Dante Gabriel Rossetti - La Mandolinata

signed with monogram and dated 1869 u.r.
red and black chalks heightened with white on buff paper
90 by 70cm., 35½ by 27½in.
ESTIMATE 150,000-250,000 GBP
Lot Sold: 181,250 GBP

Purchased from the artist by Thomas Agnew & Sons, 17 March 1870, for 80 guineas (Agnew's stock no. 9659 and
entitled La Mandoline);
Sold to John Dearman Birchall (1828-1897), 5 March 1872

Rossetti's fine chalk drawing, La Mandolinata shows an unidentified model at half length playing a mandolin. Her hair is dressed with strands of pearls gathered in an elaborate spiral decoration worn at the side of her head (an ornament seen previously in the artist's oil painting Fiammetta (Private Collection) and Monna Vanna (Tate), each of 1866, andJoli Coeur (Manchester City Galleries) and A Christmas Carol (ex Lord Leverhulme collection), each of 1867, and a again in paintings of the early 1870s). She wears a necklace in the form of stylised pansies and at her wrist a bracelet made in the pattern of flower whorls. On the third finger of her right hand she wears a ring consisting of a pyramid of metal with a stone resting at its centre (as also worn in Monna Vanna). Her dress is of a rich brocade pattern of flowers in red on a white of pale coloured ground, in the Venetian style, and falling from below her shoulders and decorated across her corsage with ribbon bows. On the right side is an architectural form decorated with a wreath of laurel leaves at the centre of which the artist has placed his monogram, while from behind the woman's back there appears further sprays of leaves.

Although the woman shown in La Mandolinata is not immediately recognisable as one of Rossetti's familiar models of the 1860s, her brown eyes and dark lustrous hair are feminine attributes of the kind that most appealed to him and which he was eager to introduce into his painted and drawn compositions. Redolent of the artist's work in the period, and in this sense of characteristic produce of the nascent Aesthetic movement, is the model's trancelike expression, as if she is transported into another sphere by the sweet intoxication of her own music-making. With subtlety and poignancy the artist offers the image of a beautiful woman, but one who remains elusive in the privacy of her own dream existence. La Mandolinata takes its place with other works by Rossetti of the 1860s showing women making music and playing musical instruments, and into which are instilled metaphors of imaginative departure from the actualities of daily life into a parallel and eroticised state of mind. The series commences with The Blue Flower (Barber Institute, University of Birmingham), of 1865, for which the painter's mistress Fanny Cornforth was the model, and in which a Japanese koto is played. The aforementioned A Christmas Carol, incorporating further exotic motifs suggestive of a secluded and artificial existence and for which the model was Ellen Smith, followed in 1867, while in the early 1870s Rossetti painted The Bower Meadow (Manchester City Galleries), in which Marie Stillman and Alexa Wilding play a zither and a mandolin respectively, and Roman Widow (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico), in which Alexa Wilding is seen to rest each of her hands on the string of two separate stringed instruments, in idle distraction and in expression of her grief. Rossetti was the exponent of a subject matter which regarded the motif of music-making as a means of glimpsing the inner soul of the female persona.

Although not referred to by its given title in Rossetti's correspondence, on two occasions in the summer and early autumn of 1869 he mentioned chalk drawings that he had recently worked on and which were in the process of being sold. The first of these letters, dated 27 August and written to Frederic James Shields from Penkill in Ayrshire, reported that 'At this moment I hear from London that Agnew has called & bought 2 chalk drawings I left to be shown to him for 80gns each. If he will go on, this will furnish some profitable pot-boiling; & I tell you, as you were the first to suggest a connection with him'. (William E. Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Cambridge, 2004, IV, p. 254). This was followed by an interesting account of Rossetti's drawing method and recommendations as how to achieve richer effect in chalk by careful selection of tinted paper and by building up the textures of the composition by applying layers of chalk of different colours over the sheet. Then on 7 September he wrote to Jane Morris in Germany, again from Penkill, telling her that 'Work has been going on in the regular pot-boiling line while I have been away [...] and Agnew has been buying the drawings I did just before I left'. (Fredeman, ibid., p. 269). By this period in the artist's career, elaborate chalk drawings, made in their own right rather than as preparatory studies and done to be framed and displayed, had become one of his staple forms of production, and an important source of income.

