Gather Ye Rosebuds while ye may

John William Waterhouse ~ Flora and the Zephyrs, 1897

2010-06-16T22:46:00.002-05:00

Charcoal study for Flora

Flora and the Zephyrs, 1897

John William Waterhouse in his St John's Wood studio, 1913.
Flora and the Zephyrs is seen on the wall behind him.
(photograph courtesy ArtMagick)

The charcoal study is courtesy Sotheby's.
It is part of the Victorian & Edwardian Art sale,
13th of July 2010.
http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?lot_id=159607422

John William Waterhouse ~ Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900

2010-05-31T11:09:00.012-05:00

Nymphs finding the head of Orpheus:
a sketch of the nymph at the left

"This evocative oil sketch was painted as Waterhouse prepared his great 'Nymphs Finding the head of Orpheus' (private collection), signed in 1900 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts the following year.

The depiction of this mythic moment is unique within Victorian painting, and possibly within all of British art. Through the late 19th Century, Symbolist artists and writers had grown evermore enthusiastic about Orpheus, the greatest poet and musician in Greek myth, because he, like so many creative individuals, sang the truth and thus aroused resentment. Dismissed by his contemporaries as effeminate for mourning his wife too passionately, Orpheus was torn to pieces by Maenads after rejecting their advances. Into the river they hurled his head, which demonstrated art's immortality by continuing to sing as it floated away.

Victorian artists usually showed Orpheus singing while still alive, or rescuing his wife Eurydice from Hades. Most avoided the gruesomeness of Orpheus's demise, which instead attracted such Continental peers as the Frenchman Gustave Moreau. Indeed, Waterhouse may have been inspired by Moreau's pensive 'Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus on his Lyre' (1866), which the Englishman surely saw on visits to the popular Musée Luxembourg in Paris. Waterhouse was also probably familiar with the recent revival of Orphism, the ancient ecstatic cult that had celebrated Orpheus as a martyr before it was absorbed by the early Christian church.

Gustave Moreau
Orpheus, 1865

Waterhouse had long been fascinated with the violent aspects of ancient myth. Yet rather than presenting a physically dynamic struggle (such as 'Ulysses and the Sirens' of 1891), he imagined 'Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus' as a scene of contemplation subtly laced with horror. Orpheus's severed head constitutes the key feature, yet viewers notice the beautiful nymphs first and last, and are drawn inexorably into the picture by their compassionate gazes and gestures. A now-unlocated drawing of the nymphs (published in 1917) reveals that Waterhouse considered-and wisely rejected-more horrified facial expressions and body language. Instead, he created a picture 'more of dream than of conscious thought,' a phrase coined by critic Frank Rinder that pertains equally to other Waterhouse masterworks of this period.

The present sketch deftly conveys the girl's mix of alarm and sympathy: her eyes gaze downward, drawing her head and upper torso forward without seeming ungainly. This work also reveals how Waterhouse built up his surface, focusing most intensively on the flushed face, then on the hair and other flesh passages. (Particularly adept is the shadowing along and below the right cheek, which allows the brighter nose and shoulder cap to guide our eyes downward.) Highly characteristic are the delicate blue colouring of the garment and the lively brushstrokes in the background, especially the dark dabs at right centre that hint at the right-hand nymph."
Courtesy Christie's Lot Notes:
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5327298
Study by Waterhouse is included in the June 16th auction at Christie's, London:
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/searchresults.aspx?intSaleID=22746#action=refine&intSaleID=22746&sid=72efb6e2-7814-4045-b2e8-1ca937902f2a

John William Waterhouse
Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900

"Traditionally, Orpheus was the son of a Muse (probably Calliope, the patron of epic poetry) and Oeagrus, a king of Thrace (other versions give Apollo). According to some legends, Apollo gave Orpheus his first lyre. Orpheus' singing and playing were so beautiful that animals and even trees and rocks moved about him in dance.

Orpheus joined the expedition of the Argonauts, saving them from the music of the Sirens by playing his own, more powerful music. On his return, he married Eurydice, who was soon killed by a snakebite. Overcome with grief, Orpheus ventured himself to the land of the dead to attempt to bring Eurydice back to life. With his singing and playing he charmed the ferryman Charon and the dog Cerberus, guardians of the River Styx. His music and grief so moved Hades, king of the underworld, that Orpheus was allowed to take Eurydice with him back to the world of life and light. Hades set one condition, however: upon leaving the land of death, both Orpheus and Eurydice were forbidden to look back. The couple climbed up toward the opening into the land of the living, and Orpheus, seeing the Sun again, turned back to share his delight with Eurydice. In that moment, she disappeared.

Orpheus himself was later killed by the women of Thrace. The motive and manner of his death vary in different accounts, but the earliest known, that of Aeschylus, says that they were Maenads urged by Dionysus to tear him to pieces in a Bacchic orgy because he preferred the worship of the rival god Apollo. His head, still singing, with his lyre, floated to Lesbos, where an oracle of Orpheus was established. The head prophesied until the oracle became more famous than that of Apollo at Delphi, at which time Apollo himself bade the Orphic oracle stop. The dismembered limbs of Orpheus were gathered up and buried by the Muses. His lyre they had placed in the heavens as a constellation."

Courtesy ArtMagick
Source: Encyclopædia Britannica

Two additional studies by Waterhouse for
Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus

~~~~~~
For information about the last study:
http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?live_lot_id=128&sale_number=L08132

For information about Gustave Moreau's Orpheus:
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting/commentaire_id/orpheus-3033.html?tx_commentaire_pi1%5BpidLi%5D=509&tx_commentaire_pi1%5Bfrom%5D=841&cHash=fec9d558a8

Edward Burne-Jones ~ Earth Mother, 1882

2010-04-21T18:34:00.007-05:00

"Burne-Jones was a second-generation member of the pre-Raphaelite artists, who rejected the growing materialization of industrialized England. Instead they focused on the comparative simplicity of the medieval world and the art of Italian painters prior to Raphael. 'Earth Mother', which shows the influence of Renaissance artists like Botticelli, was painted by Burne-Jones in connection with his series of stained-glass windows representing the planets. Here is an allusion to Earth Mother's role of nurturing all life: human, represented by the child; animal, by the wolf; and horticultural, by the trees and vegetation. The snake next to the feet of Earth Mother symbolizes fertility and relates to Ceres, goddess of earth. To show earth's role in the transitional nature of water, the allegorical figure is represented holding up a blue jar that produces clouds, rain, and eventually a stream below. To create the ivorylike skin of the figures and the rich textures throughout, Burne-Jones employed the ancient technique of encaustic. The pigments are bound in a wax medium, over which the artist applied oil glazes and, in certain areas, minute touches of gold for an even more decorative effect." - JAW, Worchester Art Museum

http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/European/1983.1.html
Worcester, Massachusetts

Such a beautiful work.

Emma Sandys (1843-1877)

2010-04-18T22:31:00.007-05:00

A video from Marisa - 'marisayutub'

"Emma Sandys was the sister of Frederick Sandys, and like him produced bust length portraits of women in an intense and detailed Pre-Raphaelite style. Little is known of her life, despite extensive recent research. Like her brother she was born in Norwich and lived there until 1874 when she moved to London. She exhibited in Norwich and at the Royal Academy, where she showed three female portraits, an 'Enid' and an 'Undine' between 1868 and 1874. It is difficult to reconstruct her oeuvre as her paintings are technically very similar to those of her brother and until recently have been confused with his." - Hilary Morgan

http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/misc/esandys1.html

The Garland, 1870

Viola, 1870

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anthony Frederick Sandys @ ArtMagick

This is Civilisation (Episode 3) ~ John Ruskin ~ The Pre-Raphaelites ~ William Morris (presented by Matthew Collings)

2010-04-13T19:28:00.012-05:00

Many thanks to Stephanie Piña
for sharing with us about the program.
http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/?p=1391

Videos courtesy http://www.youtube.com/user/CollingsShrine

BBC Radio 3 to broadcast the choral symphony, Earthly Paradise - Sayings, Songs and Poems of William Morris, Tue 13 Apr 2010

2010-04-10T21:32:00.006-05:00

George Frederic Watts
Portrait of William Morris, 1870

"The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davis head into visionary territory, with a new piece by Ian McQueen. The search for the land where 'none grow old' guides the twists and turns of William Morris's 'The Earthly Paradise'. Ian McQueen's work for chorus and large orchestra evokes the poem's extraordinary world, surges with erotic charge, and conjures up Morris's magical vision of Iceland's landscape and sagas."

Tue 13 Apr 2010
BBC Radio 3
(A broadcast of the concert presented 10 April 2010.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rwwhq
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Scored for a large orchestra and choir, this has been commissioned by BBC Radio Three. It is dedicated to Stephen Jackson and the BBC Symphony Chorus, to celebrate the chorus's 80th birthday. There are four movements, which refer to the life of the great Victorian poet, designer and political activist, lasting about 30 minutes.

'Earthly Paradise' will be broadcast on April 13th at around 7.45 pm [UK time] on BBC Radio Three.

Ian Mcqueen will introduce the piece live in the studio."

http://www.ian-mcqueen.co.uk/latest.html

** Update April 13th: The broadcast will be available for seven days at the link below. The Earthly Paradise segment begins at about the 54 minute mark with interesting commentary from Fiona MacCarthy and Ian McQueen.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rwwhq

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

William Morris in Iceland
an article by Fiona MacCarthy
LINK

The Literary Pilgrimage
an article in Iceland Review
LINK

John William Waterhouse - The Lady Clare, 1900

2010-04-10T15:25:00.007-05:00

She clad herself in a russet gown,
She was no longer Lady Clare:
She went by dale, and she went by down,
With a single rose in her hair.

The lily-white doe Lord Ronald had brought
Leapt up from where she lay,
Dropt her head in the maiden's hand,
And follow'd her all the way. - Tennyson

Two studies for The Lady Clare by Waterhouse

~~~~~~

The Lady Clare @ ArtMagick

Elizabeth Siddal's Lady Clare - LINK

Some poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson - LINK
Lady Clare is at the bottom of the page.

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian dream ..., Museo d'Arte della Città di Ravenna, Ravenna, Italy

2010-04-07T04:53:00.005-05:00

Edward Burne-Jones
Musica, 1877

***************

A collaboration between the Museo d’Arte della Citta di Ravenna
and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian dream:
From Beato Angelico to Perugino,
from Rossetti to Burne-Jones

Museo d'Arte della Città di Ravenna, Ravenna, Italy
through June 6th 2010

http://www.museocitta.ra.it/

LINK to a PDF file with a listing of works in the exhibition.

***************

The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
15th September 2010 to 5th December 2010
LINK

The exhibition curators are
Claudio Spadoni, Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall.

***************

A wonderful glimpse of some of the works

that are being shown in Ravenna.
(The Telesanterno commentary is in Italian.)

***************

Danielle Mitzman, a British freelance journalist based in the north Italian town of Bologna, recently spoke with two of the exhibition curators. She writes, "... a major exhibition, 'The Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian Dream', has opened at MAR, the Museum of Art in the north Italian city of Ravenna. It will run until June before moving to Oxford’s Ashmolean museum in September. Appropriately a joint Anglo-Italian venture, it looks at the connection between the British Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Italian artists – as their name suggests, before Raphael - who inspired them."

** Listen to the interview at this LINK. **
(It is in English.)

William Holman Hunt
Tuscan Girl, ca. 1869

From ItalyTraveller:

"Much more than a dream, Italy was a veritable obsession for the young British artists who went on to found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. With its "The Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian dream. From Beato Angelico to Perugino, from Rossetti to Burne-Jones", the Ravenna Art Museum (MAR), stages the first ever Italian exhibition devoted to this artistic movement.

It was in the mid 19th century that a group of British artists, guided by William Holman Hunt, rebelled against what they considered formulaic academic mannerism, choosing to take Italian painters from the medieval and pre-renaissance period (before Raphael), as reference. Of the works from this period the Pre-Raphaelites admired the brilliance of the colors used, the intensity of expression, the references to the natural world, and the spontaneous approach to art which they deemed to have been abandoned by the artists who succeeded Raphael.

