Samuel Palmer, Simeon Solomon and the Camden Town Group at RAMM, Exeter

Samuel Palmer - Self Portrait

The new selection from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum’s art collection on display in the downstairs gallery includes some paintings which will be familiar to Exeter citizens who have visited regularly over the years. But there are also some new acquisitions which are being displayed for the first time. Chief amongst these is Samuel Palmer’s After the Storm, a late watercolour from 1861. This was painted on the North Devon coast, with a perspective looking out from Lee Bay. The mountainous outcropping of Castle Rock rises above the sheer cliff face in the middle distance, like a shattered tower keep at the foot of the Valley of Rocks, which leads up to the clifftop town of Lynton. The jutting headland of Foreland Point protrudes in the distance, a more solid echo of the clouds hanging above. These provide an element of Romantic sublimity, a touch of Alpine awe found closer to home. Palmer uses magic hour tones to lend his seascape a stained glass luminosity, the deep blue of the sea contrasting with peaches and saffron yellows of the after sunset horizon with which it is edged. This colour saturated seascape has a melodramatic narrative imposed upon it, as if Palmer were trying to bring his work into accord with Victorian pictorial conventions. A ship has foundered on the rocks, and a lifeboat is being heaved across the shore towards the sea, its crew preparing to row out and rescue any survivors still clinging to the wreckage. One of the lifeboatmen is embracing his young son as he is called by another young man whose hand is raised, summoning him to join the vessel as it is launched into the breaking waves. His wife stands to the side, body tensed with anxious anticipation, hands nervously wrung or firmly clasped in fervent, supplicatory prayer.

1861 was a terrible year for Palmer. His 19 year old son Thomas, to whom he had devoted all of his attention after the death of his daughter at the age of three, and in the face of his own stagnant artistic career, died after a short period of consumptive illness. It’s difficult not to see this tragedy reflected in the emotional parting of father and son which is the dramatic focus of After the Storm. The magic hour sunset light was typical of Palmer’s work, along with atmospheric moonlit night settings. There is, indeed, another late watercolour from 1865 with the title The Golden Hour. After the Storm, in common with the rest of his watercolour work from his middle and late periods, lacks the visionary intensity and sense of numinous presence characteristic of the paintings he produced whilst living in the North Kent village of Shoreham in the seven years between 1827-34. The Darent Valley, or the ‘valley of vision’ as he called it, provided him with the perfect stage backdrop for the realisation of his ideal spiritual landscapes. From it, he projected an Arcadia protectively bounded by the soft, feminine curves of sheltering hills and the rounded, piled up ranges of cumulus clouds, and lit by the silver sickle of a harvest moon, the copper disc of a lowering sun or the warm evening glow emanating from welcoming cottages and churches. These Edenic settings are peopled by figures languorously working in the fields, sheaving and bringing home the golden harvest or lounging about beneath bountifully burdened apple trees. It was a dream, of course, but a glorious one, a landscape suffused with what Palmer saw as a divine spirit. Unfortunately, his non-naturalistic, visionary paintings found no more favour with the public, patrons or the art establishment than had the work of his friend and inspiration William Blake (who came down to visit him in his Shoreham house towards the end of his life).

Scenes from the valley of vision - The Magic Apple Tree

Palmer saw his rural idyll as a retreat from the industrial expansion of the London on the outskirts of which he’d grown up. His solution was to look back to an idealised past, as it would be for the Pre-Raphaelites some years later. It was a past which included a reverence for old masters like Durer, Fra Angelico and Leonardo, soundtracked by Elizabethan English composers like Purcell, Tallis and Gibbons, and with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as its key literary work. But the ideal world which he constructed in his imagination and superimposed on his magical valley clashed badly with the distinctly unromantic realities of the rural labourer’s life in the early nineteenth century, which was a matter of grinding poverty and backbreaking toil rather than mystical communion with the cyclical progress of the seasons. The Captain Swing riots of 1830, a spontaneous reaction across Southern England to a failed harvest, depressed wages and the threat of widespread unemployment posed by new agricultural machinery, punctured Palmer’s dreamworld. Its radiance was already waning as the economic reality of his own commercial failure led to increasingly desperate poverty. An inheritance, which had sustained him for some time, had eventually dwindled away. Frustrated that visionary imagination, intensely personal artistic activity and spiritual idealism were turning out to be forces insufficient to transform his life and the indifferent world about him, he grew increasingly reactionary, retreating into narrow religious conservatism and judgemental hellfire condemnation. The 1832 Reform Act, which took tentative steps towards widening the voting franchise in the country beyond the landowning class, raised his ire and led to him proselytising for the Tories in apocalyptic ‘death of England’ fulminations which were dismissed, if they were noticed at all, as the ravings of a crank.

A Letter from India (1859)

