinate parts of the design are expressed with the utmost care and patience, and with a sureness of touch that is worthy of the poet whose verse he has striven to illustrate.
F.G. Stephens was equally enthusiastic in the Athenaeum:
We turn to Mr Strudwick's Isabella with pleasure, which would be unalloyed if the artist, instead of appearing to glance at Mr Rossetti, or to adopt the exaggerated cultus of Mantegna that is now fashionable, had discarded affectations which can only be temporary. Keats's Isabella...is represented by a wan and wasted maiden standing before the tripod from which the tragic vase has been removed. Her face has a dazed and hopeless look, which ought to distinguish the picture in the galllery as one surpassed in inspiration by no example here, except, perhaps, by Mr Burne-Jones's virgin in the 'Annunciation' [his main contribution that year, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight]. The attitude of Isabella is hardly, if at all, inferior to her face. The careful execution of the picture throughout is highly creditable to Mr Strudwick. There are many excellent points of local colour, such as the deep red rose of the dress, while the painting of the accessories and floor, the window and furniture, is capital. The careful studies which this picture displays are exceptional in these careless times.
The picture's first owner was almost certainly W. Graham Robertson (1866-1948), a young aesthete who studied under Albert Moore, knew and admired Burne-Jones, played a considerable part in the theatrical life of his time, and is now variously remembered as the subject of one of Sargent's finest portraits (Tate Gallery), the author of some delightful and witty reminiscences, Time Was (1931), and a passionate collector of the work of William Blake. Robertson certainly had the picture by 1892, when he lent it to an exhibition at the Guildhall, and he may well have bought it direct from the Grosvenor. Although he was only thirteen in 1879, he was wealthy, precocious, and had been a devotee of the Grosvenor since its opening two years earlier. 'The impression left upon me...', he wrote in Time Was, 'was unforgettable. To this day old fogeys speak of the first two or three exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery with undiminished enthusiasm: there has been no such delightful surprise in the world of pictures since.'
Robertson kept the picture until his death in 1948, presumably hanging it either in his London house (he lived consecutively at 21 Cleveland Square, Bayswater, 23 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge (this address appears on a label on the back), and 5 Argyll Road, Kensington), or at 'Sandhills', his beloved country house near Witley in Surrey, which had formerly been owned by William and Helen Allingham. It must have been familiar to his wide circle of friends, including the young theatrical talents - Noël Coward, Lawrence Olivier, the Lunts and others - to whom he became something of a guru in his old age.
At his posthumous sale at Christie's the picture made a mere 15 guineas, but this would not have surprised him. He had long become used to the way the heroes of his youth had fallen out of fashion and been, as he saw it, derided. 'It was rather sad', he had written of the private view of the Burne-Jones centenary exhibition held at the Tate Gallery in 1933, 'a little crowd of forlorn old survivals paying their last homage to the beauty and poetry now utterly scorned and rejected...The whole thing was evidently...foredoomed to failure, and I am glad now that I never encouraged the idea when I first heard of it.'
On the other hand, the paltry prices fetched by such pictures when Victorian art was in the doldrums gave Mrs Stirling the opportunity to find things for her collection at comparatively little outlay. Presumably she wanted a picture by Strudwick because at one time he had been Spencer Stanhope's studio assistant.
Strudwick painted another version of the same subject, which appears to be lost. It was exhibited at the Grosvenor in 1886 - and this time Keats was correctly quoted in the catalogue
Isabella
John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)
Isabella
signed 'JM Strudwick/14 Edith Villas/West Kensington/.W./London' (on the artist's label attached to the stretcher) and inscribed '"Isabella"/Piteous she looked on dead &/senseless things/Asking for her lost Basil amourously [sic]/-Keats.' (on a label attached to the stretcher)
oil on board
12¼ x 9 1/8 in. (31.1 x 23.2 cm.)
Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886, this picture is a much reduced version of one that had itself been shown at the Grosvenor in 1879. The latter, formerly in the collection of the artist W. Graham Robertson, was sold in these Rooms on behalf of the De Morgan Foundation on 28 November 2001 (lot 2). The small version was noted in the catalogue entry but described as apparently lost. This was clearly not the case.