Agnew's stock books confirm that the two drawings which Rossetti wrote about in his letters to Shields and Jane Morris were Penelope (Lord Lloyd-Webber Collection) and the present La Mandolinata. The two drawings were in fact bought separately, with Penelope recorded as entering Agnew's stock on 1 September 1869, and La Mandolinata not until the following March. Rossetti's asking price of 80 guineas was paid for each, and both were bought for stock rather than on behalf of clients. Penelope was sold to James Leathart in December 1869, while La Mandolinata was sold to J. D. Birchall on 5 March 1872.John Dearman Birchall came from a prominent and prosperous Quaker family in Leeds. He worked in the cloth industry as a young man but in 1868, aged forty, gave up his business interest and moved to Bowden Hall at Upton St Leonard's in Gloucestershire. He was a passionate collector of blue and white porcelain; in his own watercolour of the interior of the morning room at Bowden La Mandolinata may be seen hanging beside an ebonised and gilded sideboard all the surfaces of which are crowded with pots, and with the side walls given over to book cases and recesses containing further pieces of china (figure 00). Birchall's drawing serves as a valuable record of how works of art disparate types were displayed together in the period and how consideration was given as to how all the decorative elements might be harmoniously combined. Birchall and Rossetti were in direct contact in this period, as is documented by various entries in the former's diary (MS in the collection of his descendant). A diary entry for 1868 records that Birchall 'Gave £15 to Rossetti for dwg' (the drawing purchased or commissioned on this occasion is not identified). A further entry describes a visit to Rossetti's Chelsea studio in 1871, although the purpose of this meeting is unknown.

In addition to being a talented artist in his own right, Birchall was a familiar figure on the contemporary art scene, attending dinners and private views at the Royal Academy, Dudley and Grosvenor Galleries, and commissioning designs for stained glass windows from Edward Burne-Jones and decorative designs from Walter Crane. Other painters and draughtsman who were friends of his and who he describes meeting in diary entries were John Everett Millais, Richard Doyle and Frank Dicksee. A further link between Birchall and Rossetti was the Aesthetic designer John Aldam Heaton, who had been a childhood friend of the former's in Leeds and who had been commissioned to paint the interiors at Bowden Hall. Rossetti had known Heaton at least since 1861, when he had stayed with him and his wife Ellen Mary to paint her portrait (Regina Cordium: Mrs Aldam Heaton, ex Forbes Magazine Collection, New York), and from this time forward Heaton became a correspondent of Rossetti's, and one with whom he engaged in business transactions to do with placing works of his with collectors. Whether the idea of acquiring a drawing by Rossetti to place in conjunction with the collection of ceramics at that time by devised by Heaton was Birchall's own or one recommended to him, it was most fortuitous. Rossetti was himself one of the pioneering enthusiasts for blue and white china and had amassed a rich collection of his own in the 1860s in his house in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea.
The late 1860s, and specifically the year 1869 was not an easy time for Rossetti, with a variety of anxieties besetting him. His health was beginning to break down, with particular worries about his eyesight and he was suffering from chronic insomnia. In addition, he had financial problems, exacerbated by debts connected with outstanding commissions and monies previously received on account. Old friendships came under pressure, with a notable falling out with Frederick Sandys, and he was himself increasingly isolated, especially so during Jane Morris's long absence at Bad Ems in Germany, to which place she went in the latter part of 1869 for the sake of her health. Rossetti devoted much of his time to poetry, and particularly after the retrieval of the manuscript of his early poems from the coffin in which his wife Lizzie had been buried in 1862 he was occupied with the revision and preparation for publication of his verse. La Mandolinata - made as has been seen that same summer - may be regarded as especially interesting as coming from a period of turmoil and distress in Rossetti's artistic and personal life when he produced very few other works of art.