He calmed down once he got married in 1837 to Hannah Linnell, by which time he had left the valley of vision and returned to London, having reluctantly relinquished his Darent dreaming. Hannah was the daughter of John Linnell, a successful and wealthy painter who was also a friend and patron of William Blake. Palmer had got to know Linnell in 1822, when he was still a teenager, and the older, well-established artist had guided him towards forming his own individual style and tastes. He was to prove something of an ogre as a father-in-law, however, loudly voicing his strongly held views and never forgetting to remind his son-in-law of his failure as an artist, both commercially and, in his opinion, aesthetically. Palmer remained humiliatingly beholden to him financially, and it was Linnell who funded a journey to Italy in the wake of the marriage. He steeped himself in the art of the area, consciously adapting his landscape painting to a more classical style, shorn of visionary stylisation, in an attempt to gain wider acceptance, and to hopefully earn a living with which he could support his family and gain some degree of independence. His watercolours from this point onward still have a vivid eye for the numinous qualities of landscape, but they are of a different, more prosaically Romantic tenor to those of the Sharpham period. In later years, he would look back with nostalgic yearning to his days in the magic valley of vision. His regular travels to Devon and the West Country, which began in 1833, suggest that here more than anywhere he managed to recapture something of the enchanted spirit which had illuminated those fast receding days. Paintings such as Mountain Landscape at Sunset (1859), The Good Farmer (1865) and The Dip of the Sun (1857) set the shadowed contours of Dartmoor landscapes before rubescent sunset sky backdrops. The Brother Home From the Sea (1863) and Robinson Crusoe Guiding His Raft Into the Creek (1850) locate their dramas of arrival or return in front of the limestone cliff arch of Durdle Door in Dorset, the jutting spar marking the furthest westward cusp of the curve of Lulworth Cove beyond. A Letter from India (1859), meanwhile, places another narrative within a North Devon landscape. Castle Rock and the Valley of Rocks are viewed from the opposite direction this time, and from an inland perspective. The sun sets below the ocean’s rim, setting the clouds on fire, and the crags of Lundy Island protrude above the watery horizon like the phantom city of Ys risen from the depths.

Simeon Solomon - Night (1890)

Another new painting on display is Simeon Solomon’s Night, a small watercolour painting from 1890. Solomon was born in 1840 in Bishopsgate in East London, on the edge of the Spitalfields area which was home to a large Jewish immigrant population in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Solomon was the youngest of 8 children born to orthodox Jewish parents. He clearly grew up in an environment which encouraged artistic expression, since his brother Abraham and sister Rebecca also had successful careers as painters. Night features a dreamy face in profile, eyes gazing outwards but lost in inner absorption. It is garlanded with light blue poppies, and a bird’s wing of the same colour sweeps back above the ear in a streamlined suggestion of flight. Liquid, light-blue swirls seemingly exhaled from nostrils or mouth, or inhaled from the intoxicating incense curling from the poppy’s dark stamen, are like the vapour trails of dream, and the contours of the billowing grey cloak the expanding shadow of night which this mythic figure trails in its wake. Solomon signs his picture with his characteristic serpentine double S transfixed with a straight line topped by a downward curve. Short strokes rising from this curve are suggestive of radiant flames or beams of light, as if this is some sort of ceremonial torch. It’s a signature symbol which looks like a tattoo. Night bears a definite resemblance to the work of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, both in the androgynous appearance of the dreamer, and in the poppy motif. This recalls Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, his memorial portrait of his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s muse, in which the poppies carried down by a bird alludes to her opium addiction. This is no incidental similarity, and certainly not a case of stylistic copying. Solomon had met Rossetti back in 1857, and through him got to know Burne-Jones and the poet Algernon Swinburne. All four were very close and in the early 60s were pioneers of the Aesthetic style, both in their art and in their lifestyles. The flow of influence and ideas between them was mutual and benefited all in finding their own individual style and thematic preoccupations. Burne-Jones may have partly derived the pallid, androgynous subjects of his later work from Solomon’s sensual dream figures. Of these figures, the poet and art critic Arthur Symons commented that ‘these faces are without sex’ and that ‘they have brooded among ghosts of passions till they have become the ghosts themselves’.

Solomon photographed by David Wilkie Wynfield

Solomon was particularly close to Swinburne, and illustrated two of his most controversial works, which remained unpublished until after his death: Lesbia Brandon, his erotic novel and The Flogging Block, his mock epic poetical paean to flagellation. Swinburne in turn wrote two more restrained poems inspired by Solomon: Erotion and At A Month’s End. It was Swinburne’s work in particular which was the object of a swingeing and hugely destructive attack on Rossetti’s circle by the critic Robert Buchanan in 1871, in which he decried what he described as ‘the fleshly school of poetry’ for its moral turpitude. The ruling powers, both cultural and political, were determined to clamp down on such liberal expressions of desire. The Paris Commune was enjoying its chaotic and brief anarchist ascendancy over the channel, and the Victorian establishment was not about to tolerate the assertion of individual liberties beyond those which were endorsed by the state, which might in turn expand into demands for greater political liberty. Burne-Jones had already experienced censorious ire over his painting Phyllis and Demophoön, which had been exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society and attacked for indecency. The dreamy homoeroticism of much of Solomon’s work, and the suggestive androgyny of his subjects (sometimes dressed in priestly robes) made them another target for the repressive forces of conservatism. His alliance with the flamboyant Swinburne, who was recklessly liable to flaunt his transgressions, increased his vulnerability to attack. In 1873, he was arrested for soliciting in a toilet near Oxford Street, found guilty of illegal homosexual acts, and sentenced to 18 months hard labour. Fortunately, an acquaintance managed to use his influence to suspend the sentence, and he got away with a period of police supervision. The man who he’d been having sex with, a 60 year old stablemaster, was not so lucky. He had to serve out his 18 month sentence, as well as facing the ruinous social repercussions.