The exhibition route commences with two rooms containing works by Beato Angelico, Taddeo di Bartolo and Perugino. The exhibition is divided in two sections: one exploring the Pre-Raphaelites interest in Italian painting and art; the other dedicated to the British artists' representations of the country's landscapes and historic buildings. Fascinated by Italy and its history, members of the Pre-Raphaelite Confraternity attempted to direct British painting towards more authentic and less conventional subject matter, far removed from the cliché imposed by the academies. Although, today, the works of the Pre-Raphaelites appear anything but revolutionary or ground-breaking, at the time of their creation, they provoked scandal in Victorian society, to such an extent that they are thought by many to represent the first avant-garde movement in art.

One of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of an Italian immigrant, who chose the works of Dante Alighieri as one of the principal themes of his artistic discourse. The exhibition includes a series of splendid paintings by Rossetti and other, lesser known artists, inspired by the Divine Comedy and the life of Dante. Ample space is dedicated to other themes dear to the Pre-Raphaelites, such as that of the woman destroyed by unrequited, tragic or adulterous love."

John Ruskin
Italian Village, 1845
(not included in the exhibit)
LINK

"The passion for Italy and its artistic heritage, which animated these artists, emerges in the works of John Ruskin who, during his many journeys through Italy studied with attention the artistic treasures of the Italian peninsula, recording them in the form of meticulously accurate drawings in the conviction that, in this way, he would somehow be able to save them from degradation and preserve their beauty. Ruskin even financed the journeys to Italy of a series of artists and students from Oxford University, so that they could follow his example and realize drawings and paintings of all the most beautiful Italian monuments. The resulting collection of works is one of the most interesting aspects of the Ravenna exhibition. The exhibition concludes with Edward Burne-Jones' sketches of the mosaics realized for Rome's Church of San Paolo dentro le Mura, mosaics inspired by the Byzantine masterpieces still visible in the basilicas of Ravenna." (Courtesy: ItalyTraveller)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Designs an Angel on the First Anniversary
of the Death of Beatrice, 1853

From an article by Rachel Spence about the exhibit: "Intensely romantic and spiritual, yet rooted in the language of the common man, Dante’s verses furnished the ideal subject matter. Rossetti, who was also a poet himself, both translated and illustrated many of the Tuscan’s verses. Of several watercolours on show here, the most historically significant is the earliest – “Dante Designs an Angel on the First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice” (1853) – which brought the young painter to the attention of Ruskin for the first time. The critic hailed it as “the most perfect piece of Italy I have ever seen in my life”." LINK

(*Update April 13th ... another article about the exhibit. LINK)

Some works by Beato Angelico and Perugino.

Beato Angelico
A Rome Reports TV News Agency video from April 2009

Pietro Vannucci (Perugino)
A video by Ricardo G. Silveira

Kate Elizabeth Bunce

2010-04-06T01:32:00.011-05:00

Melody (Musica)

A video from Marisa - 'marisayutub'

Works and biography at ArtMagick

The Keepsake

'The Keepsake' "is based on a poem by Rossetti
and was first shown with this quotation:

'Then stepped a damsel to her side,
And spoke and needs must weep:
'For his sake, lady, if he died,
He prayed of thee to keep
This staff and scrip'."

Melody (Musica) and The Keepsake are both part of the
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery collection:
http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1897P17
http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1928P156

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2010-04-06T00:42:00.005-05:00

A film by Dekklun Cuinn

John William Waterhouse - Windflowers ... and links to the 2009 Waterhouse documentary and another video

2010-04-02T02:29:00.009-05:00

The photographs shown above were taken at the Groninger Museum
in Groningen, The Netherlands during the Waterhouse exhibition.
Copyright for the photographs belongs to:
1. 'AbAberson'
2. & 3. 'Sandori'

Windflowers, 1903 - at ArtMagick

~~~~~~~~~~~

If you haven't seen them before,
or would like to enjoy them again ...

RTV Noord shares works by Waterhouse in London
before the opening of the Waterhouse exhibition
at the Groninger Museum (December 2008).
Na 'Fatale Vrouwen' hele tentoonstelling Waterhouse
(English & Dutch - about 3 minutes long)
- LINK -

Documentary about John William Waterhouse
from AVRO Close Up
in association with the Groninger Museum (1 April 2009).
De betoverende vrouwen van John William Waterhouse
The enchanting women of John William Waterhouse
(English with Dutch subtitles - 52 min.)
http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=8573842

William Morris - Jane Burden ~ La Belle Iseult and two drawings

2010-03-25T19:41:00.017-05:00

La Belle Iseult, 1858

"Bequeathed by Miss May Morris 1939"
Image courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London.

"The inspiration for this painting was Thomas Malory's 'Morte d'Arthur' (1485), in which Guinevere's adulterous love for Sir Lancelot is one of the central themes. The model is Jane Burden who became Morris's wife in 1859 ... She was 'discovered' by Morris and Rossetti when they were working together on the Oxford Union murals, the subject matter for which was also taken from Malory. The painting ... is a splendid expresion of the intense medieval style prevailing in Rossetti's circle in the late 1850s, with its emphasis on pattern and historical detail. This is Morris's only completed oil painting." - courtesy the Tate Gallery

Morris wrote about Jane and the painting,
"I cannot paint you, but I love you."

It is such a beautiful work, though.
And so are the studies below.

I do agree with what Margaret wrote about La Belle Iseult at her blog, The Earthly Paradise: "I adore this work. While Rossetti was much better at capturing the sensuous qualities of Jane and his other models, I think Morris' painting does an incredible job of envisioning a creative, romantic space. It gives one quite the "scope for the imagination" -- don't you think?" ~ Indeed.

http://www.theearthlyparadise.com/2008/07/william-morris-la-belle-iseult.html

Drawing of Jane Burden by William Morris, 1858
Courtesy Morris Online Edition - Link

Study for 'Iseult on the Ship' by William Morris, c. 1857
Portrait of Jane Burden. Pencil and ink.
Courtesy of William Morris Gallery. London Borough Waltham Forest.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

According to information at the Tate Gallery website, La Belle Iseult is currently on display at the Victorian and Albert Museum in London.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=10322&searchid=25114&tabview=loan

Happy Birthday to our dear William Morris

2010-03-24T16:51:00.045-05:00

William Morris was born in Walthamstow in East London on March 24, 1834 - 176 years ago today.

"When William Morris (1834-1896) died at the age of sixty-two, his physician declared that the cause was "simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men." This multi-faceted man was at one time or another (and sometimes simultaneously) a designer and manufacturer of furniture, stained glass, tapestries, wallpaper and chintzes; an accomplished weaver; a pioneering preservationist; an active Socialist and social reformer; a successful poet and novelist; and in his last years, the founder of the Kelmscott Press. Yet all of these activities were of a piece, unified by several threads in the tapestry of Morris's life.

Garden of Delight

One continuity, dating from early childhood, was his love of nature, evidence of which may be found in the fond natural descriptions of his letters and poetry, the patterns of his tapestries, and the vining borders of the Kelmscott book. There was also his passionate devotion to the Middle Ages and to everything they represented; romantic Medievalism informs Morris's literary output, as well as his arts and crafts work and the books from his Kelmscott Press.

From The Wood Beyond the World

A third thread was his belief that it is impossible to separate esthetic issues from social and political ones. Morris often contrasted the social organization of the Middle Ages with the present condition of England, which led him to advocate a complete reform of industrial society. At first, he advocated an overhaul of the flawed esthetics of the age and later, realizing that such reform alone was insufficient, a thoroughgoing political revolution.

Sketch by Walter Crane
William Morris speaking at a meeting of Hammersmith Socialist Society

One must also mention his conviction that it was impossible for an artist to exist outside the context of a community. Thus Morris's homes in London's Red Lion Square, Red House in Kent, Kelmscott House in Hammersmith near London, and Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire became centers of communal artistic and intellectual endeavor. Morris's talent for friendship was another continuity in his life. Though he was a somewhat solitary child, as a university student he formed enduring attachments to the Pre-Raphaelite artists Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These close friendships influenced his choice of a life devoted to art. ..."

William Morris and his close friend Edward Burne-Jones

Above text courtesy Richard W. Oram
Ransom Center Librarian
Exhibition Curator - http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/morris/

~~~~~~~~~~~

"William Morris was born in Walthamstow and the Gallery is housed in his former family home ‘Water House’, where he spent his formative years in the 1840s and 50s. The Gallery was established by the Borough of Walthamstow (now the London Borough of Waltham Forest) and was opened in 1950 by the then Prime Minister, Clement Attlee." - The Friends of the William Morris Gallery

Gallery and Images
http://www.friendsofthewmg.org.uk/?page_id=36

The William Morris Society
http://www.morrissociety.org/

Biographies of William Morris
http://www.morrissociety.org/bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"On 10 [April], the BBC Symphony Orchestra will present the world premiere of 'The Earthly Paradise', a setting of prose, poetry, and sayings by William Morris composed by Ian McQueen."

http://morrissociety.blogspot.com/2010/02/bbc-symphony-to-premiere-ian-mcqueens.html

"The search for the land where "none grow old" guides the twists and turns of William Morris’ 'The Earthly Paradise'. Ian McQueen’s new work for chorus and large orchestra evokes the extraordinary world of the poet, surges with erotic charge and conjures up Morris’s magical vision of Iceland’s landscape and sagas."

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=8912

Above image above courtesy Atlantic Free Press - Link
Sketch by Walter Crane courtesy WCML - Link

John Keats - Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil

2010-03-23T21:18:00.019-05:00

Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil
(completed in 1818)

A Story from Boccaccio

LIII.
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.

LIV.
And so she ever fed it with thin tears,
Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
So that it smelt more balmy than its peers
Of Basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew
Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,
From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:
So that the jewel, safely casketed,
Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread.

LV.
O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!
Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile;
Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily,
And make a pale light in your cypress glooms,
Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs.

Lines 417- 440

1. William Holman Hunt
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1867
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

An interesting posting -
http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/?p=41

2. John William Waterhouse
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1907
Private collection

3. Henrietta Rae
Isabella
"Reproduced in colour in 'Henrietta Rae (Mrs. Ernest Normand)' by Arthur Fish, Cassell and Company, 1905." - Courtesy ArtMagick

4. Arthur Trevethin Nowell
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1904
Museo de Arte de Ponce
The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc.
Ponce, Puerto Rico
(Thank you to ArtMagick for sharing information about this work.)
http://www.arthurnowell.com/

-----------------

Keats-Shelley House, Rome - Link
http://www.keats-shelley-house.org/en/romanticism

Four Keats Poems and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision of the Middle Ages
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/bottai1.html

Introduction to Keats
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keats.html

The complete poem - Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil

J. W. Waterhouse - Isabella and the Pot of Basil

2010-03-20T15:04:00.025-05:00

John William Waterhouse's painting, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, is shown above the fireplace in Rod Stewart's Beverly Hills mansion master suite. The lovely photograph (photo by Mary E. Nichols) is from a 2007 Architectural Digest piece. Link
(Link to beginning of photographs from the Digest.)

“I would give anything to work at Sotheby’s,” says Stewart, who—fame aside—is a collector like any other collector. He reads auction catalogues in bed. He frets about running out of space. He always has his eye on something, though he has learned to bid with caution and from a distance. “It’s so-o-o addictive,” he says. ... The collection that gives Stewart the most pleasure is his Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which he believes to be one of the largest in the world. The heroes and heroines of his canvases are caught in various late-Victorian states of ecstasy, many of them, the singer explains, “based on the poems of Keats and Tennyson.” About a third of the collection is hung here, most dramatically on the split entrance hall stair, paintings of women on one side and couples on the other. He reminds us, "You have no idea how big those paintings are until you’re standing next to them." - Link to the text of the Architectural Digest article this is taken from.

image courtesy ArtMagick
@ http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/home/

On page 193 of Peter Trippi's 2002 Waterhouse monograph, it is written that Isabella and the Pot of Basil was "unlocated" at that time.