The subject is taken from Keats's well known poem Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, which in turn borrows its theme from Boccaccio's Decameron. Set in medieval Florence, the story tells how Isabella falls in love with Lorenzo, an employee in her brothers' business. Having hoped she would make a profitable marriage, the brothers are angry and murder Lorenzo, burying his body in the forest and telling Isabella that he has been sent away on urgent affairs. When Lorenzo's ghost appears to Isabella and reveals his true fate, she exhumes the body and cuts of his head, concealing it in a pot beneath a basil plant which she waters with her tears. Eventually the brothers discover and steal it, and Isabella dies of a broken heart.
The story was popular with the Pre-Raphaelites and had already inspired major works by two members of the Brotherhood: Millais' Isabella (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, and Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne), which made its first appearance at the King Street premises of the dealer Ernest Gambart in 1868. Strudwick would have known both these celebrated works, either 'in the flesh' or through engravings, but he chose to illustrate a different incident to either. In his picture, the brothers have just stolen the pot of basil. They are seen through the open window, making their escape in the Florentine countryside, while Isabella stands forlornly in her chamber, hand on palpitating heart as she contemplates her loss. To the right stands the elaborate wrought-iron stand on which the pot formerly reposed, while the floor is strewn with basil leaves, hinting that the theft has not been effected without a struggle.
Although the composition remains basically the same in both versions, the colour schemes differ and there are many variations of detail. For example, two prominent features of the present version, the open book in front of the window and the pedestal supporting the wrought-iron stand, are absent in the earlier picture. The bench against which the heroine leans is also larger in the first version, and made of marble, embellished with reliefs, rather than carved wood, as in the second account.
It is no surprise that both pictures were unveiled at the Grosvenor Gallery. Strudwick had been an assistant to Burne-Jones in the mid-1870s. He remained one of his closest followers, and was among the many adherents who joined him in showing at the Grosvenor, where their mentor was the star attraction from the moment the gallery opened its doors in 1877.
Both versions of the picture won critical acclaim when they were exhibited. The Times observed of the artist's two contributions in 1886: 'Mr Strudwick, the ablest of the followers of Mr Burne-Jones, has made a considerable advance on any of his former works, both in "Circe and Scylla" and in the smaller and perhaps more desirable picture of "Isabella".' It is interesting that, of the two, the writer preferred Isabella, since Circe and Scylla had been reviewed at length by F.G. Stephens in the Athenaeum and is generally considered to be one of Strudwick's finest works. Now in the Holt Collection at Sudley, one of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, it was included in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989, no. 45 (illustrated in catalogue).
Sunday, November 18, 2012
John Melhuish Strudwick - A Symphony exh 1903
Throughout his life Strudwick worked on a series of paintings one take music as their central theme. 'A Symphony' is among the culminating examples of these works, which also include 'The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day' (1890, Private Collection), 'When Apples were Golden' (1906, Manchester City Art Gallery) and closest precedent to the present work 'St. Cecilia' (1897, private collection) which exists in a number of versions. Significantly in the present painting Strudwick has eliminated any reference to a story or individuals so that the musical theme stands alone. Music was the central metaphor in the aesthetic movement for the direct way in which paintings affected the spectator's emotions through their design and colour. Many artists in this movement made musical references in their works. It is noteworthy that Whistler titled his paintings 'Harmonies' and 'Symphonies'.
The present painting shows how Strudwick attains an evocative mood outside everyday reality through pictorial inventiveness. As Bernard Shaw wrote in his pioneering article on the artist:
No matter how minutely a painter copies a model in the costume of a certain period, with appropriate furniture and accessories, his labour is as nothing compared to that of a man who creates his figures and invents all the circumstances and accessories. This is what Strudwick does. [Shaw, 1891]
In the present painting, by drawing directly onto the canvas and then building up a series of thin glowing glazes in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, Strudwick creates both a richness and delicacy.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
John Melhuish Strudwick - Study for an angel in a green dress
Price Realized
£2,868
($5,254)
Study for an angel in a green dress
pencil, watermark 'J WHATMAN 1894', on two joined sheets of paper
27 7/8 x 10 3/8 in. (70.8 x 26.5 cm.)