Simeon Solomon - Self Portrait (1860)

The echoes of Oscar Wilde’s martyrdom in his 1895 trial are inescapable. Wilde espoused an aesthetic brand of utopian socialism in which the transformation of society would free people from the strictures of time and narrow convention and allow them to express themselves in whatever artistic manner suited them. The wide reporting of the details of the trial, and the repugnance which was stirred up destroyed his public persona as the spokesperson for Aestheticism, and left the movement, with its potentially radical worldview in ruins. Wilde served out his sentence, at least partly involving hard labour to which he was utterly unsuited, and it broke him physically and spiritually. Solomon may have evaded imprisonment and labour, but he still had to face the social opprobrium, verging on hatred, with which any gay man, designated a sexual criminal, was burdened at the time. He fled to France, but was arrested again for having sex with another man, and on this occasion did serve out a three month prison sentence. The year of 1873 opened an unbridgeable fissure in his life, and effectively ruined him. Galleries and patrons were no longer interested in his work, and his friends, the fickle and self-interested Swinburne included, turned their backs on him. Only Burne-Jones, outwardly less of a flamboyant rebel than Rossetti and Swinburne, stood by him. He turned more and more to alcohol, and fell into destitution, until finally he was obliged, in 1884, to take up residence in the St Giles Workhouse in Bloomsbury. At he lowest ebb, he was reduced to begging on the streets. But despite such desperate circumstances, he continued to work, producing small scale visionary paintings, and chalk sketches and pen and ink drawings of angelic heads. Night is one such. The artistic spirit simply refused to be crushed. A lot of the works from the 90s have a melancholy air of escaping into interior dreamworlds. Dreaming sleep is a recurring theme, retreating from harsh reality into blissful imaginative reverie. This is reflected in titles such as The Moon and Sleep, the Healing Night and Wounded Love, and Night Looking Upon Sleep her Beloved Child.

Solomon's grave in Willesden Jewish cemetary

Solomon’s art fitted in perfectly with the Decadent phase of the Aesthetic Movement, the fin-de-siecle 90s of the Yellow Book and the Savoy, the Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome. Solomon anticipated the spirit of this age, with his dreaming androgynes and blurring of the rigid parameters of sexuality. His influence can be seen not only in the palled figures of Burne-Jones, but in the limpid and dandyish fops and angels of Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley. Solomon was something of a cult figure to this new generation of aesthetes. He was collected by one of the chief intellectual forces behind Aestheticism, Walter Pater, and by its public figurehead, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was particularly upset to lose his Solomons in the sale of his belongings made necessary by the personal and cultural disaster of his trial. Solomon may have fallen on hard times, but his work retained a devoted coterie of admirers. There were tow major retrospectives in the immediate wake of his death: an exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London in 1906; and a book, Simeon Solomon: an Appreciation by Julia Ellison Ford, published in New York in 1908. It’s clear, therefore, that the value of his work was recognised at the time, even if it would subsequently fall into obscurity once more, eclipsed by his better known contemporaries, whose scandalous activities provided more colourfully and acceptably entertaining versions of the wild bohemian life. Obviously, such appreciation would have been of immeasurably greater use to Solomon had it been forthcoming whilst he was alive. But the lingering taint of scandal, together with his slow plummet into the netherworld of underclass destitution, meant that people were reluctant to be publicly associated with him, particularly after the Wilde trial. He died in 1905, still in the workhouse, five years after Wilde’s passing. It’s strange to think that his last works were produced whilst the first stirrings of twentieth century modernism were making themselves felt on the continent, currents which would first be recognised and drawn upon in nearby Bloomsbury and Fitzroy Street. Although Solomon had long since moved away from the Judaism which had formed the subject of many of his early paintings, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden, where you can seek out and lay a poppy or sunflower upon his grave.

Walter Bayes - Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front

Another new picture here is Walter Bayes’ large scale 1915 painting Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front. Bayes was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, which formed around Walter Sickert, its presiding elder. It replaced the Fitzroy Street Group, which had met and exhibited in the house and studio space of 19 Fitzroy Street in Fitzrovia, the area of narrow Georgian streets north of Soho. Bayes was the intellectual of the group, writing art criticism for the Athenaeum magazine and supporting himself by teaching at the Westminster School of Art. He was less in thrall to the colourful stylisation and formalism of the continental post-impressionists than the other Camden Town Group members, and painted in a more conservative academic style. He did follow his friend Sickert’s example in choosing unusual and sometimes counterintuitive perspectives for his subjects, however. But his Victoria Station might as well be in a different world form that portrayed by Camden Town fellow Charles Ginner in his 1913 painting Sunlit Square, Victoria Station (this produced in the same year as his Clayhidon, also on display in the RAMM gallery). Bayes’ palette is muted, in keeping with Sickert’s dark, smoke-stained non-primary colours from his dimly lit music hall and Mornington Crescent interiors. The stone arch beneath which the soldiers pass forms a foreground frame within a frame. It’s brooding mass, topped with an ornamental keystone, has the heaviness of ceremonial architecture, and there is a fateful sense that these men are filing through a gateway of doleful significance, a presentiment of memorial monuments later to be erected in their collective name. The drab olive khaki of their uniforms makes of them a largely unindividuated mass. Only the red coat of a woman walking arm in arm with her man and the small red circle of a cap which hangs on the barrel of an erect rifle stand out, adding defiant touches of distinctiveness, reminders of the world beyond military uniformity. The cap on the barrel is a poignant variant on the traditional nursery rhyme image of the knotted pack on the end of a stick thrust over the shoulder of the innocent traveller heading out into the world for the first time. The interior of the station into which the men are trooping in their haphazard group is dark and wreathed with ragged palls of locomotive steam. A suspended bulb provides an angular cone of dim illumination, which fails to penetrate beyond a narrow radius. Although perhaps viewing with the benefit of historical hindsight, there seems to be a highly symbolic dimension to the painting. These men are entering the baleful shadows of a netherworld which will carry them with regimented and timetabled efficiency beyond the land of the living.