I checked this yesterday after reading a blog posting by Alison Flood about a recent fundraising event for the Keats-Shelley house in Rome.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/18/keats-shelley-house

In the posting, Alison shares something Catherine Payling, curator of the Keats-Shelley House, told her. While "searching for the whereabouts of John William Waterhouse's painting Isabella and the Pot of Basil, based on Keats's poem of the same name, she was pointed towards, of all people, Rod Stewart. An eagle-eyed expert had spotted what appears to be the painting, hanging in Stewart's Beverley Hills mansion, in an "at home" feature the singer did with Architectural Digest [May 2007]."

Alison wrote, "Whether or not it turns out to be the original remains to be seen ..."

Today ArtMagick confirmed that it is: "per Peter Trippi, Waterhouse's biographer, as far as he is aware, the original painting 'Isabella' is indeed in Rod Stewart's collection."

The work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1907. Anthony Hobson shared the following about the painting in his 1980 publication. It first became part of the H. W. Henderson collection. (H. W. was the brother of Alexander Henderson - http://www.buscot-park.com/frameset5.html) (Also see about halfway down this page from Julia Kerr for information about the Hendersons.) The painting was purchased in 1948 by Gooden & Fox for 35gn. at a Christie's auction. A "Mrs Wigan" is then listed in the provenance - I believe this is Aline Henderson, H. W. Henderson's daughter. She married John Tyson Wigan in 1911. The painting appeared at Christie's again in 1967 and became part of the Lord Lambton collection. In 1971 it was shown at Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield UK as part of a Burne-Jones exhibition.

The Portrait - a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2010-03-17T21:43:00.008-05:00

THE HOUSE OF LIFE
SONNET IX
THE PORTRAIT

O Lord of all compassionate control,
O Love! let this my lady's picture glow
Under my hand to praise her name, and show
Even of her inner self the perfect whole:
That he who seeks her beauty's furthest goal,
Beyond the light that the sweet glances throw
And refluent wave of the sweet smile, may know
The very sky and sea-line of her soul.

Lo! it is done. Above the long lithe throat
The mouth's mould testifies of voice and kiss,
The shadowed eyes remember and foresee.
Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note
That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!)
They that would look on her must come to me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"The sonnet is associated with three specific pictures by DGR and with three distinct women. No hard evidence connects the sonnet to the famous picture 'Beata Beatrix', the memorial reconstruction of DGR's wife as his visionary Beatrice, but this connection is commonly made. The portrait in colored chalks of Jane Morris, signed and dated by DGR 1869 and called '[A] Portrait', was exhibited in 1883 at the Royal Academy Exhibition. According to Ford Madox Brown, however, the sonnet “was written to accompany 'Mrs. Morris in a Blue Dress'" (see Newman and Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown, 155). Finally, Stephens says that the sonnet referred chiefly to Alexa Wilding ( Dante Gabriel Rossetti 173 ).."

http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1868.s212.raw.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Beata Beatrix, circa 1864-70

[Beata Beatrix at http://lizziesiddal.com/portal/?p=154]

A Portrait, 1869

Even of her inner self the perfect whole,
The very sky and sea-line of her soul.

(Note: The above verses from Rossetti's sonnet, The Portrait
were "reportedly inscribed on the original frame.")
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s212.rap.html

Mrs. William Morris (The Blue Silk Dress), 1868

Latin verse inscription that DGR composed for the painting:
'Famous for her poet husband, and most famous for her face,
finally let her be famous for my picture!' - Link

"Though not technically a double work, the painting is connected to many of DGR's most central writings and pictures. The all but explicit connection to “The Portrait” is made via the Latin verse inscription that DGR composed for the painting. From that nexus a host of other relations proliferates, as the scholarly commentary shows. “The Portrait”, for example, has been the center of a long controversy about the specific painting to be associated with the sonnet so titled. But the truth is that DGR's whole aesthetic life was a pursuit of this ideal image of Beauty. Mrs. Morris came ultimately to represent for him perhaps the closest incarnation that he had ever known of that ideal form."

http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s372.raw.html

Alexa Wilding, 1866

"So many differently inspired versions did Rossetti give us of the beauty of Alice Wilding. Nevertheless, I dare say, not a little of her charm existed mostly in the passionate heart of the painter; yet I well remember that nothing he drew of her, diverse as the delineations were, seemed less than an exact likeness. Of course, one saw her through the mood of the artist and it has sometimes appeared to me that the ardent sonnet he called 'The Portrait' referred, however generally, yet chiefly, to her, when he described how, when “my lady’s picture” was finished, he exclaimed –“Lo! it is done. Above the long, lithe throat The mouth’s mould testifies of voice and kiss, The shadowed eyes remember and foresee. Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!) They that would look on her must come to me.” - F. G. Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1899
[from the 2006 thesis by Jennifer J. Lee: Venus Imaginaria: Reflections on Alexa Wilding, Her Life, and Her Role as Muse in the Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Link]

Alluring Alexa - an ArtMagick Art Album by stargazer

Bruna Brunelleschi - Rossetti

2010-03-08T15:23:00.008-06:00

(bodycolour on paper)
1878
Courtesy The Fitzwilliam Museum - Link

"Rossetti wrote concerning this work: "27 Feb 1878. I have finished an old watercolour for the head of your portrait and it comes well - it is for Valpy. I did not want it to be talked about, among strangers by your name so have christened it "Bruna Brunelleschi" of course bearing on the dark complexion. I did think of calling it "Vittoria Colonna" who I find was certainly the original of those heads by M.A. which are portraits of you but I thought it would not do to tackle Mike" (from 'Unpublished Letters to Jane Morris', British Museum)."

A Portrait by Rossetti - Jane Burden Morris

2010-03-07T13:44:00.006-06:00

Coloured chalks on paper
Signed with the artists monogram and dated 1869
43.20cm wide 52.00cm high (17.01 inches wide 20.47 inches high)
Provenance:
Leonard Rowe Valpy
Canon Valpy, his sale, Christies, Saturday May 19th 1906, lot 146, £508
Sotheran
Courtesy The Leicester Galleries - Link

"Rossetti's 'A Portrait' can be seen hanging in Canon Valpy's drawing-room [over the fireplace] in a watercolour painted c. 1900, illustrated in Susan Lasdun, 'Victorians at Home', Weidenfeldt & Nicholson, London 1981, page 127."

Rossetti - Portrait of Jane Morris Asleep on a Sofa

2010-03-06T21:57:00.003-06:00

1869 - 1871
241mm x 151mm
Pen and brown ink and ink wash, on paper.
Bequeathed by James Richardson Holliday, 1927

Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries - Link

Arthur Hughes - Amy

2010-02-14T15:29:00.010-06:00

"... the young woman, Amy, appears to be waiting for her lover. As she adjusts her hair in preparation for meeting him, her eye rests on her name carved in the bark of the tree. ... Hughes used the shawl worn by Amy in his later painting 'April Love'." - Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

(for a better look at the lovely work, please click on the image)

Arthur Hughes @ ArtMagick

http://www.arthurhughes.org/

Julia Margaret Cameron - Scenes of Pre-Raphaelite grace

2010-02-13T22:01:00.009-06:00

Pre-Raphaelite study, 1870
(May Prinsep)

(Hatty Campbell, I believe)

The Dream, 1869
(Mary Hillier)

'My Aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.' - Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir John Herschel, 31 December, 1864

-----

Julia Margaret Cameron biography from the V&A Museum - Link

Annals Of My Glass House
An autobiography by Julia Margaret Cameron
Text compiled and annotated by Violet Hamilton - Link
From the 2001-2002 National Gallery of Victoria exhibition - Link

Dimbola Lodge, Galleries and Photographic Museum,
Isle of Wight - Link

John William Waterhouse - St Cecilia, 1895

2010-02-07T00:42:00.015-06:00

"... in 'St Cecilia' Mr Waterhouse has taken another stride forward. There is not, perhaps, the mystery which has invested so many of his pictures with indescribable charm; but there are here greater merits, as compensation, in the composition, fine and well balanced, and a true sense of poetry, in its wider significance of conception, handling, colour, and painter-like quality. The artist's imagination....has been well supported by his generous palette; and his wealth of colour, of mauve and white, of green and blue and red, are resolved into a harmony exquisitely adapted to the subject." - The Magazine of Art via Christie's catalogue notes and Peter Trippi

My first opportunity to see Waterhouse's St Cecilia came in June 2000 when it was shown at Christie's in London. In December when I visited the exhibit in Montréal I was able to view it once more. This time, for more extended periods which was such a joy. I was able to stand closely and admire the artist's work. At other times, I was the only person in the room as I sat and gazed upon its beauty. I was able to visit the exhibit over a three day period. As I entered the exhibit for the first time and found works I had never seen in person before, tears of joy welled up. The colours were so much more vivid in person - the works so impressive. On my first day's visit when I arrived in the last room, I found St Cecilia there ... along with other wonderful works ... again the tears of joy came as the beauty of John William Waterhouse was all around me. Today is the last day of the exhibit ... so mixed feelings of regret and thankfulness surround me. I'm so glad I was able to make the trek to Montréal.

'In a clear walled city on the sea,
Near gilded organ pipes...
...slept St Cecily'

oil on canvas
48½ x 79 in. (123.2 x 200.7 cm.)

From Didier Rykner of The Art Tribune - an article about the exhibit.

From Matthew Innis - A visit with Waterhouse ...

From Margaret Smith - Enchantment blooms at Waterhouse exhibit ...

From Neil Miley who visited the exhibit at its first location - a review.

From ArtMagick - A Visit to Kelmscott, home of William Morris

2010-02-02T03:49:00.003-06:00

ArtMagick at YouTube - LINK

ArtMagick

May Morris

2010-02-02T00:17:00.020-06:00

circa 1890

Embroidered Panel
c.1885 stamped MORRIS & CO. to reverse of frame
19 3/8in. (49.2cm.) high
Christie's

Firescreen
mahogany, silk
32 5/8in. (82.8cm.) high
Christie's

"By producing small embroideries, for firescreens and cushions, many more people were able to acquire designs. Many of these designs were sold in kit form, becoming the financial mainstay of the business. The designs were available in three different stages of completion; as background fabric marked with the design to be embroidered entirely at home, with the embroidery already started as a guide or, all the work could be done in the Morris & Co workshops.

William Morris in 1885 handed over the management of the Embroidery Section to his daughter May, aged 23. She had already designed embroideries and was a skilled embroideress. All designs for embroidery were either designed by her or John Henry Dearle, Morris's assistant, who on Morris's death became Art Director." - Meg Andrews

http://www.meg-andrews.com/item-details/Morris-embroidery/6529
http://www.meg-andrews.com/item-details/May-Morris/6685

Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
circa 1890

http://thetextileblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/may-morris-and-embroidered-tapestry.html

A threefold screen
Designed by J.H. Dearle and May Morris, circa 1885,
retailed by Morris & Co.
Mahogany frame with ebony banding,
glazed panels with satin stitch embroidery,
central drop leaf shelf
69in. (177.3cm.) high; 20in. (51.3cm.) width of side panels;
23in. (58.7cm.) width of central panel
Stamped twice Morris & Co 449 Oxford St West, numbered 1586
Christie's

Kelmscott Manor - For the Bed at Kelmscott

2010-02-01T22:49:00.017-06:00

"In William Morris's room at Kelmscott Manor, the early-seventeenth century carved oak bed has an embroidered valance and bed-hangings that were designed in 1891 by May Morris, his daughter, and worked by May with the help of Lily Yeats and Ellen Wright (two Morris & Co. embroiderers). The poem "For the Bed at Kelmscott" was written by William Morris for the project. [It is is embroidered on the vallance.] May Morris also designed the bedcover, which was embroidered by Jane Morris ..." -Link-

THE wind's on the wold
And the night is a-cold,
And Thames runs chill
'Twixt mead and hill.
But kind and dear
Is the old house here
And my heart is warm
'Midst winter's harm.
Rest then and rest,
And think of the best
'Twixt summer and spring,
When all birds sing
In the town of the tree,
And ye in me
And scarce dare move,
Lest earth and its love
Should fade away
Ere the full of the day.
I am old and have seen
Many things that have been;
Both grief and peace
And wane and increase
No tale I tell
Of ill or well,
But this I say:
Night treadeth on day,
And for worst and best
Right good is rest.