The present sketch is possibly a preparatory sketch that relates to two oils exhibited at London's New Gallery, Summer 1896, nos. 78 and 82.
Friday, June 1, 2012
John Melhuish Strudwick - Isabella
signed 'JM Strudwick/14 Edith Villas/West Kensington/.W./London' (on the artist's label attached to the stretcher) and inscribed '"Isabella"/Piteous she looked on dead &/senseless things/Asking for her lost Basil amourously [sic]/-Keats.' (on a label attached to the stretcher) oil on board 12¼ x 9 1/8 in. (31.1 x 23.2 cm.) London, Grosvenor Gallery, 1886, no. 71 Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886, this picture is a much reduced version of one that had itself been shown at the Grosvenor in 1879. The latter, formerly in the collection of the artist W. Graham Robertson, was sold in these Rooms on behalf of the De Morgan Foundation on 28 November 2001 (lot 2). The small version was noted in the catalogue entry but described as apparently lost. This was clearly not the case. The subject is taken from Keats's well known poem Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, which in turn borrows its theme from Boccaccio's Decameron. Set in medieval Florence, the story tells how Isabella falls in love with Lorenzo, an employee in her brothers' business. Having hoped she would make a profitable marriage, the brothers are angry and murder Lorenzo, burying his body in the forest and telling Isabella that he has been sent away on urgent affairs. When Lorenzo's ghost appears to Isabella and reveals his true fate, she exhumes the body and cuts of his head, concealing it in a pot beneath a basil plant which she waters with her tears. Eventually the brothers discover and steal it, and Isabella dies of a broken heart. The story was popular with the Pre-Raphaelites and had already inspired major works by two members of the Brotherhood: Millais' Isabella (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, and Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne), which made its first appearance at the King Street premises of the dealer Ernest Gambart in 1868. Strudwick would have known both these celebrated works, either 'in the flesh' or through engravings, but he chose to illustrate a different incident to either. In his picture, the brothers have just stolen the pot of basil. They are seen through the open window, making their escape in the Florentine countryside, while Isabella stands forlornly in her chamber, hand on palpitating heart as she contemplates her loss. To the right stands the elaborate wrought-iron stand on which the pot formerly reposed, while the floor is strewn with basil leaves, hinting that the theft has not been effected without a struggle. Although the composition remains basically the same in both versions, the colour schemes differ and there are many variations of detail. For example, two prominent features of the present version, the open book in front of the window and the pedestal supporting the wrought-iron stand, are absent in the earlier picture. The bench against which the heroine leans is also larger in the first version, and made of marble, embellished with reliefs, rather than carved wood, as in the second account. It is no surprise that both pictures were unveiled at the Grosvenor Gallery. Strudwick had been an assistant to Burne-Jones in the mid-1870s. He remained one of his closest followers, and was among the many adherents who joined him in showing at the Grosvenor, where their mentor was the star attraction from the moment the gallery opened its doors in 1877. Both versions of the picture won critical acclaim when they were exhibited. The Times observed of the artist's two contributions in 1886: 'Mr Strudwick, the ablest of the followers of Mr Burne-Jones, has made a considerable advance on any of his former works, both in "Circe and Scylla" and in the smaller and perhaps more desirable picture of "Isabella".' It is interesting that, of the two, the writer preferred Isabella, since Circe and Scylla had been reviewed at length by F.G. Stephens in the Athenaeum and is generally considered to be one of Strudwick's finest works. Now in the Holt Collection at Sudley, one of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, it was included in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989, no. 45 (illustrated in catalogue). http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/john-melhuish-strudwick-isabella-5563215-details.aspx?from=salesummary&pos=10&intObjectID=5563215&sid=9a38c825-bf08-442e-b4ec-668190353e6d&page=1
Saturday, November 12, 2011
John Melhuish Strudwick - Acrasia
The inspiration for this painting is "The Faerie Queene", by Edmund Spenser from the end of the 1500s. The enchantress Acrasia is depicted in the 'Bower of Bliss' surrounded by handmaidens with a knight at her mercy.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
John Melhuish Strudwick - In the Golden Days
signed and inscribed with the artist's address on an old label attached to the reverseoil on canvas
65 by 45cm.; 26 by 18in.