J. D. Birchall lent La Mandolinata to the memorial exhibition of Rossetti's works at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1883, presumably having been asked to do so by the artist's brother William Michael Rossetti. In 1889 it was included in the checklist published by W. M. Rossetti as an appendix to his Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, and then ten years later it was likewise published by J. C. Marillier. Birchall died in 1897, by the drawing remained at Bowden Hall for another twenty-nine years, appearing in the various inventories of the house contents and finally being sold in 1926. in 1928 it appeared at Christie's in London, probably being bought on that occasion by the antiquarian booksellers Spencer and Co, and from whom ten years later it was purchased by the distinguished American academic Dr A. Joseph Armstrong (whose descendants own it to this day). The drawing therefore has an interesting provenance with only one brief period when its whereabouts are unknown. Dr Armstrong (1912-1954) was professor of English literature at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. He was renowned as an authority on Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and was a keen collector of all material relating to the Brownings (his collection formed the basis of the Armstrong Browning Library Collection of Browningiana at Baylor University. He was presumably in search of Browning material when he visited Spencer's premises in 1938, on which occasion the opportunity occurred to purchase La Mandolinata. He may have felt less confident of judging the merits of a drawing by Rossetti than in his more familiar field of literary manuscripts, and therefore sought corroboration of the attribution. In 1963 Dr Armstrong's widow, Mary Maxwell Armstrong explained in a letter to Virginia Surtees how her husband had 'bought this painting [sic] many years ago from a London dealer, and how to 'allay our fears as to its authenticity [the dealer Spencer] permitted my husband to take the picture in a taxi to the home of two nieces of Rossetti, then living in London. Dr Armstrong did so, [and] found the two ageing nieces who welcomed him warmly'.

In her book Pre-Raphaelite Twilight - The Story of Charles Augustus Howell (1954) Helen Rossetti Angeli, herself one of the two nieces visited by Armstrong, described how 'some examples of the kind [i.e. spurious drawings purported to be by Rossetti] were offered for sale to an American - no connoisseur of painting - by a reputable bookshop and art dealer in 1938. Of his lot one alone appeared to be a genuine with a traceable history - a crayon drawing very desirable to possess'. This was La Mandolinata, and thus the attribution to Rossetti was endorsed and the purchase of the drawing carried forward.

Although recorded in the early Rossetti literature, La Mandolinata has remained very little known since the time of its acquisition by Dr Armstrong, and in that time has never been shown in an exhibition of Rossetti's works.

We are grateful to Venetia Harlow of Agnew's for her assistance tracing provenance for this lot.
CSN

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Dinah Roe

http://www.dinahroe.com/
great blog too

Edward Burne-Jones - Portrait of Georgina Burne-Jones

oil on canvas
76 by 53cm.; 30 by 21in.
ESTIMATE 400,000-600,000 GBP
Lot Sold: 481,250 GBP

By descent to Margaret Mackail, née Burne-Jones (1866-1953);
To her daughter, Angela Margaret Thirkell, née Mackail (1890-1961);To her son, Lancelot Thirkell and thence by descent

Burne-Jones's hauntingly beautiful portrait of his wife Georgiana, and with their two children Margaret and Philip in the background, was begun in 1883 and then worked on at intervals. It was neither exhibited in his lifetime, nor shown at the memorial exhibition held at the New Gallery in 1898-99, presumably because it was regarded as too personal a document for public display. After the death of the sitter – Georgiana Burne-Jones died in 1920 – the portrait was left to Margaret, who herself died in 1953. The painting subsequently passed through three further generations of the descendants of Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones, and is now offered for sale for the first time in its history.

The Burne-Joneses had been married in 1860, when Georgiana was twenty years old and Edward twenty-seven. The portrait therefore shows her at the age of forty-three and after twenty-three years of married life. The two children, Philip and Margaret, were born in 1861 and 1866 respectively, and were therefore twenty-two and seventeen when the portrait was begun.

Georgiana's father, the Revd George Browne Macdonald, was a Methodist minister. Her childhood – she was the fifth of eleven children (seven of whom survived into adult life) – was marked by material austerity and a high-minded dismissal of anything that might be considered worldly or frivolous. Even the reading of Shakespeare was prohibited
and the idea of attending a theatre unthinkable. The non-conformist upbringing that George Macdonald and his wife Hannah provided for their children, combined with frequent moves of home as their father was transferred from place to place within the Methodist ministry, seems to have instilled a quality of self-reliance and intellectual independence in their children. Among Georgiana's sisters, Agnes ('Aggie') married the painter Edward John Poynter, while Aliceand Louisa ('Louie') were respectively the mothers of the writer Rudyard Kipling and the prime minister Stanley Baldwin. The lives of these remarkable women are described in A.W. Baldwin's book The Macdonald Sisters (1960).