Kelmscott Manor
painting by May Morris

More about Kelmscott Manor from Margaret:
http://www.theearthlyparadise.com/2008/02/william-morris-and-kelmscott-manor.html

http://www.kelmscottmanor.org.uk/
http://www.morrissociety.org/poems.htm#lines

First image courtesy ... William Morris Fan Club

Aurora - Edward Burne-Jones

2010-01-30T23:37:00.007-06:00

"A small pocket-book of this time [1866] contains a note made by Edward from a canal-bridge in a poor quarter of the city, which nearly thirty years afterwards he developed into the background of his "Aurora." The main outlines of building and canal are preserved in the picture, and Aurora with her cymbals comes lightly stepping along a waterside path from which in the original sketch a woman stoops to bathe her baby, but the canal has changed into an arm of a river and the houses have been welded into the long, low storage-places of a wharf, crowned by a great church lifted up against the sky." - from Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones by Georgiana Burne-Jones

Aurora, 1896
Queensland Art Gallery

"Aurora, the Roman mythical personification of dawn, is here depicted barefoot and with cymbals to wake the sleeping city as a soft dawn light rises behind rooftops and distant trees. ... The face of Aurora in this work is an idealised portrait of Bessie Keene, one of the artist's models." - Link to Queensland Art Gallery note

Reframing Burne Jones 'Aurora' (1896) - an article from the Queensland Art Gallery (Link)

Edward Burne-Jones ~ Bessie Keene

2010-01-30T20:16:00.012-06:00

Three drawings of Bessie Keene - studies for the head of the woman in Love Among the Ruins, 1893-94.
Courtesy Leicester Galleries

A wonderful article from ArtMagick prompted my searching today ... Love Among the Ruins ... a Burne-Jones painting in ruins: -Link-

Love Among the Ruins, 1893-94
Bearsted Collection, Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton

John William Waterhouse, Garden of Enchantment

2010-01-28T00:51:00.005-06:00

Television spot from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts:

http://www.mbam.qc.ca/waterhouse/en/video-tv-spot.html -
Eight other videos filmed while the exhibit was at the Royal Academy of Arts in London featuring Peter Trippi discussing some of the works shown at the exhibition are found at the link above.

From the television spot:

http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/

'Enchantment blooms at Waterhouse exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts'

2010-01-27T21:02:00.041-06:00

By Margaret Smith
GateHouse News Service
Jan 27, 2010

Montreal —
"Imagine walking along a remote ocean or sea shore, as turquoise waves call you to some exotic, distant place.

More beckoning still is the sight of a mermaid combing out her long hair, her eyes looking afar, a gaze at once mysterious and inviting.

A viewer can easily imagine encountering such a scene for real in the painting, “A Mermaid,” by John William Waterhouse, the British artist who embraced scenes of a mythical past even as his contemporaries emphasized edgier images of the everyday world.

An exhibit of his paintings is on view in “John William Waterhouse, Garden of Enchantment,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in the only scheduled North American stop of a tour of the paintings.

The exhibit – with paintings and artifacts on loan from The Tate Gallery in London, Leeds Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Ontario -- is the largest-ever retrospective of Waterhouse’s work, and the first international Waterhouse exhibit since 1978.

Among the exhibit’s features are all three of Waterhouse’s paintings depicting “The Lady of Shalott,” the young noblewoman whose love of Sir Lancelot ended in tragedy.

Visitors can learn more about Waterhouse’s life, times, and evolution of his style over his 50-year career, and gain greater understanding of his working methods.

At the same time, it’s a chance to be ensnared somewhere in a dream – perhaps in Cleopatra’s sun-caressed parlor, or in the florid garden of St. Cecilia, as angels greet the patron saint of music with a serenade of violins.

The paintings are arranged in a spacious and elegant walkthrough illuminated with soft lighting, and draped with dark curtains. Throughout are settings of flowers and ornate chairs, quietly echoing the assuring yet haunting worlds Waterhouse brought to life on canvas.

The exhibit puts Waterhouse into the context of the art world of his day, including the emerging schools such as Impressionism in which Waterhouse found formidable competitors.

“Waterhouse knew a great deal about what was going on in the (more technically progressive) art worlds of Paris and Brussels -- partly through British friends who had returned from studying and working there, partly through artworks sent from those cities for exhibition in London, and partly through illustrated magazines and other publications available in London,” said Waterhouse biographer Peter Trippi, exhibit curator, editor of “Fine Art Connoisseur,” and author of an article in the exhibit’s catalogue.

Trippi said, Waterhouse and his contemporaries were excited by new techniques and ideas espoused by the Impressionists.

Some observers also see hints of Impressionist influence in Waterhouse works such as one his three versions of “The Lady of Shalott,” in which water lilies dot the lake where the doomed young noblewoman has taken her boat.

Ultimately, however, Waterhouse retained his own identity, and this, many argue, is what has allowed his work to endure.

The magic touch

If viewers find themselves bewitched, it’s more than coincidental. Inspired by many sources – classical mythology, Biblical and early Christian stories, the poetry of Keats and Tennyson, Shakespearean plays, and British folklore – Waterhouse created numerous images of women, especially those with magical powers.

In “Medea and Jason,” the young witch Medea appears to create a potion while Jason watches. We know from the play by Euripedes that Jason betrays Medea, and that she wreaks a terrible revenge. But for the moment, he seems content to watch and perhaps even learn.

A starker image of magic is seen in “The Magic Circle,” where a witch casts a circle around herself and a cauldron emitting clouds of ether, as magical portents – including crows and a toad – watch from outside the circle’s perimeter.

“The Symbolist painters (of which Waterhouse was one) were deeply interested in the occult, and so it’s not surprising that Waterhouse was, too,” Trippi said.

Spiritualism and other forms of mysticism were popular among the upper classes, in part because of changing attitudes toward religion – including Darwin’s challenge to the literal view of the Bible’s creation stories.

While it’s unknown whether Waterhouse was a member of any of the occult and mystical societies that were prevalent, Trippi said, “Certainly in his works--right from 1884 through his death in 1917--we see continuous expressions of interest in the occult, magic, the supernatural, transformations from one shape to another (e.g., human to plant, animal to human).”

Feminine focus

As enchantresses, queens, victims of injustice, saints, martyrs, mythical creatures, or femmes fatales, Waterhouse painted women predominantly as his main subjects.

In his mature works, they are unfailingly vivid in their expressions of love, fear, longing, sorrow, or contemplation of the world and their role within it.

Sensuality and even seduction can prevail, in ways that are wholesome and innocent, but also signaling possible danger.

A docent guiding a tour group pointed out an exquisite portrait of Circe, another great sorceress of classical Greek tradition, and a prominent character in Homer’s “Odyssey.” She wields her powers without apology, and thinks nothing of turning Odysseus’ sailors into swine that cower at her feet.

She’s also known for her ability to lure men with her voluptuous beauty. The docent remarked that this is seen in the diaphanous and revealing gown she wears. But, one tour member suggests that another clue to Circe’s passions is in her eyes.

“Waterhouse's women have knowledge--the ability to both help and hinder men, who always appear as secondary figures in the compositions,” Trippi said.

One possible interpretation – far from being passive objects to be dandled by fate, the figures in the paintings are women of action. They are always possessed of their own ideas and feelings, and fully expressing them.

“Although we cannot be sure that Waterhouse was a feminist or supported the drive to secure women's right to vote, we can be sure that he admired women not just for their beauty and fertility, but also for their unique sets of knowledge and their closeness to nature," Trippi said.

He added, “Remember that most spiritualistic mediums (see above) were women, not men.”

Trippi observed that viewers in Waterhouse’s times were generally familiar with the stories he depicted, and likely looked at the paintings with their own understandings of the stories and characters.

Waterhouse has long had a popular following, and one doesn’t have to be an art authority to enjoy his work. But in recent years, there is a growing understanding and respect for Waterhouse’s technique among artists and art historians.

Trippi said, “We are seeing a groundswell of admiration of Waterhouse's technical excellence (brushstrokes, coloring, glazing) thanks to this traveling exhibition. Photos of his art are lovely and colorful, but nothing prepares you for the rich, almost voluptuous, experience of seeing these masterworks properly lit and framed.”

And little compares to the fantastical yet unexpectedly personal and familiar realms into which Waterhouse invites his viewers, places that are spellbinding, unsettling, and compelling as any siren’s song." - Margaret Smith, GateHouse News Service

1. A Mermaid, 1900
2. The Lady of Shalott, 1888
3. The Lady of Shalott, 1894
4. Cleopatra, 1888
5. St Cecilia, 1895
6. Jason and Medea, 1907
7. Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, 1891
8. Circe Invidiosa: Circe Poisoning the Sea, 1892
9. Lamia, 1909
10. Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900

The exhibit, John William Waterhouse, Garden of Enchantment, will be at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through 7 February, 2010.
http://www.mbam.qc.ca/waterhouse/en/

Thornbridge Hall window ~ Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris

2010-01-25T14:11:00.014-06:00

"... In 1871 Sleigh sold the Hall and 185 acres (about 77 hectares) of land to Frederick Craven who commissioned the architect J B Mitchell-Withers to rebuild the Hall in the Jacobean style, with stained-glass windows by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones." - Parks and Garden UK

Pygmalion and the Image - The Soul Attains by Edward Burne-Jones was part of the Frederick Craven Collection. Another work in his collection was Night. (I believe now part of the Lloyd Webber Collection.)
http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1903p26/pygmalion-and-the-image-the-soul-attains/

Photo courtesy White Beer Travels
The current owner of Thornbridge Hall
is the proprietor of Thornbridge Brewerey.

Edward Burne-Jones - Morris & Co. ~ Constance & Dorigen

2010-01-25T00:03:00.007-06:00

Stained Glass Panel
Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'
Constance

Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries
"This panel seems to have been made as part
of a series for Birket Foster's house,
the Hill, in Witley, Surrey."
-Link-

Pencil drawings and stained glass cartoons
Chaucer's Legend of Good Women
-Link-

Stained Glass Panel
Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'
Dorigen

-Link-

Edward Burne-Jones - William Morris ~ Thornbridge Hall Window (Derbyshire)

2010-01-24T23:34:00.016-06:00

Thornbridge Hall Window
(Photo courtesy Nottinghamshire Notes)

"In the top tier the 4 roundels were designed by Burne-Jones in 1862, depicted Griselda, Dorigen, Constance & Cressida.
[another version shown in Monday's blog entry above - link]
The second tier depicts minstrels ... designed by William Morris.
The bottom tier, again by Burne-Jones in 1878 depict
Luna, Earth, Morning Star and Evening Star."
- Nottinghamshire Notes
-Link-
~~~
Thornbridge Hall

Edward Burne-Jones - William Morris & Co. ~ Beautiful stained glass

2010-01-24T15:44:00.023-06:00

Morning Star

Evening Star

Luna

Details of three of the five Morris & Co. panels
featured in the March 2008 Sotheby's sale,
The Jimmy Page Collection.
-Link-

"... the windows [were] made for [Angus] Holden at Woodlands in 1879. ... Nine panels were originally designed by Burne-Jones for Woodlands: `Venus', `Evening Star',` Saturn', `Jupiter', `Luna', `Earth',` Sol', `Morning Star' and `Mars'."
-Catalogue Notes-

~~~~~~

(click on image for larger picture)
Two panels, (Sol and Mars)
were part of the Gabreal Franklin Collection in 2009.
(I'm not sure if they currently are still there.)
The others were with Jimmy Page until 2008.
The panels Earth and Saturn were unlocated in 2009.
(Photo courtesy the Franklin Collection)
-Link-

William Morris and 'The Beauty of Life' - from the blog, 'Venetian Red'

2010-01-22T19:49:00.011-06:00

Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, 1890
photo:William Morris Gallery, London