1907
ESTIMATE 200,000-300,000 GBP
Lot Sold: 241,250 GBP
Steven Kolsteren, 'The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)', The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies, vol. I: 2, Fall 1988, p.8 and 12 no. 3 in the checklist of paintings by Strudwick (marked 'present whereabouts unknown')
How sad it were for Arthur, should he live,
To sit once more within the lonely hall,
And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds
As in the golden days before thy sin.'
TENNYSON, IDYLLS OF THE KING
Of all the painters who formed the late nineteenth-century manifestation of romantic Pre-Raphaelitism, a movement which owed much to the example of Edward Burne-Jones and more remotely to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Melhuish Strudwick is the most remarkable. Because he painted so slowly, and in such a meticulous style which he
never attempted to adapt or simplify so as to be less technically exacting, he is represented by a small but precious corps of works. The present painting which was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1907, his last exhibit there, exemplifies
the essential qualities of refinement and other-worldliness of his art. Strudwick was preoccupied by the subject of passing time or of an imagined golden age, from Passing Days of 1878 (sold in these rooms, 10 November 1981, lot 39), The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day of 1889 (private collection) and When Apples were Golden and Songs were
Sweet, But Summer had Passed Away of 1906 (Manchester City Art Gallery). As Steven Kolsteren has pointed out; 'Strudwick's private dreamworld is not a perfect hiding place, being continually affected by time and decay' (Steven Kolsteren, 'The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)', The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies, vol. I: 2, Fall 1988, p.8)
The subject shows three beautiful female figures in a medieval chamber at the bottom of a staircase. On the left sits a damsel clad in rose-coloured robes playing a type of archaic lute, whilst beside her, dressed in green is a second girlholding a song-book. A third girl, dressed in a darker red robe, lifts a veil from her ear and stoops forward to listen to the music played by the other two figures. At the side of the girl dressed in green are pale wild roses growing over a knight's shield, reminiscent of Burne-Jones' Briar Rose series of pictures painted in the 1880s (Buscot Park, Oxfordshire). The title is taken from Tennyson's Idylls of the King from the part of the poem where Guinevere talks of her regret of her sins and desire to return to the idyllic time of her youth. The central figure dressed in green may
therefore depict the young Guinevere, attended by two of her companions before she had met Arthur or Lancelot. The crown depicted on the bronze salver behind her and the lions rampant and Fleur-de-Lis on the heraldry probably relate to King Arthur whilst the knight carrying a golden sword and being crowned by angels, depicted in the panel above the window, is clearly the king her future husband holding Excalibur.
The wild roses possibly relate to the illicit love of Lancelot.
In the Golden Days contains one of the central themes of the English Aesthetic Movement, the sense of sound evoked by the musical subject. The work follows in a similar vein to Summer Songs of 1901 (sold in these rooms, 13 December 2005, lot 23) which similarly depicts a group of girls making music. Strudwick had also painted a series of various St Cecilia subjects in the late 1890s (Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead and elsewhere). As John Christian has written, 'Like Burne-Jones, Strudwick loved to paint compositions in which a mood
of wistful sadness is evoked by a group of female figures playing musical instruments' (The Last Romantics- The Romantic Tradition in British Art- Burne Jones to Stanley Spencer, exhibition catalogue, 1989 (under the discussion of Strudwick's 1897 St Cecilia), p.94).
A crucial formative experience in Strudwick's move towards a style of art of technical refinement and aesthetic subtlety occurred in the early 1870s when he was employed as a studio assistant first by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and then by Burne-Jones. Strudwick's works were repeatedly rejected by the Royal Academy and his professional prospects were uncertain.