Charles Ginner - Clayhidon

Two more familiar works from the museum’s collection on display are from fellow members of the Camden Town Group, the aforementioned Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan. Both are connected with Clayhidon Farm on the Blackdown Hills in Devon, near the Somerset border. Both stayed there in the years before the war, sketching and painting the farm buildings and routines and the surrounding landscape. These paintings are displayed in their centenary year, both having been created during a 1913 visit. Charles Ginner’s Clayhidon exhibits his carefully measured and meticulously built up technique and style. Fields, trees and the roofs, walls and chimneys of the farm buildings are marked out with thickly layered lines of paint, the whole composition divided into strongly distinct ‘pieces’; it’s like a stained glass window or a surface of ornamental marquetry. The oil paint is applied with careful evenness, and the overall impression is of static order, a gelid atmosphere, as if the scene were filtered through the heavy, humid air of a long summer afternoon. With such solid and firmly girdered construction, it’s not surprising to learn that Ginner trained and for a while practised as an architect, before devoting himself to his art. He was born in France, growing up in Cannes, and was educated in Paris, so he could claim a close connection to the source of the post-impressionism which the Camden Town Group aimed to translate into an English idiom. Quite the opposite of the stereotype of the wild bohemian artist, he was a quiet, self-contained and rather conventional batchelor, who kept regular working hours throughout his life. He was very close to his fellow Camden Town Group members Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, and was deeply affected by their early deaths. He nursed Gilman through a bout of influenza, which proved such a killer after the war, but both subsequently caught pneumonia in the early winter months of 1919. Ginner survived, Gilman didn’t. Ginner lived alone from then until his death, in his house in Pimlico, in 1952, a man increasingly out of his time. He never stopped working, however (and received a commission as a war artist in the second world war). Indeed, his life seemed to have been his work.

Robert Bevan - Devonshire Valley No.1

Robert Bevan’s Devonshire Valley No.1 similarly divides the landscape into discrete blocks of colour, although they are not so firmly delineated here. The characteristic Camden Town colours of muted mauves and magentas and light and dark olive greens are prominently used. Bevan is more free and expressive with his brushstrokes than Ginner, particularly in the wavering lines of the foliage to the left of the frame. His composition is a lot less rigidly controlled, edges allowed to blur into that which they outline. The impression is less of a heavy summer’s day than a hazy spring one. If Ginner’s work shows the influence of Van Gogh, then Bevan’s is more in tune with late Monet (who was still painting at the time, of course) and Cezanne. Bevan had also studied in Paris, and had stayed for a while in the artists’ colony at Pont Aven in Brittanny in the 1890s. This was a hugely fulfilling time for him, during which he met and got to know Gauguin, producing several sketched portraits of him in his books. Unlike Ginner, who was principally an urban artist, Bevan preferred the rural life and the depiction of rural subjects. He painted on Exmoor between 1895-7, and after marrying a Polish woman, Stanislawa de Karlowska, in 1897, made a number of trips to her home country in the early twentieth century. Here, he sketched and painted rural life in and around the villages in which he immediately felt at home. He was quite mature in years by the time he hooked up with Sickert and his circle. Sickert invited him to join his Fitzroy Street group after seeing some of his pictures exhibited in the first Allied Artists Exhibition in 1908. It was the first time he’d received significant recognition for his art. An inward man lacking in self-confidence and belief, he’d frequently doubted his talents and the worth of his endeavours. His wife, Stanislawa, was firm and constant in her encouragement, however, and it was largely due to her support that he persisted in his artistic career. He was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, and his subjects whilst in London generally centred around cabs and omnibuses, and horses and the world of the stables on the periphery of the city. This was a world in its twilight years, the era of horse drawn transportation already increasingly supplanted by the spread of electricity and the insidious invention of the internal combustion engine. Bevan’s choice of the stables as a subject for his urban art suggested that his heart lay beyond the boundaries of the city. He felt particularly drawn to the farm at Clayhidon, and returned on numerous occasions throughout the 1910s. Eventually, he bought his own cottage nearby – Lychetts in Bolham Valley in the Blackdown Hills. Devon was his own version of Palmer’s magic valley. And it was in Devon that he passed away in 1925. The paintings he produced in the area which he made his home remain amongst his most personal, and his best.

There's an excellent archive site providing extensive information on Simeon Solomon, with plentiful illustrations, over here, as well as a good general article (with pics) at the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture site over here.

British Art Up North - Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester and Birmingham

PART ONE

William Hogarth - The Distressed Poet

An ill-travelled Southerner, I recently headed up North to Leeds, Manchester and Wakefield, with a short subsequent jaunt to the Midlands and Birmingham (which is still North from here, anyroad). This gave me the opportunity to visit the local galleries and see the excellent collections of British art which they hold from the Victorian and early to mid-twentieth century periods, and come across works by favourite artists which I’d not encountered before in the sense of standing before the actual painting (an experience which no reproduction, no matter how expertly photographed and reproduced, can replace). The Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham museums and galleries are all housed in imposingly monumental buildings reflecting the sense of civic pride in these newly emergent cities of the industrial revolution. Given the neoclassical Victorian facades of all these buildings, it’s unsurprising to discover that they all have impressive collections of nineteenth century British art, with Manchester and Birmingham having particularly fine displays of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. There are works by earlier favourites, too: Hogarth, Blake and Samuel Palmer. The original oil painting of Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet (1733-5) in Birmingham, which was subsequently reproduced in several versions as a print, vividly portrays the poverty and despair of a Grub Street writer (the precursor of the modern day hack). Hogarth depicts his jobbing wordsmith as more exploited than exploitative. The garret room is unadorned and bare (as is the food cupboard) and the ceiling plaster is crumbling, exposing the joists beneath. The writer, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown sits at his desk, his chair the end of the bed, desperately rubbing his head beneath his wig as if to prompt the circulation of new ideas. The detritus of crumpled and discarded papers below indicates that they are refusing to emerge to order. Meanwhile, his wife sews his worn trousers and attempts to deal with the demands of the milkmaid, who proffers the full board of unpaid bills. Only the cat seems comfortable, curled up on the writer’s coat, which is cast down on the floor. His comfort may be shortlived, however, since it seems unlikely that he’ll be getting any more milk. It’s a scene which had a bitter personal resonance for Hogarth. His father, Richard, came down to London in the late 1680s, with dreams of becoming a writer and teacher, and settled in the Bartholomew Close in the Smithfield area, adjacent to Grub Street, where William was born. But he found the learned life to be a hard struggle, and failed to make a name for himself, his proposals for a dictionary and literary coffee house never realised. The only books for which he did find a publisher were a children’s introduction to Latin, Greek and English and a few school texts. The manuscript of the dictionary and encylopaedia, his grand work, was later lost. In 1709, when young William was 12 years old, he found himself in the Fleet debtor’s prison, where he remained until 1713. His incarceration would have been more extended had it not been for a new parliamentary bill offering relief for low-level debtors.