Photographs included in the interesting blog entry,

Eminent Victorian: William Morris and 'The Beauty of Life'

written by Christine Cariati.
- Link -

Drawing Room, Kelmscott Manor
(Click on image for a larger picture.)
~~~
http://www.kelmscottmanor.org.uk/

Maxwell Armfield (British, 1881-1972)

2010-01-21T21:51:00.007-06:00

Biography from ArtMagick

1. Faustine, 1904 (Musee d'Orsay)
2. The Young Queen and the Page, 1904

More lovely images from A Polar Bear's Tale: -Link-

'An Important Lost Carpet for 1 Holland Park, circa 1883' - Morris & Co

2010-01-21T01:31:00.018-06:00

The beautiful pattern of a carpet that was listed as Lot 11 in a 2007 auction at Bonhams.

Catalogue notes:
Morris & Co.
An Important Lost Carpet for 1 Holland Park, circa 1883.
The royal blue field with central cream floral motif and all over scrolling vine and flowerhead pattern in cream and sky blue, enclosed by a scrolling leaf border with a flowing strawberry red vine and forest green tendrils with large leaves in sky and royal blue.
508cm x 131cm

I'm not sure if this is the same one mentioned in a recent posting on the blog, News from Anywhere (the blog of the William Morris Society) ... but, they are the same dimensions. The title of the blog entry is, The Lost William Morris Carpet of Holland Park is For Sale.

Information about 1 Holland Park from the blog entry:
"Alexander Ionides, the Greek Consul-General in London commissioned Phillip Webb and William Morris to transform his magnificent house, No. 1 Holland Park (now the Greek Embassy) into a showpiece of the decorative talents of William Morris and his circle. In the photograph of the Marble Hall (from the Studio, 1897) a magnificent Morris and Co. carpet may be seen. Ionides and Morris had a shared interest in Middle Eastern design, and Morris and Co bought dyes used for dying carpets from Ionides & Co., the family's textile firm.

Ionides's son, Alexander Ionides, inherited the house, which was sold ten years later by his widow to the trustees for the sixth Earl of Ilchester. After damage by incendiary bombs in World War II the property passed to London County Council in 1952. When the council decided to demolish what remained of the house in 1953 nothing of value was found in the interior.

Of the original furnishings in the house, a piano designed by Burne-Jones, a Morris carpet, and a tapestry designed by William Morris, Philip Webb and J. H. Dearle, are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. ... A second Morris and Co. carpet, bought from Bonhams, London a number of years ago and listed in Malcolm Haslam's book, Arts and Crafts Carpets (1991), is currently for sale. It dates from ca. 1883 and measures 508 x 131 cm. For a private viewing in the Holland Park area contact Dominic Woods, alliedcentral@yahoo.com."
http://morrissociety.blogspot.com/
~~~~
(Update ... later today Grace posted a wonderful blog entry about her visit to the exhibit, Imperishable Beauty. She shares some lovely photos, including some showing the fantastic Morris & Co textiles she saw at the exhibit. -Link- )

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford - Anthony Frederick Sandys and Pio Fedi

2010-01-19T20:20:00.020-06:00

I love this photograph taken by Martin Beek at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In the background you can see the painting Gentle Spring (1865) by Anthony Frederick Sandys. The marble sculpture, Pia de'Tolomei e Nello della Pietra or Il sospetto (The suspicion) is the work of Pio Fedi, 1816-1892.
(Be sure to click on the image or the first link above to better see the delicate work of the gown.)

