Morgan Le Fay.1880. Art by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

The Charcoal Thieves John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

Rispah, the Daughter of Aiah John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Our Lady of the Watergate

John Roddam Spencer Stanope - Robins of Modern Times

Love and the Maiden [1877] | John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

Love and the Maiden [1877] | John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Morgan Le Fay

Meanwhile, in Hoylandswaine... Kirsty Walker

http://fannycornforth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/meanwhile-in-hoylandswaine.html

Night 1878

Cupid and Psyche ( circa 1880)

Penelope 1849

Knowledge Strangling Ignorance

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-roddam-spencer-stanhope-519

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/drawings-watercolors/john-roddam-spencer-stanhope-knowledge-strangling-ignoranc-5077433-details.aspx?from=searchresults&intObjectID=5077433&sid=820d13ea-17d2-4858-8963-474aaf5baa67

Prostitution

Prostitution was a risque subject for Victorian painters, despite there being upwards of 80,000 prostitutes in London alone. There were three attitudes towards prostitution – condemnation, regulation, and reformation. Dickens adopted the last and was intimately involved in a house of reform called Urania Cottage. 

http://samanthabvance.wordpress.com/presentation-page/

Holman Hunt dealt with the subject first in The Awakening Conscience in 1853. It is a picture full of symbolism

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

This painting is a companion to Hunt's Christian painting The Light of the World, a picture of Christ holding a lantern as he knocks on an overgrown handleless door which Hunt said represented "the obstinately shut mind".The young woman here could be responding to that image, her conscience pricked by something outside of herself. Hunt intended this image to be The Light of the World's "material counterpart in a picture representing in actual life the manner in which the appeal of the spirit of heavenly love calls a soul to abandon a lower life." In Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Hunt wrote that Peggotty's search for Emily in David Copperfield had given him the idea for the composition and he began to visit "different haunts of fallen 

girls" looking for a suitable setting. He did not plan to recreate any particular scene from David Copperfield; he initially wanted to capture something more general: "the loving seeker of the fallen girl coming upon the object of his search", but he reconsidered, deciding that such a meeting would engender different emotions in the girl than the repentance he wanted to show. He eventually settled on the idea that the girl's companion could be singing a song that suddenly reminded her of her former life and thereby act as the unknowing catalyst for her epiphany.

The model for the girl was Annie Miller, who sat for many of the Pre-Raphaelites and to whom Hunt was engaged until 1859.

Hunt also seems to have had in mind Thomas Hood's then famous poem The Bridge of Sighs of 1844, also perhaps the basis of G F Watt's Found Drowned of about 1850. The poem inspired a number of paintings and a etching by Millais.

But back to Awakening. Rossetti's only contemporary moral subject, Found was never completed, and he had tremendous trouble with it. Fanny was the final model though earlier studies seem to be of a maid Ellen Frazer. 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_(Rossetti)

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope was painted in 1858-9 in the studio above Rossetti's in Blackfriars (he had worked on the Oxford murals). He was believed to be inspired by the two other paintings and used Fanny as the model, though oddly the finished picture more closely resembles Lizzie. The view out the window is looking up the Thames to Waterloo bride. Like Hunts picture the room is full of symbols of her poverty like the few coins on the table, perhaps a payment from a client.

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

Love and the Maiden - John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope - The White Rabbit

Courtesy of the brilliant Pre-Raphaelite Passions facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/#!/preraphs

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope - Love Betrayed

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope - Two Figures in a Cave

http://www.bridgemanart.com/image/Stanhope-John-Roddam-Spencer-1829-1908/Two-Figures-in-a-Cave/330c7cdf53b045a1bf2ceb6a2067f879?key=pre%20raphaelites&filter=CBPOIHV&thumb=x150&num=15&page=56

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope - The Wine Press, c.1860