Samuel Palmer - The Bright Cloud

There were a couple of William Blake paintings in Manchester, delicately sculptural renderings in tempera of literary ‘heads’, busts of the Spanish poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga and the French enlightenment essayist Voltaire. Relatively conventional and lacking in his customary visceral visionary intensity, these date from around the year 1800, when he also submitted two biblical paintings in tempera (The Last Supper and The Loaves and Fishes) for exhibition at the Royal Academy. It would seem that this was a period in which he was making one last bid for artistic respectability. Blake’s follower Samuel Palmer has his painting The Bright Cloud (1833-4) in Manchester. It’s not the only picture he did with this title, and the billowing masses of cumulus cloud form a secondary landscape in the background. It’s one of his depictions of a golden and russet coloured autumnal idyll, a Kentish Eden in the Darenth Valley, where he lived in the village of Shoreham. The sleepily rural scene, with placid cattle idling on the hillside beneath oak and beech, is given a sacred resonance by the figures walking past, baskets on their heads presumably containing apples from an adjacent orchard. They are led by a figure in a blood-red headscarf (echoing the autumnal reds on the hill) on a donkey, who guides them in a processional line into the valley, like Christ riding into Jerusalem; the prelude to an English pastoral Passion.

Atkinson Grimshaw - Reflections on the Thames, Westminster (1880)

Leeds Art Gallery honours its native son, Atkinson Grimshaw (he was born in Back Park Street on 6th September 1836) with a number of his works from their extensive collection on display. Probably best known is his fairy painting Iris, which also acts as a study in autumnal colours and atmospheres. The titular fairy, hovering above a woodland pool with a certain aerodynamic implausibility, has a fiery halo forming a coronal crown about her head, the light from which reflects on the spectral translucence of her dragonfly wings, which in turn refract in beams and phosopherescent spatters of radiant light. This sprays out into the twilight shadows of the autumn woodland, bringing out and making hallucinatorily vivid their orange, red, caramel and mossy green colours. Iris was the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology, connecting heaven and earth, the divine and the human, and was associated with the rainbow, which similarly connected those realms. Here, Grimshaw brings the Greek goddess into a very English environment, linking the old Mediterranean myths with the more native fairy tale tradition, with its northern European roots. She becomes the spirit of autumn, highlighting the beauty of the season which Grimshaw would repeatedly depict to such atmospheric effect. Iris is, in effect, his muse. Grimshaw was also known for his nocturnes, evocations of nightime atmospheres, either in reflective, rain-slicked city streets or in tree lined suburban streets, with eerie, shadowy figures hovering in the middle distance. On display here was his London picture Reflections on the Thames, Westminster, in which the curve of the Embankment leads to Westminster Bridge, lit by doubled rows of gaslit lamps, and the clockface of Big Ben smoulders with a baleful orange glow. A woman looks longingly over the water, silvered by the full moon which shines through dappled cloud, thinking who knows what. Perhaps she is considering how inviting the waters look. Her dog looks at the oncoming night strollers, intent on protecting her from any unwanted attentions. The lunar light creates a moody green luminescence which is an instantly recognisable characteristic of Grimshaw’s nocturnes. His nights are always tinted with a copper-green patina. A small, late work from 1892-3 is also on display, Snow and Mist (Caprice in Yellow Minor). A departure from his signature style, the musically allusive title makes clear his debt to Whistler, his fellow nocturniste. Its snowbound landscape is featureless noplace, daringly stripped of recognisable landmarks or any sign of human habitation. The lady with a shawl carrying her small basket on her concealed arm is walking into a blank void. It’s a study in off-whites, approaching abstract colour composition in the manner of Turner. It’s a brave turn towards experiment, an exploration of new styles and techniques in what was to be the last year of his life. He died in the year of its completion, 1893, and was buried in Woodhouse Cemetery in Leeds.

Ford Madox Brown - Work (1852-65)