However, in 1876 his painting Song without Words (sold in these rooms, 8 June 1993, lot 22) did gain admission (it was in fact his only contribution to the Royal Academy summer exhibitions in his entire career). The work caused a great stir among those who were curious to know how such a quaint and yet technically demanding work could have been undertaken by an otherwise unheard of artist. According to George Bernard Shaw, who wrote the article about Strudwick which is the principal source of information about the artist, the sale of Song without Words marked the critical
turning-point in the painter's fortunes. He 'promptly hired a studio for himself; and since that time his vocation as an artist has never been challenged. There is no such thing as an unsold picture by Strudwick; and so the story of his early struggles may be said to end there' ('J.M. Strudwick', Art Journal, 1891, pp.97-101).
In reply to the accusation that Strudwick was merely an imitator of an historical style of painting, Shaw wrote: 'There is nothing of the fourteenth century about his work except that depth of feeling and passion for beauty which are common property to all who are fortunate enough to inherit them'. His paintings are highly sophisticated expressions of an anti-Utilitarian counter-culture in the late Victorian world, and were esteemed for their complete indifference to all that was modern, or indeed distinctly of any age.
Sothebys 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
John Melhuish Strudwick - Love's Music, a triptych
signed and dated l.l.: JMS 1877
oil on three panels, contained in the original carved gilt frame
two 15 1/2 by 20 cm., 6 by 8 in.; the other 15 1/2 by 77 cm., 6 by 30 in.; overall 21 by 114
cm., 8 1/4 by 45 in.
ESTIMATE 150,000-200,000 GBP
Lot Sold: 181,250 GBP
PROVENANCE
Captain Henry Hill, Brighton;
His sale, Christie's, London, 25 May 1889, lot 98 (bought for 300 guineas by Kitchin);
The Revd Dr G. W. Kitchin, Dean of Winchester and later of Durham.
EXHIBITED
London, Grosvenor Gallery, 1877, no. 58
LITERATURE
Art Journal, 1877, p. 244;
Art Journal, 1889, p. 303 (under 'Art Sales of 1889');
Steven Kolsteren, 'The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)', The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies, vol. I: 2, Fall 1988, pp. 1-16, no. 3 in the checklist of paintings by Strudwick (marked 'present whereabouts unknown').
Love's Music represents John Melhuish Strudwick's extraordinary and most individual style of painting in its first phase. Many of Strudwick's paintings had titles and themes which evoked music whether played or sung. Song without Words may have been the earliest of these, and Love's Music therefore the second. These were the works that set the pattern of the artist's professional career. The composition of the central panel shows at its centre a stonebuilt apse enclosing a throne upon which is seated the figure of Love, a youth draped in red robes and with gilded wings, and at whose feet are four cupids. He is identified by the word 'Amor', carved into the lower panel of his throne.
Love plays a horn which suggests the painting's main theme and symbolic gist. On either side of the apse stone colonnades, incorporating relief sculptures, extend across the width of the composition, and through which may be glimpsed a rolling landscape of hills and coast. In front is a paved area, and with fountains playing in red stone basins.
At either side are groups of figures, each gathered around fruit trees growing in circular beds, and prompted by the sound of the music to see whether love will bring happiness or tragedy.
On the right side, four figures hold hands and form a circle around the tree to engage in a courtly dance, with the two men each raising their right feet in step, while the two women demurely watch their respective suitors. The hopeful message of this episode is supported by a band which rests in the branches of the tree, lettered with the words 'Amorest vita'. On the panel's left side, however, a parallel scene unfolds, which warns that all may not end happily: two men
who are rivals for the love of one woman confront one another around the tree, with one shooting an arrow which strikes the woman who is the object of both of their desires. She dies in the arms of the other. Here the inscribed message is 'Amor est morte'.
The two separate lateral panels show scenes which may be regarded as the consequences of the alternatives of contentment or rivalry in love. On one side we see a scene illustrating the motto 'Amor est concordia', showing a loving man and wife seated together and with their child in a sculpted throne, while a maiden dances to them. On the other side, however, is shown a similar throne but which is here abandoned and already overgrown with brambles, while a desolate woman refuses to be comforted by the figure of a king who kneels before her. The message here is that 'Amor est discordia'.
The highly crafted and otherworldly style of painting which Strudwick adopted owed much to the formative experience that he had working as a studio assistant for John Roddam Spencer Stanhope the early 1870s, and later while working for Burne-Jones. His painting, like theirs, is a manifestation of the aesthetic culture that established in certain circles in London in the 1870s, with its particular affection for an Italianate world and for remote and indeterminate historical epochs.