For Burne-Jones the purpose of portraiture was 'the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything temporary, fleeting, [or] accidental' (quoted Burne-Jones, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, and elsewhere, 1975-6, p. 76). Georgiana had an enormously strong character and was imbued with a moral quality that made her a demanding companion. She was absolutely stalwart in her loyalty to friends and family, standing by and supporting her husband despite his more wayward disposition, and enduring his craving for female attention. She was an adoring mother and gave emotional support to a wide circle of young people who gravitated towards her and looked to her as a mentor. Without side or selfishness, she had a vast gift for friendship, allowing complete honesty of exchange combined with total discretion. Her longstanding friendship with William Morris – her husband's friend since university, was probably the most important relationship of his whole life, and one upon which she also placed great reliance. Likewise, her shrewd intelligence allowed her to spot men and women who entered, or sought to enter, the circle of friends that formed around Burne-Jones who were self-serving or otherwise not to be trusted.

Unimpressed as Georgiana was by the false prestige of social rank, or indeed by the financial advantages of a successful professional life, she observed with dismay her husband's inability to resist the beguilement of worldly acclaim – notably on the occasion of his acceptance of a baronetcy. As Burne-Jones – once radical in his political views – became increasingly Tory, she more progressively embraced socialism, pacifism and feminism. A project designed to improve life for the London working classes was the establishment of the South London Art Gallery, and to which she devoted time and energy, and which was the practical fulfilment of John Ruskin's precept that works of art should be available for all to look at and study.

Georgiana Burne-Jones was a woman of artistic sensibility. In her youth she had learnt how to engrave wood blocks, collaborating with Elizabeth Siddal on a projected book of illustrated fairy tales. She sang and played the piano, to the delight of her friends and especially to Burne-Jones himself. She frequently served as a model for her husband in his imaginative subjects (most tellingly for the 1860 watercolour Clara von Bork (Tate Gallery), in which her personality was ideally matched to that of the caring and sweet-hearted figure represented, in contrast with the sinister and mendacious Sidonia von Bork, the subject of the pendant, for whom the model was Rossetti's mistress of the late 1850s, Fanny Cornforth). Among Georgiana's great achievements was the two-volume biography of her husband that she wrote after his death and which remains a vital source of information and insights, and in which she achieves extraordinary truthfulness and candour without ever betraying friends or family.

Although not conventionally beautiful, her physical appearance was a delight to those who loved her. As Walford Graham Robertson wrote, 'the quiet in those wonderful eyes of clearest grey was the centre of the strange stillness' that friends felt when they visited the Burne-Joneses at their home The Grange in Fulham (Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson, 1931, p. 75). Burne-Jones himself well knew the power of his wife's formidable personality. As he wrote to May Gaskell: 'It makes me happy that Georgie welcomes you – some day come to see her for her own sake – she is the wittiest company, and very pious – I say pious because all things are serious to her – only she is bitter upon folly – she is not a Christian any more and yet she hates to be approached except on bended knees' (quoted Josceline Dimbleby, A Profound Secret, London, 2004, p. 94). As Penelope Fitzgerald wrote of the Burne-Joneses' marriage, 'Georgie, as Ned well knew, bore the burden of everything' (Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1985, p. 181), and in keeping with the unspoken dependence that he felt for her Burne-Jones provided an image of Georgiana that speaks of her sense of purpose. The solemnity of her expression and the unflinching gaze with which she returns the artist's inspection of her, may be regarded as indicating – as the Burne-Joneses' great grand-son Lance Thirkell said of it – 'something of the unhappiness of being the artist's long-suffering wife, which he perhaps did not see when he was painting it' (Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, London, 1985, p. 334). Whether in his heart he acknowledged his transgressions – on occasions he allowed himself to be drawn into intenserelationships with other women – the portrait was undoubtedly intended as a token of his love for Georgiana.