Ford Madox Brown’s Work, in Manchester, is one of the key works of Victorian art, in which the Pre-Raphaelite medieval dreaming or pious religiosity was set aside for a moment in order to represent the world around them as they saw it. Just as much of a dream, perhaps, but a fascinating insight into the Victorian mindset. And, thanks to the detailed photographic realism of the Pre-Raphaelite style, with its invisible brushstrokes, a real snapshot of Victorian life in all its colour and grime. The view is from the raised footpath above Heath Street in Hampstead, and is still recognisable today, although the road is now habitually choked with traffic heading up the hill towards the heath and over into Golders Green and points north, or down towards the centre of the ‘village’ and on through Archway into the dense heart of the city beyond. As usual with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the composition is cluttered with symbolic detail, every carefully placed object and figure freighted with some more or less obscure meaning. I find it best, having taken note of the different meanings, to ignore them and just enjoy the painting on its own pictorial merits. Here, Brown crams all the tiers of Victorian society within his small, overarching gold frame: the industrious navvies digging up the pavement; the well-dressed ladies leisurely taking the air; the marchers with their sandwich board surplices, perhaps advertising their temperance sentiments; the dishevelled, bare-footed flower-seller, miserable with poverty; and the unruly and unsupervised urchins in the foreground, antecedents of the ‘chavs’ of modern-day parlance (these maybe having a more direct linguistic correspondence, gypsies coming down from the fairs on the heath). Overlooking the whole teeming parade with a surveying stance of analytical detachment are portrait figures of the Reverend F.D.Maurice, a man of the cloth with a bent for social reform, and the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle. With their air of casual repose, they represent a less physically arduous kind of work, the labour of the mind. They stand in for the observer of the picture, implicitly inviting a unifying overview which draws all the elements together into a socially representative whole. Carlyle was a difficult model, too impatient and restless to stand still long enough for his portrait to be accurately painted. His likeness was instead worked up from a photograph, the new medium which allowed for a realistic reproduction of nature to be created within the comfortable confines of the studio.

John Everett Millais - Autumn Leaves (1856)

Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, also in Manchester, is another of the best-known of Pre-Raphaelite works. This moves out of the city to a more characteristic rural and, in this case, agricultural setting. Again, the symbolism, with straying sheep and tempting apples, can be comfortably ignored, leaving us with an enjoyable portrayal of rosy-cheeked rustic lust against a beautifully realised farmland backdrop, one part pasture, one part golden-sheaved arable. This background is painted with the meticulous Pre-Raphaelite attention to the detail of the natural world, to the shape, texture and colour gradations of leaf, grass-blade and corn-stalk. Such attention to natural form can also be found in Arthur Hughes’ 1859 painting The Long Engagement, in which fern and ivy, tree-bark and moss are rendered with such exquisite care that you can almost smell the loamy woodland aroma. They draw the attention as much as the trysting figures chastely meeting behind the tree trunk. John Millais’ Autumn Leaves, in Manchester, is a more evanescent evocation of nature, a beautiful depiction of twilight gloaming. Its warm, after-sunset colours contrast with encroaching shadow in what amounts to an autumnal English impressionism, catching the quality of evening light. A few curls of smoke send exploratory tendrils into the frame from the left, and the painting exudes a taint of smoky atmosphere from neighbouring bonfires and chimneys, synaesthetically extending its sensory range beyond the visual to the olfactory. The pile of dead leaves raked up by the young girls, their cheeks rosy with the cold and faces aglow with the light from the implied bonfire placed beyond the frame, about where the viewer is standing, at which they stare, are clearly intended to reflect the seasons of life, foretelling their own inevitable aging. I prefer once more to put such sentimental and overstuffed Victorian symbolism to one side and revel in the melancholic glow of this magical autumn evening.

John William Waterhouse - The Lady of Shallott (1894)

John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallott, in Leeds, represents the wistfully yearning Arthurian dreaming of the Pre-Raphaelites, mainly (as in this case) deriving from Tennyson. Here, the lady, forever isolated in her river island tower, weaves the threads of her own binding fate, not yet aware of the figure of Lancelot riding across the meadow beyond. The same subject was painted by William Holman Hunt, a picture I first came across on the cover of the post-New Worlds SF and fantasy anthology the Savoy Book, published out by the Manchester Savoy Press in 1978. It was his last work, completed with the help of Edward Robert Hughes in 1905, and now resides in the suitably castellated building of the Wadsworth Athenium in Connecticut. Waterhouse’s smaller painting is not to be confused with his much-loved, large scale work entitled The Lady of Shallott, which happened to be on display in Birmingham at this time as part of an exhibition of Victorian paintings on loan from the Tate, entitled Love and Death. This transports us to the final stages of Tennyson’s poem, with the lady leaving her protecting tower to float downstream towards Camelot. It’s a journey which fulfils her foretold fate, her mysterious, funereal arrival at the castle presaging the fall of Arthur’s court. The frail, fey figure of the Lady reveals, as did Millais’ Ophelia, the Victorian gentleman’s tendency to view women as fragile creatures in need of sheltering and protection, and their attraction to tragic and mournfully sentimental presentations of femininity. The popularity of the Pre-Raphaelites in the late 60s and 70, particularly in their Arthurian mode, also made Waterhouse’s Lady the model for many a wispy flower child or myth-soaked folkie.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Proserpine (1874)