From the catalogue notes for another version of the sculpture: "This delicate group has an intricate, patterned surface which recalls Pio Fedi's early training as a goldsmith and engraver. The subject is taken from a verse in Dante's Purgatorio mourning the fate of 'La Pia'. ..."

~~~~~~

Anthony Frederick Sandys, 1829-1904
Gentle Spring, 1865

"The landscape is painted with a Pre-Raphaelite truthfulness, but the figure is inspired by Greek or Roman statuary." - Jon Whiteley via ArtMagick

Wonderful details 1 and 2 above courtesy Martin Beek.

More from Martin -
The Ashmolean Museum
The New Ashmolean Museum
Oxford in Winter
~~

James Wyatt - an early patron of John Everett Millais

2010-01-19T01:15:00.007-06:00

James Wyatt and his Granddaughter Mary

More paintings of the Wyatt family by Millais.

"John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the first artistic link between Oxford and the Pre-Raphaelites. … Arriving in Oxford in 1846, Millais met his first patron, the art dealer and framer James Wyatt (1774-1853), who provided him with studio space in the High Street and commissioned portraits of himself and his family. Wyatt’s support gave Oxford an important place in Millais’s early Pre-Raphaelite work. The artist often painted in the open air using the landscape of Oxford, the woodlands of Botley and Shotover, in the backgrounds of his pictures."

Sir John Everett Millais - The Return of the Dove to the Ark

2010-01-18T22:48:00.025-06:00

Earlier today ArtMagick shared a link to the Ashmolean Museum website's news concerning The Return of the Dove to the Ark by Sir John Everett Millais. The painting was selected by the Oxford based museum as part of the BBC's new series,
A History of the World.

This is a new partnership between the BBC, the British Museum and other museums and institutions across the UK -
BBC - A History of the World.

Photograph above courtesy Martin Beek.
It was taken in 2008 at the Ashmolean Museum.
Millais's portrait of Thomas Combe is seen to the left in the photograph.

Thomas Combe

Many of the Pre-Raphaelite pictures at the Ashmolean Museum
come from the collection of Thomas Combe and his wife,
important early patrons of the movement.

"Thomas Combe (1796-1872), a senior partner in Oxford University Press from 1851 until his death, was a close friend of Millais, who advised him on the formation of his collection. After Thomas Combe's death, his widow Martha acquired further works by the Pre-Raphaelites, and bequeathed the whole collection to the Ashmolean in 1893."

An interesting article, Jericho and the Pre-Raphaelites:
"Few people are aware that the area of Oxford known as Jericho has a number of striking connections with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ... " continued here.

The Lady of Shalott - William Holman Hunt

2010-01-13T03:58:00.005-06:00

(second photo courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Arts)

Glimpses of the Holman Hunt exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2009)

2010-01-13T02:01:00.021-06:00

Video Tour of the exhibit, Sin and Salvation: Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision (April 2009) - Art Gallery of Ontario.
(Link to video on YouTube)

You can see a few of Holman Hunt's studio costumes in the display cases.

Photographs and video courtesy "Listen Up TV".

Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision (2008-2009 exhibition)

2010-01-12T23:10:00.025-06:00

(Information about the exhibition catalogue.)
~~
The exhibit was presented at three venues.
Each website still has information about the exhibition.

Manchester Art Gallery (11 October 2008 - 11 January 2009)

The three versions of Hunt's The Light of the World were shown.
Glimpses of them can be seen in this 2008 BBC report about the exhibit. Thoughts about the exhibition are also shared by
Muslim, Jewish and Christian families.

~~

Art Gallery of Ontario (Feb 14 - May 10, 2009)

Holman Hunt: Pre-Raphaelite Passion (Audio)
"This talk by Holman Hunt scholar Carol Jacobi presents the artist’s life and inspirations as well as the development of his approach to art."

Holman Hunt: “Branding” a Vision (Audio)
Presented by Brenda Rix, assistant curator of Prints and Drawings at the AGO.

~~

Minneapolis Institute of Arts (June 14 to Sept. 6, 2009)
The link above leads to these short preview sections:
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Love and Pain: Hunt’s Private Life
William Holman Hunt, 1827–1910
Textiles
Hunt in the Middle East
Hunt and the Holy Land
Light of the World: Spreading the Word
The Lady of Shalott

Link to the Institute's webpage featuring a
slideshow presentation about the exhibit.

Information from the Exhibition Listings section at ArtMagick.

William Holman Hunt

2010-01-12T22:11:00.009-06:00

1. The School-Girl's Hymn, 1859
2. Study of Firelight, circa 1861-62
("...The girl portrayed is probably the artist's sister Emily ..." - ArtMagick
3. Tuscan Girl, 1868-69
'About the artwork' - Lady Lever Art Gallery
4. Amaryllis, 1884

ArtMagick

William Holman Hunt and his son Cyril

2010-01-03T04:36:00.007-06:00

William Holman Hunt and His Son Cyril
courtesy The Victorian Web

courtesy the Rossetti Archive

Cyril Benoni Holman Hunt, 1880
courtesy The Fitzwilliam Museum

Photograph of Cyril (1887) - National Portrait Gallery

William Holman Hunt - Master Hilary - The Tracer, 1886

2010-01-03T00:33:00.012-06:00

"Hilary had first appeared in his father's work as the Christ Child in 'The Triumph of the Innocents' (1876-87; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), and other early studies of him are reproduced in Hunt's autobiography. In our picture he is seen through the glass of a French window, we ourselves standing outside with the painter, looking into a shadowed room, the child inside looking out. He has stuck a design on the glass with sealing wax, and is about to trace it against the light with the stick of coloured chalk which he holds in his right hand. At his feet are a box of paints, his paint brushes in a glass of water, and an upturned white china plate which he presumably uses as a palette." - Christie's catalogue notes (extensive)

The painting "remained in Hilary's possession until his death in 1949. It was then inherited by his daughter, Diana, who died" in 1993.

William Holman Hunt - Fanny and Edith Waugh

2010-01-02T22:27:00.025-06:00

Fanny Holman Hunt, 1866-1868

From the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio (link).

"We ... know from letters that Hunt wrote to W. J. Bunney, his studio assistant in Florence, that he reconstructed this memorial image of his wife with the same care and precision that he devoted to his major religious paintings. He took great care, for instance, to secure Fanny's own peacock shawl, the painting of which one contemporary reviewer took to be the "greatest tour de force of the exhibition" when it was shown at the 1869 Royal Academy." - The Victorian Web

Photograph of Fanny shared at the Pre-Raphaelite Art blog.

From Stephanie Pina at her website, The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood -
Isabella and the Pot of Basil

"... in 1865 at the age of thirty-eight, [William Holman Hunt married] Fanny Waugh, the daughter of a prosperous London chemist. In August the following year, when Fanny was seven months pregnant, they set out for what would have been Hunt's second visit to the East, and on 20 December 1866 she died at Florence after giving birth to a son. He was named Cyril Benoni (Hebrew for 'child of sorrow'). Nine years later Hunt married Fanny's younger sister Edith, flouting the Table of Affinities, outraging her family, and causing a permanent rift with his fellow PRB Thomas Woolner, who had married another Waugh daughter. Of this second marriage there were two children, Gladys, born in 1878, and Hilary Lushington, born on 6 May 1879." - from Christie's lot notes

The Birthday

"The Birthday (1868) is a striking portrait of the artist's sister-in-law, Edith Waugh, on her twenty-first birthday, surrounded by gifts. They include a cameo, which Holman Hunt had originally given to his first wife, Fanny Waugh, Edith's sister. ..."

"Edith had become a surrogate mother to Fanny and William’s son, and seven years after this painting, Edith and Hunt (age 48) were married in Switzerland – because English law (the Table of Affinities) forbade their marriage. Incidentally, Edith and Hunt, who by then was quite prominent, campaigned against this ridiculous prohibition, and in 1907 Parliament passed the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, which sanctioned their union."

Information about Fanny and Edith from the Dictionary of artists' models

by Jill Berk Jiminez and Joanna Banham.

William Holman Hunt (British, 1827-1910)

2010-01-02T14:21:00.012-06:00

Miss Gladys M. Holman Hunt
(The School of Nature)

A photograph of Gladys as a child - National Portrait Gallery

Works by William Holman Hunt at ArtMagick

A question from a reader of the Telegraph - UK

John William Waterhouse - The Shrine

2009-12-31T13:24:00.003-06:00

The Shrine (detail)

Wishing you much joy and happiness in the New Year!

Montréal - Christmas trees and the wonderful Waterhouse exhibit

2009-12-26T20:24:00.079-06:00

Beautiful Christmas trees can be found in the lobby and halls of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion - Montréal Museum of Fine Arts through 3 January 2010. (The 35 trees were decorated by local groups that reflect Quebec's cultural diversity.)

Below are photographs of signs for the John William Waterhouse exhibition - Garden of Enchantment - I found amongst the Christmas trees.

But, you need to cross the street and enter the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion for a visit to the wonderful exhibit (showing through 7 February 2010).

If you look closely in through the windows at the far right of the photograph above, you can almost :) see part of a display of exhibition catalogues in the lobby at the entrance to the gift shop.

After going up to the third floor, these beautiful banners greet you at the entrance to the exhibit (the door to the left furthest away).

We aren't allowed to take photographs in the exhibiton galleries ... but, I found the two below that some brave souls had taken of Waterhouse's 1894 and 1888 versions of The Lady of Shalott.

This is the first time all of Waterhouse's paintings of The Lady of Shalott have been exhibited together. The first one shown above is the 1894 version and, of course, the other is his 1888 version. Also in this room of the exhibition, hung to the left of the 1894 painting, is Waterhouse's third version, "I am Half Sick of Shadows," said the Lady of Shalott (1915). To the right is a study for the 1894 version.
In the second photograph, you can see Tennyson's poem, The Lady of Shalott, has been displayed on the wall. Then at the lower left of the photo is a darker area which I believe is the large, round, black cushioned seat in the middle of the room.

"Waterhouse owned a copy of the collected works of Tennyson, the pages of which are covered in sketches for future illustrations. [his lovely book is on display as you enter The Lady of Shalott room] He painted three episodes from this poem: the Lady setting out for Camelot in her boat in 1888; the Lady as she turns to look at Lancelot through her window, 1894; and “I Am Half-Sick of Shadows” in which the Lady sits wistfully before her weaving loom in 1915." - Cheryl Van-Buskirk & Emily Rice

Seeing all of the paintings together was such a wonderful experience. I hope to share more about my trip to Montréal and the Musée des Beaux Arts in another posting.
If you haven't already read it, Matthew Innis has written a very interesting and informative piece about the exhibition: A Visit with Waterhouse: My trip to Montreal.

Photographs courtesy:
1. wallyg - taken August, 2009
2. proacguy1
3. & 4. Photos taken by Cathy
5. A.M. Kuchling - taken October, 2009 (the sign wasn't there when I visited in December)
6. cbransto
7. Photo taken by Cathy
8. Brave soul 1
9. Brave soul 2

John William Waterhouse - Camellias

2009-12-24T17:55:00.004-06:00

A favourite work by Waterhouse .... a beauty for all seasons. :)
All the best to you and yours!

Wishing you the very best of the Season !

2009-12-24T17:40:00.006-06:00

Happy Holidays

2009-12-24T17:07:00.009-06:00

Wishing you much joy and happiness!

Albert Chevalier Tayler (British, 1862-1925) - The Christmas Tree
Aileen Robertson Mackinnon (British, b. 1901) - Cairn
Viggo Johansen (Danish, 1851-1935) - Happy Christmas

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Adoration

2009-12-24T03:43:00.006-06:00

from The Seed of David
The Adoration, 1858-64
Watercolour on paper
Information from the Tate Collection:

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, ca. 1445-1510)

2009-12-24T02:57:00.017-06:00

The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child, about 1490
National Galleries of Scotland

Exhibition - Städel Museum
Through 28 February 2010

Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, 1406–1469)

2009-12-24T01:20:00.008-06:00

1. Madonna delle Roccie
2. Maria mit dem Kinde
Wikipedia

Rossetti and Melozzo Da Forli

2009-12-23T01:50:00.022-06:00

I love looking at these together. Different ... but, oh the faces and the colours ... I can't help but wonder if the angel's face might have been an inspiration for Rossetti - or do they just seem quite similar?

Melozzo Da Forli, Angel playing the tambourine, circa 1480
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hanging the Mistletoe, 1860

Fragments of frescos painted by Melozzo Da Forli circa 1480

2009-12-23T01:06:00.008-06:00

Vatican Museums, Pinacoteca, Room IV

List of works in Room IV

Photographs courtesy:
1. & 3. Kwong Yee Cheng
2. IRIS' Travelogue
4. Cuadero de viaje
5. WVJazzman

Melozzo Da Forli (Italian, ca. 1438-1494)

2009-12-23T01:02:00.005-06:00

Angel Musicians:
Angel playing the lute
Angel playing the viola
Angel playing the tambourine
Fresco fragments circa 1480
"The painting[s] [are] by Melozzo da Forlì, an Italian Renaissance painter, the first who practised foreshortening with much success and one of the most outstanding fresco painters of the 15th century."
These are included in the 14 fragments that can be seen at the Vatican Museums, Pinacoteca, Room IV.
More information is found at this link.

Rossetti's - Hanging the Mistletoe

2009-12-22T16:36:00.003-06:00

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Hanging the Mistletoe
oil on panel
32.7 x 27 cm
date on image: Xmas 1860-61
(Rossetti Archive)

Winter Beauty

2009-12-22T13:37:00.006-06:00

yes ... it's a heart :)

Photos courtesy vtpeacenik

Celebrating the Winter Solstice

2009-12-22T12:07:00.016-06:00

1. Photo courtesy David Brizendine - Winter Solstice 2008
2. From the video collection of hawthyn - Ring out, ring solstice bells
3. Photo courtesy JMR71 - 'Calling the Dawn'

A lovely Solstice photo from Scotland courtesy northstar37
More

2009-12-22T11:31:00.011-06:00

2008 Winter Solstice Lantern Festival in Vancouver, BC
Photos courtesy ItzaFineDay - 2nd link

Happy Winter Solstice!

2009-12-21T21:46:00.011-06:00

As we await the return of the light.

*******
Lovely words from Gorsedd Arberth

It is now the marker of time marks time
When light shifts in the dark
Upon itself and ebb turns back
To flow as the land lies stark

More wonderful posts shared at Gorsedd Arberth

Solstice sunset photo courtesy BarneyF

The Sacred Mistletoe

2009-12-21T19:01:00.028-06:00