Strudwick was accused of plagiarising certain early Italian Renaissance painters, a charge refuted by George Bernard Shaw in an important article describing Strudwick's art: 'There is nothing of the fourteenth century about his work except that depth of feeling and passion for beauty which are common property for all who are fortunate enough to inherit them' ('J. M. Strudwick', Art Journal, 1891, pp. 97-101).
Strudwick was slow to establish a professional reputation, with his works repeatedly rejected by the selection committees at the Royal Academy. However, in the mid 1870s he began to find opportunities to exhibit, with one painting of his - Song without Words - being shown at the Academy and in fact causing a certain degree of excitement and finding a buyer, and then the following year the present subject's appearing at the first summer exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery.
This new exhibition space, established in a purpose-built gallery in London's New Bond Street in 1877, was recognised from the start as representing the acme of artistic fashionability. Great excitement was caused by the display of works by several progressive artists, notably Edward Burne-Jones, whose paintings and drawings had been very rarely displayed in London since 1870. With Burne-Jones were also represented a group of what the Art Journal in 1878 dubbed 'thoughtful and gifted disciples of the quasi-classic, semi-mystic school', and who were regarded
loosely as his followers. Works were sent to the Grosvenor exhibitions by the invitation of its proprietor, Sir Coutts Lindsay. He in turn took advice and canvassed opinion from artist-friends, always seeking to show works that were fresh and original, and often of the type that was considered exceptionable at the Royal Academy. How he first became aware of the then obscure figure of J. M. Strudwick is not known, but it can be assumed that either Burne-Jones or John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, for each of whom Strudwick worked as a studio assistant, would have recommended his work to Lindsay. In any case, from the time when the present tempera painting on three panels appeared there in 1877 Strudwick became a regular participant in the Grosvenor exhibitions, showing fourteen works there over the following ten years.
Although Strudwick was still an artist with minimal reputation at the time of its first appearance at the Grosvenor Gallery, Love's Music was received with enthusiasm by the reviewer of the Art Journal, who coupled it with a painting entitled Eve Tempted by Spencer Stanhope: 'We must likewise commend [...] John M. Studwick's "Love's Music", in several compartments.' (Art Journal, 1877, p. 244). There seems to have been a particular taste for Strudwick's art in Liverpool and other northern cities; this work was, however, acquired by Henry Hill, who lived in Brighton, whether bought directly from the Grosvenor exhibition or subsequently is not known. Hill was clearly deeply attracted to Strudwick's work, as he eventually owned five paintings by him, in addition to the present, works entitled Love and Time, Peona, Isabella and Passing Days. All were included in the sale of Hill's collection in 1889, with Love's Music securing the second highest price of the five - 300 guineas. Hill was a remarkable collector in one particular respect: he combined an affection for latter-day Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the present type with a pioneering (in the English context) taste for progressive French painting, from the works of Corot, Millet, and the Barbizon school, through to that of Monet and Degas, by which last artist he had no fewer than seven works in his house in Marine Parade, Brighton.
CSN
http://www.sothebys.com/en/catalogues/ecatalogue.html/2008/victorian-edwardian-art-l08131#/r=/en/ecat.fhtml.L08131.html+r.m=/en/ecat.lot.L08131.html/3/
Monday, July 4, 2011
Saturday, June 4, 2011
John Melhuish Strudwick - In the Golden Days
65 by 45cm.; 26 by 18in.
Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 241,250 GBP
London, New Gallery, Summer Exhibition, 1907, no.12
Steven Kolsteren, 'The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)', The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies, vol. I: 2, Fall 1988, p.8 and 12 no. 3 in the checklist of paintings by Strudwick (marked 'present whereabouts unknown')
'How sad it were for Arthur, should he live,
To sit once more within the lonely hall,
And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds
As in the golden days before thy sin.'