She is shown at half-length and with her hands and forearms resting on a table or shelf that forms a parapet in the foreground. She is dressed in a dark coat the lustrous texture of which is seen in the outline of the sleeve. At the neck and cuffs, a simple fringe of lace appears, but otherwise her clothes are of the utmost simplicity. She appears to wear no jewellery; the ring finger of her left hand is obscured by the book she is holding, so the wedding-ring that she may be presumed to be wearing cannot be seen. Her dark hair is parted at the centre and carefully drawn to the back of her head, as it had been in the photograph taken of her at the age of sixteen, twenty-seven years earlier (see BurneJones, Georgiana, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1904, two volumes, I, illustrated opposite p. 134). The portrait was almost certainly done at The Grange; a dark coloured internal wall forms the immediate backdrop to the figure, while on the right a flight of three steps leads into a room beyond – more brightly lit than that occupied by Georgiana. In this further space are shown the figures of Philip and Margaret – he seated at an easel and with palette and mahl-stick in his left hand; she standing behind in a flowing white dress as she watches her brother at work. This device whereby a glimpse is given into a space beyond and in which figures are represented on a much smaller scale may have been derived from Burne-Jones's study of sixteenth-century Italian art – which had become important to him in the course of successive visits to Italy and which he took his opportunity to study in collections at home. John Christian has linked the portrait of Georgiana with a portrait by Giulio Romano of c. 1531, then and now at Hampton Court, (traditionally said to show Isabella d'Este but recently claimed as a portrait of Margherita Palaeologa) (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Edward Burne-Jones – Victorian Artist-Dreamer, 1998-9, exhibition catalogue, p. 260), which like the Burne-Jones portrait has a subsidiary composition at the upper right showing much smaller full-length figures. A further suggestion is that the portrait may owe something to Burne-Jones's interest in Spanish Baroque art, which was the object of fascination among progressive British painters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A possible prototype for the division of the composition into two distinct parts is Velasquez's Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (National Gallery), of 1618, a work which was in turn dependent on a Flemish artistic tradition which permitted figures to be treated on dramatically differing scales, and with noticeable varied degrees of finish, to be combined in a single composition.

Unambiguous as a coded message of love on the part of the artist for the sitter, but also perhaps an admission of his failings as a husband, was the book that Georgiana holds. This is John Gerard's Great Herball, or Generale Historie of Plantes, published in 1597. Burne-Jones consulted this source when devising his series of watercolours exploring the mythological association of flower names which came to be called The Flower Book (British Museum), also made in the 1880s. In the portrait Georgiana holds the book open to show the illustration of a heartsease or pansy, while resting on the page is a blue flower of the same plant. Gerard says of the heartsease that it 'groweth in fields and in gardens also, and that oftentimes of itselfe: it is more gallant and beautiful than any of the wild ones'. According to the traditional language of flowers, the heartsease is regarded as symbolical of loving thoughts and memories, and of
undying affection, even if with associations of sadness and loss. Burne-Jones's choice of this particular flower emblem may also have been influenced by John Ruskin's book Proserpina – Studies of Wayside Flowers, issued in parts from 1879 onwards and which he and Georgiana must certainly have read and probably also discussed with the author.

Ruskin described particular flowers on the basis of his own observations, writing of the variety in question: 'The wild heart's-ease of Europe [is] not larger than a violet, but perfectly formed, and firmly set in all its petals [and] quite one of the most lovely things that Heaven has made'. In his more general discussion of the genus Viola, Ruskin identifies the Shakespearean heroines 'who love simply, and to the death; as distinguished from the greater natures in whom earthly Love has its due part, and no more', and in a passage which surely must have reflected his friendship with both Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones and his appreciation of what each meant to the other he concluded:

'Practically, in daily life, one often sees married women as good as saints; but rarely, I think, unless they have a good deal to bear from their husbands' (Ruskin Works, volume XXV, pp. 416, 420).

An entry in Burne-Jones's studio work-list records that in 1883 he 'began [the] portrait of Georgie with Phil andMargaret in the background'. Georgiana herself, in her biography of her husband, states that it remained unfinished.

The area of the composition on which he might perhaps have intended to work further is that in which are placed the figures of Margaret and Philip, which are relatively lightly sketched, but effectively so and in meaningful contrast to the immaculately finished figure of Georgiana. CSN


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Frederick Sandys - Study of a Woman’s Head

Frederick Sandys - Miranda

Edward Robert Hughes - Monna giovanna

Arthur Hughes - The Door of Mercy

The tomb holding Maria Zambaco is in the foreground

Edward Burne-Jones - Earth Mother, 1882

George Frederic Watts - The Honourable Mary Baring, Later The Marchioness Of Northampton