For they believe that whatever grows on these trees is sent from heaven, and is a sign that the tree has been chosen by the gods themselves. The mistletoe is very rarely to be met with; but when it is found, they gather it with solemn ceremony. This they do above all on the sixth day of the moon, from whence they date the beginnings of their months, of their years, and of their thirty years cycle, because by the sixth day the moon has plenty of vigour and has not run half its course.
After due preparations have been made for a sacrifice and a feast under the tree, they hail it as the universal healer and bring to the spot two white bulls, whose horns have never been bound before. A priest clad in a white robe climbs the tree and with a golden sickle cuts the mistletoe, which is caught in a white cloth. ... - from 'Naturalis Historia' (XVI, 95) by Pliny the Elder

When cut down at the Winter Solstice as the sun is reborn, this divine spark of the gods is drawn down to earth symbolizing the moment of conception, although the plant is prevented from actually touching the ground and its sacredness preserved by catching it in a white cloth.
The golden sickle used to cut the mistletoe represents both the sun and the moon - a union of male and female energies. The gold symbolizing the sun and the shape of the crescent blade resembling the quarter moon. ...
Pliny also tells of the sacrifice of two white bulls and, in common with the oak, the bull is sacred to Taranis. Whilst the bull (like his zodiacal counterpart Taurus) is an earth symbol, his horns reach skywards in the shape of a crescent moon, linking earth with the realm of the gods. - Steve Tatler

1. Henri Paul Motte, Druids Cutting the Mistletoe on the Sixth Day of the Moon, circa 1890-1900 [more information from ArtMagick]
2. [information unknown]
3. E. A. Hornel and George Henry, The Druids Bringing in the Mistletoe, 1890
In the Artist's Footsteps

Image to the left is from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

The Druids Bringing in the Mistletoe will be included in the Glasgow Boys exhibition to be shown 30 October 2010 until 23 January 2011 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

J. W. Waterhouse Exhibition - Garden of Enchantment

2009-12-13T11:17:00.004-06:00

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
John William Waterhouse
Garden of Enchantment

The exhibition will be at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
through 7 February 2010.

This past summer it was at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. (look mid-way along right side of page for links)

The exhibition was first shown at the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands.

Lots of interesting information to explore
about Waterhouse and the exhibition!

****************

TV advertisement from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Review from The Art Tribune

I'll be away for a few days ... hoping you have a wonderful week!

John William Waterhouse

2009-12-13T11:16:00.001-06:00

The Enchanted Garden

A Tale from the Decameron

johnwilliamwaterhouse.com

Lady Lever Art Gallery - The Enchanted Garden & A Tale from the Decameron

Transcript of Podcasts about A Tale from the Decameron and The Enchanted Garden from National Museums Liverpool.

Fairy Starlight

2009-12-12T10:13:00.002-06:00

Kate Greenaway, R.I. (1846-1901)

2009-12-11T19:05:00.002-06:00

Christmas Eve: A visit from Father Christmas
signed with initials 'K.G.' (lower right)
pencil and watercolour heightened with white
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm.)

from Jane Austin's World
Wikipedia

Helen Jackson (British, ?-1911)

2009-12-10T21:29:00.004-06:00

1. Portrait of a lady, bust-length, wearing a red bead necklace
signed and dated 'Helen Jackson/1892' (lower right)
pencil and watercolour
20¼ x 16¼ in. (51.3 x 41.3 cm.)
2. She is Witty to Talk With (detail)
(information not available)

Harry Bright (British, 1846-1895)

2009-12-10T20:18:00.007-06:00

1. Welcome shelter
signed and dated 1876,
watercolour and pencil heightened with bodycolour,
42.7 x 31 cm (16 3/4 x 12 1/4 in)
2. Red squirrels eating nuts on a snow covered branch before an audience of blue tits and a robin
pencil and watercolour and heightened with white
11¾ x 15½in. (29.8 x 39.5cm.)
3. A robin and greenfinches in a snowy hedgerow
watercolour and pencil heightened with bodycolour,
41.5 x 28.7 cm (16 3/8 x 11 3/8 in)

Frank Wilbert Stokes (1858-1955)

2009-12-09T21:31:00.006-06:00

1. Fan-shaped Aurora Australis,
Emperor Penguin in the foreground
signed and dated 'F.W. Stokes/1915' (lower right)
oil on canvas
29¾ x 35¾in. (75.6 x 90.8cm.)
2. Midnight Sun, Inglefield Gulf, Greenland, 1893
signed and dated 'F.W. Stokes/94' (lower left)
oil on canvas
22 x 33in. (55.8 x 83.8cm.)
3. Penguins on an Ice Floe, Antarctica
oil on canvas, unframed
17¾ x 29¾in. (45.1 x 75.6cm.)

Polar Bears and Polar Bears International

2009-12-09T01:57:00.004-06:00

A card from Matoska Trading Company

The wonderful Polar Bear and Polar Bears International -
"Conservation through Research and Education"

A Polar Bears Tale - Climate Conference in town

Katherine Cameron, R.W.S. R.E. (Scottish, 1874-1965)

2009-12-09T01:01:00.013-06:00

The Legend of the Christmas Rose
An illustration for Amy Steedman's Legends and Stories of Italy

"And now when winter-time comes and the days are dark and the nights are long, when the snow covers up all the sleeping flowers and the Christmas bells ring out, the white blossoms of the child's flowers appear above the cold, dark earth. We call them the Christmas roses now, in memory of the little one who had no other gift to offer that first Christmas morning, but the gift of her sorrowful tears." - from Legends and Stories of Italy
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons [1909].

Information about Katherine Cameron from Calton Gallery, Edinburgh.

Edward Burne-Jones

2009-12-08T19:29:00.010-06:00

1. The Angel
"Painting of angel dressed in blue, playing a flageolet"
(c) Glasgow City Council (Museums)
2. & 3. Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford
"East window in the south choir aisle by Morris & Co
designed by Burne-Jones 1877-8"
Photographs by Eric Hardy
close-up photos from others ...
link
link

[A few new links and images were added to Edward Burne-Jones - those lovely angels that was posted on Monday. :)]

Edward Burne-Jones - Angels

2009-12-08T01:25:00.013-06:00

"The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul."
(Edward Burne-Jones - from The essays of Oscar Wilde)

"For every locomotive they build," vowed artist Edward Burne-Jones, "I shall paint another angel." - from an article by Terri Windling

Angel Playing a Flageolet

An Angelic Choir - 'chiaroscuro's' Art Album

Edward Burne-Jones - those lovely angels

2009-12-07T23:51:00.045-06:00

An article written by Fiona MacCarthy

Wings of desire - The Guardian, Saturday 23 December 2006

Christmas would not be Christmas without a Burne-Jones angel. Archangels. Guardian angels. Ministering angels, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, leading the blind. Annunciation angels with blush-pink wings. Joyful angelic cheerleaders, the Angeli Laudantes: angels playing trumpets, angels swinging censers, angels striking bells. Even in a multi-faith, multicultural society, Christmas comes in with a rush of angel wings.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones was one of the very great Victorian artists, adored in aesthetic circles for his charm and idiosyncratic wit, made a baronet by Gladstone, given a memorial service in Westminster Abbey on the personal intervention of the Prince of Wales. He was the first artist ever to be honoured in this way. His first recorded design for a stained-glass window, an annunciation scene, is dated 1857, when he was in his 20s. "I must by now have designed enough to fill Europe," he groaned as he designed his final hosts of angels, for Gladstone's memorial in the church at Hawarden, Wales, in 1898.

What kind of angels are they? Forget Rubens's dimpled cherubs or the saccharine angels in Guido Reni paintings. These are dignified, mysterious, medieval Christian apparitions, close in tenor to the angels in the illuminated manuscripts. Burne-Jones and his friend William Morris studied avidly in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Burne-Jones was not himself a Christian. Although he had once been intended for the church, like so many young intellectuals of his generation he had lost his faith and despised the church establishment: "Belong to the Church of England? Put your head in a bag!" But he did not lose his love of what he termed "Christmas carol Christianity", its directness and its clarity, its colour and its joy.

At the same time, Burne-Jones angels are Italianate angels. In the 1860s and 1870s he made four Italian journeys, one of them in company with Ruskin, covering the ground from Venice to Florence, from Assisi to Rome, absorbing the art and architecture of the Tuscan hill towns that from then on began to infiltrate his paintings.

Burne-Jones threw himself into the art of the Renaissance, enraptured by Bellini, Mantegna and Botticelli. From the 1870s this changed the whole direction of his work. His angels became quasi-Botticellian, girlish golden Primaveras of extraordinary sweetness, purity and promise. The great series 'Angels of the Hierarchy', designed by Burne-Jones for the south transept window of Jesus College, Cambridge - Seraphim, Cherubim, Throni, Potentates, Dominationes and the rest - are almost Michelangelesque in their power and complexity, in the sheer mouvementé quality of their draughtsmanship. When William Morris designed angels, they were often rather stiff ones, all too English. Burne-Jones angels can be recognised by their fluidity.

The most dramatic and convincing is the bearer of the news in his painting 'The Annunciation', now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight, Merseyside. This astonishing winged figure in her alluringly knotted drapery delivers the announcement still suspended in mid-air to an anxious-looking Virgin - for whom Virginia Woolf's mother, Julia Jackson, was Burne-Jones's model for the head. The Virgin stands in an interior so Italian in its detail it could be set in the V&A's current exhibition, 'At Home in Renaissance Italy' [2006-2007].

But of course these are also Victorian angels. The ministering angels, in particular, give the impression of being newly married, docile, even-tempered, thoughtful, advertising the popular Victorian concept of the angel in the house. Burne-Jones was a romantic, given to wild passions for beautiful, just-nubile, well-bred young girls, and many of his angels are interchangeable with the real-life society girls he depicted, as in his chorus line of beauty descending the marble stairway in that wonderful painting, 'The Golden Stairs'. These were the angels of the aesthetic movement, satirised by Gilbert & Sullivan in 'Patience', accused of being dressed in "tinfoil night-gowns". Greenery-yallery girls. Burne-Jones's angels might be viewed as the posh hippies of their time.

These are angels of his own desire, and there is a kind of androgyny about them. The golden-haired, bright-visaged daughters of the souls, the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, could as well be the decorative Florentine youths to whose beauty Burne-Jones was endlessly susceptible. Though not overtly homosexual himself, his circle was a wide one and included Oscar Wilde and the pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon, whom Burne-Jones continued to befriend after Solomon's arrest in a London public lavatory made him a virtual outcast and ended his career. Connoisseurs of male eroticism hung their Burne-Jones pictures alongside their Simeon Solomons. His angels have a sexual ambivalence.

In 'Love Leading the Pilgrim', the painting now in Tate Britain over which Burne-Jones laboured for two decades, Love appears both as a Christian angel and as Cupid, a winged love god of classical antiquity. Love is the retriever, leading the hunched figure of the pilgrim through the thicket, out towards the hallowed plain. The dark wings of the angel are accurately pre-Raphaelite in detailing - authentic eagle's wings. It is a strange and sombre picture, and utterly compelling. After a long period of derision and neglect, Burne-Jones has rightly been re-emerging as the most powerful of all pre-Raphaelite artists, a major influence on both European symbolism and 20th-century modernist art.

He was a pioneer, cutting across the boundaries between so-called fine and decorative arts. With his lifelong collaborator, William Morris, he was one of the co-founders, in 1861, of the decorating firm that became Morris & Co. From then on there was almost an industry in angels as Burne-Jones's designs, interpreted by professional craftsmen in stained glass, mosaic, embroidery and tapestry, were redistributed and multiplied.

In all, several thousand stained-glass windows were made by Morris & Co in their specialist workshops. The great majority of figures in these windows were based on full-size cartoons provided by Burne-Jones. The artist, a compulsive joker, lamented that at £200 per large-scale window he was being grotesquely underpaid, and perhaps he had a point. His biblical scenes, his panoplies of saints and angels, were endlessly recycled, ordered from the catalogue presented to Morris & Co clients. A Burne-Jones 'Annunciation', for example, first designed in 1873 for Jesus College, Cambridge, was reused over the next 20 years in churches in Bolton, Broughton, Chelsea, Jersey, Kirkcaldy, Plymouth, Speldhurst, Tamworth, Whitton in Shropshire and even in New York.

His angels were still appearing decades after both his own death and William Morris's in memorial windows for the fallen of the first world war. These reappearances, far from detracting from their value, make them more moving. New colourings, new backgrounds, new architectural settings mean that these figures, though arrestingly familiar, are actually never quite the same. Morris & Co windows have become part of the fabric of the nation, the absolute high point of Victorian church art.

In 1878 Burne-Jones designed two pairs of angels - 'Angeli Ministrantes' and 'Angeli Laudantes' - to be made in stained glass for Salisbury Cathedral. He invoiced these as "four colossal and sublime figures of Angels", which indeed they are. In the early 1890s these designs were adapted to make tapestries. William Morris was by then reviving rare techniques of high-warp tapestry weaving in his works at Merton Abbey on the banks of the Wandle. Burne-Jones's Angeli were part of Morris's "bright dream" to resuscitate the neglected art of tapestry in Britain. Though the Angeli panels were designed as a pair, with linking narratives of colouring and symbolism, they spent the next century apart, the 'Angeli Laudantes' in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the 'Angeli Ministrantes' in various private collections lost to sight. They were only finally reunited in 1993, when the V&A was able to purchase the 'Angeli Ministrantes' through the National Art Collections Fund. The tapestries now hang together, one pair of blue-winged angels, one pair with rose-tinged feathers, standing in an English garden of pinks, harebells and little lilies. They represent Burne-Jones at his most magnificently weird.