TENNYSON, IDYLLS OF THE KING
Of all the painters who formed the late nineteenth-century manifestation of romantic Pre-Raphaelitism, a movement which owed much to the example of Edward Burne-Jones and more remotely to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Melhuish Strudwick is the most remarkable. Because he painted so slowly, and in such a meticulous style which he
never attempted to adapt or simplify so as to be less technically exacting, he is represented by a small but precious corps of works. The present painting which was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1907, his last exhibit there, exemplifies the essential qualities of refinement and other-worldliness of his art. Strudwick was preoccupied by the subject of passing time or of an imagined golden age, from Passing Days of 1878 (sold in these rooms, 10 November 1981, lot 39), The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day of 1889 (private collection) and When Apples were
Golden and Songs were Sweet, But Summer had Passed Away of 1906 (Manchester City Art Gallery). As Steven Kolsteren has pointed out; 'Strudwick's private dreamworld is not a perfect hiding place, being continually affected by time and decay' (Steven Kolsteren, 'The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)', The
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies, vol. I: 2, Fall 1988, p.8)
The subject shows three beautiful female figures in a medieval chamber at the bottom of a staircase. On the left sits a damsel clad in rose-coloured robes playing a type of archaic lute, whilst beside her, dressed in green is a second girl holding a song-book. A third girl, dressed in a darker red robe, lifts a veil from her ear and stoops forward to listen to the music played by the other two figures. At the side of the girl dressed in green are pale wild roses growing over a knight's shield, reminiscent of Burne-Jones' Briar Rose series of pictures painted in the 1880s
(Buscot Park, Oxfordshire). The title is taken from Tennyson's Idylls of the King from the part of the poem where Guinevere talks of her regret of her sins and desire to return to the idyllic time of her youth. The central figure dressed in green may therefore depict the young Guinevere, attended by two of her companions before she had met Arthur or Lancelot. The crown depicted on the bronze salver behind her and the lions rampant and Fleur-de-Lis on the heraldry probably relate to King Arthur whilst the knight carrying a golden sword and being crowned by angels, depicted in the panel above the window, is clearly the king her future husband holding Excalibur. The wild roses possibly relate to the illicit love of Lancelot.
In the Golden Days contains one of the central themes of the English Aesthetic Movement, the sense of sound evoked by the musical subject. The work follows in a similar vein to Summer Songs of 1901 (sold in these rooms, 13 December 2005, lot 23) which similarly depicts a group of girls making music. Strudwick had also painted a
series of various St Cecilia subjects in the late 1890s (Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead and elsewhere). As John Christian has written, 'Like Burne-Jones, Strudwick loved to paint compositions in which a mood of wistful sadness is evoked by a group of female figures playing musical
instruments' (The Last Romantics- The Romantic Tradition in British Art- Burne Jones to Stanley Spencer, exhibition catalogue, 1989 (under the discussion of Strudwick's 1897 St Cecilia), p.94).A crucial formative experience in Strudwick's move towards a style of art of technical refinement and aesthetic subtlety occurred in the
early 1870s when he was employed as a studio assistant first by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and then by Burne-Jones. Strudwick's works were repeatedly rejected by the Royal Academy and his professional prospects were uncertain. However, in 1876 his painting Song without Words (sold in these rooms, 8 June 1993, lot 22) did
gain admission (it was in fact his only contribution to the Royal Academy summer exhibitions in his entire career).
The work caused a great stir among those who were curious to know how such a quaint and yet technically demanding work could have been undertaken by an otherwise unheard of artist. According to George Bernard Shaw, who wrote the article about Strudwick which is the principal source of information about the artist, the sale of
Song without Words marked the critical turning-point in the painter's fortunes. He 'promptly hired a studio for himself; and since that time his vocation as an artist has never been challenged. There is no such thing as an unsold picture by Strudwick; and so the story of his early struggles may be said to end there' ('J.M. Strudwick', Art Journal, 1891, pp.97-101).
In reply to the accusation that Strudwick was merely an imitator of an historical style of painting, Shaw wrote: 'There is nothing of the fourteenth century about his work except that depth of feeling and passion for beauty which are common property to all who are fortunate enough to inherit them'. His paintings are highly sophisticated expressions of an anti-Utilitarian counter-culture in the late Victorian world, and were esteemed for their complete indifference to all that was modern, or indeed distinctly of any age.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
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