The decadent phase of late Victorian art, as embodied by Aesthetics like Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Whistler, favoured a more openly sensual approach, full-bloodedly seductive or exquisitely refined, and pious religiosity or finickety symbolism tended to get left behind. There are a number of Rossetti paintings in the museums, as well as Holman Hunt’s memorial portrait of his friend, painted in 1882 from an 1853 sketch. It captures him as a wide-eyed 22 year old romantic, a remembrance of better days. Beata Beatrix, in Birmingham, posthumously casts Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s dead love. The poppy which the descending dove brings to her in its beak, as well as the ecstatic, dreamily self-absorbed look on her face, alludes to Lizzie’s laudanum habit and the overdose from which she died. It’s a portrait of someone who had already effectively left him before she died. This particular painting was one of five copies he made of the composition, and Ford Maddox Brown took it upon himself to complete it in as close an approximation of his friend’s style as he could manage. Bower Meadow, in Manchester, is a more Pre-Raphaelite style watercolour, with fey, dreamy women gazing into some unspecified distance, possibly an interior one. They pluck absently on their instruments, producing what we can imagine as suspended, Debussyesque melodies, to which their doubles turn floating steps in each other’s arms in the middle distance. Unusually for Rossetti, there is also a tree-lined landscape in the background, like something from a medieval tapestry. This was taken from sketches he made at Knole Park near Sevenoaks some 22 years earlier. The woman on the right, with the copper hair and full features, is Alexa Wilding, one of the women Rossetti picked up from the streets to use as a model. She featured in a great many of his paintings from the mid-1860s onwards, although her presence tends to be overshadowed by that of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, given the fact that she led a fairly self-contained and respectable life and had little to do with the tangled romantic lives of Rossetti and his circle. La Donna della Fiesta, in Birmingham, which dates from 1881 (the year preceding his death), and Proserpine (a variant name for Persephone, hence her biting into a pomegranate) are two of his later sensual portraits of mythological sirens which use Jane Morris as the model. Janey was the great love and muse of his life after Siddal had died. It was a love which was complicated by the fact that she was married to his friend and sometime artistic collaborator William Morris. Rossetti, perhaps more beholden to the mores of the time than he would have liked to admit, and undoubtedly sensitive to Jane and William’s feelings, kept the affair within the bounds of passionate friendship, although their relationship seemed to many to be closer than that between husband and wife. Rossetti’s feelings for her come through in the paintings, and in the roles in which he casts her. In his artistic renditions of her, he enjoyed dressing her up in theatrical finery, and imaginatively changing her appearance. In some versions of La Donna he dies her black hair golden, and in the Proserpine on display in Birmingham in the Love and Death exhibition it becomes auburn.

Frederick Sandys - Morgan le Fay (1862-3)

Like Rossetti with Alexa Wilding and later Fanny Cornforth (and to a degree Jane Morris, whom he first saw in a theatre box when she was still Jane Burden and then bumped into again in the streets of Oxford), Frederick Sandys cast a model from the streets, gypsy called Keomi, who took on the dramatic role of Morgan-le-Fay in his 1862-3 painting, in Birmingham. The sorceress’ room is imagined with a fantastic richness of detail, from the jewelled safe box with its phial and scroll in the bottom left and the coloured wool discarded on the floor, to the loom, which doubles as an owl perch, the flaming crucible and the straw scattered on the grain of the wooden floorboards. There is a similarly heady mix of textiles in different colours, with Morgan draped in folds of green, yellow and purple, a black cloak with colourful Celtic symbols hanging on the wall, and a red, green and gold tapestry covering the back wall. This Morgan is evidently very well-travelled: she wears a leopard-hide tied about her waist, holds what looks like some Assyrian relic, has a statue of the Buddha on her safe box, and a book at her feet with a painting of an Egyptian figure, as well as depictions of the Egyptian gods Bes, Horus, Set and Ra on her large tapestry wall covering. There’s a tiny landscape seen through the small window in the upper right hand corner, through the threads on the loom, the burnished after sunset colours of the sky reflected in a curve of river, suggesting that this is a room high up in a castle tower (a hidden corner of Camelot, perhaps).

Simeon Solomon - A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867-8)

Simeon Solomon, several of whose paintings are in the Birmingham collection, offered a more homoerotic perspective on Aesthetic sensuality. His paintings A Deacon (1863), A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867-8) and The Child Jeremiah (1862, privately owned but on display here) present beautiful young men dressed in fine garments, posed holding various sacramental objects within provocatively religiose compositions. The young Jeremiah has his lyre slung casually over his shoulder, an ancient Hebraic Dylan, whilst the deacon and saint hold their urns, censers and blossoming branches with an absent looseness, their inward gaze indicating that their attention is directed elsewhere. They are the kind of sexy priests, saints and prophets who might appear in the knowingly kitsch and romantically decadent photographic tableaux of Pierre et Gilles. Solomon was a friend of Rossetti and a member of his artistic circle (being particularly close with the poet Algernon Swinburne). Most of these friends and acquaintances moved to distance themselves from him after he was arrested in 1873 for picking up men in a toilet just off Oxford Street. One of the few who stood up for him was Edward Burne-Jones, on the surface a more sober and ‘respectable’ man, with none of Rossetti or Swinburne’s wildness, whose acceptance of a baronetcy towards the end of his life seemed to seal his establishment status.

Edward Burne-Jones - Star of Bethlehem (1885-90)

Burne-Jones has a whole room dedicated to his work in the Birmingham Art Gallery, an acknowledgement of his birth (in 1855) in nearby Bennetts Hill in what is now the centre of the city. The huge annunciation painting Star of Bethlehem was indeed commissioned by the Corporation of Birmingham late in Burne-Jones’s life, in 1889, its impressive yardage presumably a badge of profligate prestige. It was a copy, in watercolours, of a tapestry which he’d designed for Exeter College, Oxford in 1887, the fact that he was being asked at this stage to make copies of pre-existing works an indication of his well-established popularity and fame. Greybearded Joseph, standing just outside the stable, little more than a straw-roofed rain shelter held up by silver birch trunks, looks more like a druid than a carpenter in his blue-grey robes with a bundle of twigs under his arm and an axe at his foot. Mary sits on straw in her bower, whose wicker walls are threaded through with wild roses, contrasting with the blue speedwell and white celandine dotting the lush green grass beyond. They are quite the match for the jewels in the crown laid at the feet of one of the three kings who have just arrived. The angel who greets them, and who nurtures a warm glowing globe of light within its prayerfully uplifted hands, hovers just above the earth, indicating its separateness from the mortal realm. Its downturned feet are perfectly posed to show off the glittering straps of its golden sandals, and it casts a radiant shadow on the rush-bordered puddle beneath its weightless form. The African king seems to have a robe brought directly from Morris and Co, with Burne-Jones designs along the bottom hem. The dark shadows of the wildwood on the hills beyond the gathered group locate this scene more in the northern lands of Grimm fairy tales than in Biblical times and climates. It’s of a piece with Burne-Jones’ Arthurian paintings, part of a continuum with his mythological dreamworlds. Also in the room are large scale cartoons of The Last Judgement, created as models for stained glass windows produced by Morris and Co. for Easthampstead church in Berkshire from 1874-80. Working as murals in their own right, they indicate how prolifically hard-working Burne-Jones was, here effectively doubling the effort of creation to produce the finished glass-work. A late portrait of 1893-5 of Lady Windsor finds him painting in an uncharacteristically Whistler-like style. It is as much a subdued study in greys as it is a society portrait, and might as well have been given one of Whistler’s musical titles. The fact that he was, at this point in his career, sought after to paint society portraits, even though it was hardly what he was known for, indicates the degree to which Burne-Jones had been embraced by the art-loving establishment. His upwardly mobile drift, whilst it was not something he ever actively pursued, put a strain on his long term and very close friendship with William Morris, who was at the same time moving in the opposite direction, towards radical socialist engagement.