In the mid-1890s the Morris & Co weavers were at work on even more ambitious Burne-Jones designs for a series of six Arthurian tapestries for Stanmore Hall. The epic San Graal cycle tells the story of the knights' quest for the holy grail, the narrative Burne-Jones had loved from boyhood. In this late Victorian masterwork, Burne-Jones angels loom large as the keepers of the mystic cup, believed to have been used by Christ at the Last Supper and the container of blood shed by Christ on the cross. A blue-winged angel, sweet but firm, bars the door of the chapel containing the grail to Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine, knights unfit to enter. Burne-Jones described these knights as "eaten up by the world - handsome gentlemen set on this world's glory". Arthurian versions of the late Victorian cad.

In the culminating San Graal episode, 'The Attainment', there are two groups of these angels, all central to the action. Three authoritative angels, robed and bearing sword and staffs, keep Sir Bors and Sir Percival well outside the chapel, permitted to view the grail only from afar. Three more angels are seated inside, behind the altar, waiting to welcome the pure-in-heart Sir Galahad. This was the period when Burne-Jones's wife, Georgiana, was entering local politics, standing for election in Rottingdean, Sussex. Many of Burne-Jones's angels have a look of Georgiana. In the San Graal tapestries it is these confident, winged beauties, like celestial policewomen, who have the upper hand.

The ultimate Christmas carol angel is the one in 'Adoration of the Magi', originally designed by Burne-Jones as a tapestry for Exeter College, Oxford, and since then reproduced on many million Christmas cards. The Adoration proved the most commercially successful of all Morris & Co tapestries, eight versions being eventually woven, one of which is now in Eton College Chapel, one in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, and one in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Burne-Jones also made a large-scale watercolour painting of the subject, which was given the new title 'The Star of Bethlehem'. He laboured on it in his garden studio in Kensington, using a ladder to reach the upper areas of the composition. He complained that the painting was physically tiring: "Up my steps and down, and from right to left. I have journeyed as many miles already as ever the kings travelled." A contemporary critic praised the "strange and radiant" angel figure in the centre of the grouping, slightly upraised beside the kings bearing their presents, relating it to Burne-Jones's "own peculiar vein of mysticism". Interrogated by a bold young girl as to whether he believed in the scene he had depicted in 'The Star of Bethlehem', he replied: "It is too beautiful not to be true."

All his life he adored angels with much of the intensity with which he worshipped women. They were central to his oeuvre and his philosophy of wonder. He worked them and reworked them in the outlandish feathery splendour that could sometimes make them look a bit Folies Bergère. A famous photographic portrait taken by Barbara Leighton at the time he was working on 'The Star of Bethlehem' shows the elderly artist balanced on the ladder with his huge resplendent Christmas angel in the background. It seems as if Burne-Jones is about to be swept up in her great wings to join the heavenly host. - Fiona MacCarthy

from the Guardian

1. A card from Carlisle Mind
2. The Annunciation
3. Angeli Laudantes
4. Angeli Ministrantes
5. The Attainment (detail)
6. Adoration of the Magi (detail)
7. Barbara Leighton Sotheby - Sir Edward Burne-Jones

John Melhuish Strudwick (British, 1849-1937)

2009-12-06T00:35:00.005-06:00

'Thy Music, faintly falling, dies away,
Thy dear eyes dream that Love will live for aye'
G.F. Bodley
signed with initials and dated 'JMS.1893' (on a cartouche, lower left)
oil on canvas
30½ x 15½ in. (77.5 x 39.4 cm.)
Catalogue notes

More works by Strudwick at ArtMagick

From the video collection of vereiana

John Melhuish Strudwick - A Few Studies

2009-12-06T00:32:00.002-06:00

1. Study of a young girl in profile to the right
signed with monogram (lower right)
pencil, on prepared paper
14 1/8 x 9¾ in. (36 x 24.7 cm.) - Catalogue notes
2. Head of a woman
pencil
9 7/8 x 7½ in. (25.1 x 19 cm.)
"It has been suggested that the model is Maria Zambaco who sat for Burne-Jones and his circle, including Strudwick." - Catalogue notes
3. Study of a figure
with inscription 'J.M. Strudwick 'Study' for ? PCW.' (lower right)
pencil
14 x 10 in. (35.5 x 25.5 cm.)
4. A study of four figures
pencil and bodycolour
11.5 x 11 cm. (4 3/4 x 4 1/4 in.)

Snow, Ice and Fun

2009-12-05T19:37:00.012-06:00

1. Louis Tauzin (c.1845-1914)
Les Vosges
lithograph in colours, 1913, printed by F.Champenois, Pairis, backed on linen
41½ x 29in. (105 x 74cm.)
2. H. Charles
Panorama des Modes, 1895
lithograph in colours, 1895, printed by H Lefèvre, Paris, backed on linen
19½ x 31in. (50 x 79cm.)
3. Kosel
Sun, Snow and Fun in Austria
lithograph in colours, printed by Brüder Rosenbaum, Vienna, backed on linen
37 x 25in. (94 x 64cm.)
4. Jules Abel Faivre (1867-1945)
Sports D'Hiver Chamonix
lithograph in colours, 1905, printed by J.Barreau, Paris, backed on linen
43 x 31in. (109 x 79cm.)
6. Edmund Welf
Winter in Switzerland
lithograph in colours, 1945, printed by J.C.Müller, Zürich, not backed
40 x 25in. (102 x 64cm.)

George Henry - Poinsettia

2009-12-04T11:41:00.005-06:00

oil on canvas
125.5 by 177 cm., 60 by 69 3/4 in.
Brief catalogue notes

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale - My Last Duchess

2009-12-04T11:24:00.004-06:00

Christopher Wood Gallery
brown ink and watercolour heightened with bodycolour
12 ¾ x 8 ¾ ins (32.4 x 22.3 cms)

Patten Wilson, 1868-1928 - Winter

2009-12-04T11:08:00.004-06:00

The art of Patten Wilson

Eugène Grasset - Décembre

2009-12-03T11:53:00.001-06:00

Olga Alexandrovna Romanov (Russian, 1882 - 1960)

2009-12-03T11:05:00.013-06:00

Floral Interior with Christmas Tree
signed 'Olga' (lower left)
watercolour on heavy paper
11 x 8.3/8in. (28 x 21.4cm.)

Information about Olga from an auction held by Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers (date unknown)

Walter Crane (British, 1845-1915)

2009-12-03T10:03:00.010-06:00

The Masque of the Four Seasons

The Garden

Garden in Snow

More images, biography and poetry from ArtMagick

[Garden in Snow - 1908, watercolour and bodycolour on blue/green paper
14 x 19 7/8 in. (35.5 x 50.5 cm.)]

Edward Robert Hughes - Heart of Snow

2009-12-01T12:45:00.003-06:00

ArtMagick

John Anster Fitzgerald - Fairies in the Snow

2009-12-01T12:30:00.009-06:00

Fairies in the Snow (and details)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic and with scratching out
22 1/8 x 30½ in. (56.1 x 77.5 cm.)
Catalogue notes

John Gerrard Keulemans - Frozen Out

2009-12-01T12:13:00.003-06:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gerrard_Keulemans
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/ornithology/exhibit/exhibit5d.htm

Edward Burne-Jones - Study for a girl watering roses

2009-11-29T02:06:00.000-06:00

"A figure in this pose was drawn by Burne-Jones in the mid-1860s, but the present drawing would seem to date from some years later. It is evidently a form of decoration, perhaps needlework, a field with which he became involved in the 1870s when he was asked to supply designs for the Royal School of Art Needlework, founded in 1872.
Alexander Ionides, the drawing's first owner, was the younger brother of Constantine Ionides of the Victoria and Albert Museum bequest, and himself a passionate collector. On his marriage in 1875 he took over his parents' house, 1 Holland Park, and proceeded to turn it into one of the great 'aesthetic' houses of the day, comparable to that created at the same period by F.R. Leyland at 49 Prince's Gate. Burne-Jones was one of the many artists and designers who contributed to it. He was responsible for four of the paintings, and may have made this sketch for some detail of the decoration." - Catalogue notes

Study for a girl watering roses (and detail)
inscribed with colour notes (lower centre, in the margin)
pencil, fragmentary watermark
57/8 x 45/8 in. (15 x 11.7 cm.)

John Henry Dearle, 1860–1932 - Greenery

2009-11-29T00:49:00.008-06:00

Greenery (and details)
English, 1892
Designed by: John Henry Dearle, 1860–1932
For: Morris & Co., English
Wool and mohair; tapestry weave

Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Victorian Web

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893) - Portrait of the artist's wife, Theodosia as Ophelia

2009-11-28T22:49:00.009-06:00

"This painting dates from early in Grimshaw's career, when he was experimenting with many different types of subject: the moonlight scenes with which he made his name did not appear in his oeuvre until 1867. Grimshaw married his cousin Frances Theodosia Hubbarde, daughter of James Dibdin Hubbarde, editor of the Wakefield Journal, in 1858. In 1861 he resigned as clerk to the Great Northern Railway and devoted himself to painting, principally still lives of fruit and blossom on mossy banks. In 1862 he held his first known exhibition, and in 1863, the year this picture was painted, he first visited the Lake District, painting 'Nab Scar', a tour de force of Pre-Raphaelite technique, in 1864. Both in terms of technique and subject matter, the present painting also betrays his interest in the Pre-Raphaelites: 'Ophelia' (now in Tate Britain) was famously painted by Millais in 1852 and was widely reproduced in engraving." - Lot notes

Portrait of the artist's wife, Theodosia, as Ophelia
signed and dated 'J. A. Grimshaw 1863' (lower left)
oil on board
18 x 12 in. (45.7 x 30.5 cm.)

ArtMagick

Thomas Benjamin Kennington (British, 1856-1916)

2009-11-28T21:11:00.008-06:00

A Polar Bears Tale

Victorian Paintings

1. Autumn
signed and dated 'T.B. Kennington 1900' (lower right)
oil on canvas
22 x 18 in. (56 x 46 cm.)
2. The Glory of Womanhood
signed and dated 'T.B.Kennington/4' (lower right)
oil on canvas
60¼ x 39¼ in. (153 x 99.6 cm.)
3. The Letter
signed and dated 'T.B.Kennington 06' (lower right)
oil on canvas
30 1/8 x 25 in. (76.5 x 63.5 cm.)
4. The Picture Book
signed 'T.B. Kennington' (lower right)
oil on board
15¾ x 20 in. (40 x 50.8 cm.)
5. At the kitchen table
signed and dated 'T.B. Kennington 12' (lower right) and numbered 'No.3' (on the reverse)
oil on board
14 x 10½ in. (35.6 x 26.6 cm.)

William Huggins (British, 1820-1884)

2009-11-28T19:28:00.026-06:00

"Liverpool born William Huggins was perhaps one of the most adept, original and popular animal painters of the Victorian Age. His interest in animals led to him to study in local farmyards, following Wombwell’s Menagerie (a travelling animal circus) and spending hours in Chester zoo, particularly with the lions and tigers, which were to become important elements of his historical and literary paintings. He became an associate, then member, of the Liverpool Academy in the late 1840s, but resigned in 1856, perhaps as a result of his growing association with the early Pre-Raphaelites.
Huggins skill at capturing the spirit and character of his animal subjects was second perhaps only to Landseer. In his oils he often used a heavy white ground and transparent pigments, creating an effect of luminescence ... He was a man of great character, described on his gravestone near Chester as: ‘… a just and compassionate man, who would neither tread on a worm nor cringe to an emperor." - Lot notes

1. Self portrait of the artist with his chickens
signed and dated 'W. Huggins/1858' (lower right)
oil on canvas
21 x 17 in. (53.3 x 43.2 cm.)
2. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck
signed and dated 1860
oil on board
11 x w: 15 in (27.9 x w: 38.1 cm)
3. In The Cool Shade
signed and dated 1870; bears labels verso, and exhibition label from the Walker Art Gallery, oil on board,
47 x 62cm (18 1/2 x 24 7/16 in).
4. The Stoic
signed and dated 'W Huggins/1852' (lower left)
oil on board
63 x 77 cm. (24 3/4 x 30 1/4 in.)
5. Study of a terrier, sitting before a Cantonese famille rose vase
signed and dated 'W.Huggins/1868' (lower right)
black, white and red chalk and watercolour, heightened with touches of white, on buff paper
21 x 17 in. (54.6 x 43.2 cm.)
6. Portrait of a Newfoundland (detail)
signed and dated 'W. Huggins/1869.' (upper left)
oil on board
15 x 12 1/2 in. (38 x 32 cm.)

Virgilio Tojetti (Italian, 1851-1901)

2009-11-27T00:56:00.003-06:00

"Tojetti, who was born in Rome, studied with his father, the painter Domenico Tojetti, and in Paris with Gérôme and Bouguereau. In 1870 he immigrated to America and spent much of the rest of his life living and working in San Francisco and New York City. ..." - Fletcher/Copenhaver Fine Art

1. A cozy corner
signed and dated 'V. Tojetti 85' (lower right)
oil on canvas laid down on board
33 3/4 x 46 1/2in
2. A spring maiden
signed and dated 'V. Tojetti 91' (upper right)
oil on canvas
20 x 15 7/8 in. (50.8 x 40.3 cm.)
3. The muse of music with dancing putti
signed 'V. Tojetti' (lower right)
oil on canvas
21 1/4 x 14 1/4in (54 x 36.2cm)
4. Brown Haired Beauty
signed 'V. Tojetti/92'
oil on canvas
20 x 16in. (51 x 41.5cm.)

Michelangelo Meucci

2009-11-27T00:22:00.003-06:00

1. Still life of summer fruit and vegetables
signed and inscribed 'M Meucci Firenze' (lower right)
oil on canvas, in a carved Florentine wood stained frame
33½ x 23¾ in. (85 x 60.3 cm.)
2. Songbirds in a tree
signed 'M. Meucci' (lower right)
oil on canvas, unframed
39½ x 15½ in. (100.3 x 39.3 cm.)
3. Tulips, roses, magnolias, lilies, pelagoniums, convulvulous, forget-me -nots and other summer flowers in a basket on a plinth in a forest (detail)
signed, inscribed and dated 'M. Meucci- Firenze -1875-' (lower right)
oil on canvas, oval
29½ x 24¼ in. (74.9 x 61.6 cm.)

Michelangelo Meucci (Italian, 1840-1890)

2009-11-27T00:16:00.007-06:00

1. The anxious mother
signed, dated and inscribed 'M. Meucci -1885- Firenze' (lower right)
oil on canvas
33 1/4 x 23 3/4 in (85.7 x 59.4cm)

2. The cardinal's nest
signed, inscribed and dated '-M. Meucci-1889- -Firenze-' (lower right)
oil on board
13 1/8 x 10½ in. (33.5 x 26.7 cm.)

3. signed and inscribed and dated 'M Meucci Firenze/1871' (lower right)
oil on board
11 x 9 in. (28 x 22.8 cm.)

National Museum of the American Indian

2009-11-26T00:13:00.013-06:00

National Museum of the American Indian

Online Exhibitions

Identity by Design - Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women's Dresses

First American Art
The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Art

Beauty Surrounds Us

The Language of Native American Baskets, from the weaver's view

Listening

Autumn - Connecticut

2009-11-25T22:23:00.010-06:00

Courtesy johnjmurphyiii - Flickr

Abbott Graves - Roses

2009-11-25T20:24:00.010-06:00

1. Still Life
2. In a Field of Flowers (detail)
3. Still life with roses

Abbott Fuller Graves (American, 1859-1936)

2009-11-25T20:00:00.012-06:00

"Abbott Graves (1859-1936), born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, studied at MIT before going to Paris to work under Cormon, Laurens, and Gervais. He taught in Boston before opening his own art school there in 1891, but moved his school to Kennebunkport [Maine]. He frequently traveled from his New England homes to Paris, and from 1902-1905, worked as an illustrator for French magazines. Graves exhibited at the NAD (1892), PAFA (1895, 1913-4), Paris Salon (1899), Boston AC (1895-1909), and the Expo des Beaux Arts, Paris (1905). Best known for his floral still lifes, he also produced impressionistic landscapes and detailed genre paintings depicting scenes from rural life." - Cowan's Auctions, Inc

1. Near Kennebunkport
2. Poppies (detail)