Walter Crane - At Home: A Portrait (1872)

Walter Crane was another artist, illustrator and designer working in the Arts and Crafts style who embraced socialist ideals, having initially been influenced in this direction by William Morris. This is not something you’d readily detect from his 1872 picture of domestic calm At Home: A Portrait, which is in the Leeds Gallery. This is an immaculate assemblage of Aesthetic interior furnishings: there’s the blue and white china vase; blue and white fireplace tiles, illustrated with various unusual creatures, including bats, salamanders and dolphins; a Rossetti style medievalist Pre-Raphaelite wall tapestry; a decorative blue and green carpet; and a Japanese fan neglectfully held between the thumb and forefinger of a woman in a state of easeful repose. This is Crane’s wife Mary, to whom he was devotedly married for 44 years, before she was tragically killed by a train in December 1914. Here, she is more modestly dressed than most Aesthetic models, the typical loosely draped garments restricted to a white shawl falling from her shoulders. She doesn’t have the enervated slump found in many Aesthetic portraits of women, too. Instead, she leans lightly on the mantelpiece and intently reads the book she is holding. Its covers are yellow, but it’s a little too early for it to be the Yellow Book, not quite close enough to the fin de siecle. A tabby sits regally by the fire, warming its back against the crackling flames. The relaxed presence of Mrs Crane and cat (the obvious choice of pet for an Aesthetic, Rossetti’s wombats aside) make this a genuinely homely scene, rather than just an ostentatious display of exquisite taste. It’s a portrayal of quiet beauty and intelligence, a record of the artist’s own love for his wife.

Gwen John - Interior (1915-16)

Gwen John was the master of contemplative domestic interiors with calm female subjects in the early 20th century. There were several of her sensitive portraits in the galleries, all displaying the subdued use of clay-like colours, thinly applied to give the pictures the look of roughly fired earthenware pottery. The bloom in Woman Holding A Flower adds a drop of red at the bottom of the frame to the palette. The woman herself has a sad and inward look which fails to reflect this intrusion of primary colour, however. The flower is drooping in her hand, and already wilting memory, perhaps echoing the melancholic turn of her thoughts. It may have been a variant of the expressions she wore whilst modelling for August Rodin, who was also her lover at this time, but who never returned her love with the same intensity of feeling which she exhibited. The model for the Woman Holding A Flower was Chloe Boughton-Leigh, with whom John became friends in 1907, and for whom she also sat as a model. The Convalescent, in Manchester, is one of her pictures of women reading, making it a good follow-up to the Walter Crane portrait. John’s reading women, like Crane’s wife in At Home, are a study in calm, concentrated repose as they focus in on the page, and on the inward thoughts which it promotes. Here, it is a letter rather than a book which the young woman reads as she sits in her wicker chair, back propped up on a pillow and loosely clenched hand resting in her lap. The overall pallor of the background and the furniture make the teapot, highlighted with glints of reflected light, stand out with preternatural clarity, as if it contained the medicinal stuff of life (as well it might). In another such portrait, The Student, also in Manchester, John’s friend Dorelia McNeil is posed in a standing position, looking down at a well-thumbed French paperback book, La Russie (a Russian dictionary?), a notebook grasped in one hand, the other leaning on the back of a simple chair. Her face is lit by a lamp somewhere beyond the frame, and she casts a shadow on the wall behind her in what is clearly, from the proximity of the ceiling above her head, a very modestly proportioned room. The glow cast on her face could easily be seen in symbolic terms, the radiance emanating from an active and intellectually engaged mind. McNeil, who was later to have an affair with Gwen’s more extrovert and licentious brother Augustus, was a junior secretary in a solicitors office. A woman from a humble background, she nevertheless had a passion for art, and went to evening classes at the Westminster School of Art. She had a winning personality, and was soon frequenting artistic circles, where she met and became friends with Gwen. They set out in 1903 on a spontaneously arranged and barely planned continental adventure, their intention to walk from Bordeaux to Rome. In the end, they got distracted and diverted along the way, and the journey was re-routed to take them eventually to Paris. John was to make her home there for many years, too many of them spent in the vain hope that Rodin, now an elderly man, might return her romantic feelings. Interior, in Manchester, depicts her room in the Rue Terre Neuve in Meudon, just outside Paris. Like the similar A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, it is haunted by her absence, a depiction of a space from which she has vanished, leaving behind strangely affecting everyday artefacts betokening recent presence. A set of tea cups and accessories and another brown teapot, standing out with talismanic solidity against the spectrally pale backround – perhaps still warm.