Lot Essay
This and lot 557 belong to a later phase of Stanhope's career than lot 578, when he had come under the strong influence of Burne-Jones and the Italian masters. Never robust in health, he had gone to live at the Villa Nuti at Bellosguardo near Florence, where his house became a centre for British visitors. He is often said to have settled at Bellosguardo in 1880, but Burne-Jones and William Morris visited him there in 1873.
Though similar in size, the two paintings are not a pair; rather they belong to a group of nude female figures illustrating mythological or allegorical themes that Stanhope painted during this period. Another example, The Birth of Venus, possibly the picture of this title that he exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, is reproduced by Percy Bate in his book The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters (1901). The poses of Venus and of Flora in our picture are in fact identical, as if the artist had used the same study for both, although the backgrounds and accessories are entirely different.
As the compilers of the catalogue of the Heaven on Earth exhibition point out, the obvious influence on Flora is Botticelli's two great paintings in the Uffizi, the Primavera and The Birth of Venus. The figure of Flora scattering flowers is prominent in the Primavera, but she is clothed; Stanhope's seductive nude derives rather from Venus in The Birth of Venus, her auburn hair, flowing but caught casually by strings of pearls, being particularly reminiscent of her prototype. Needless to say, the fact that Stanhope actually painted a Birth of Venus, and that the figure closely resembles our Flora, only reinforces the Botticellian connection.
The foreground flowers and the roses are another echo of the Florentine master, who powders the ground with flowers in the Primavera and makes roses flutter in the wake of Venus as she is wafted to the shore by zephyrs. Here, however, Stanhope also had the stimulus of his own natural surroundings. Burne-Jones, reporting on his visit to Bellosguardo in 1873, wrote that the artist had 'a pretty house that looks all over Florence, and you go up to it by a long wall with roses in full flower showing over the top ...' Burne-Jones himself treated the subject of Flora in a painting conceived in the mid-1860s and finally exhibited in 1889, and in a design for one of the tapestries that William Morris began to weave on a commercial basis in the 1880s. But neither is particularly relevant to Stanhope's painting, both figures being clothed and very different in conception. They merely make the obvious point that these later Pre-Raphaelites shared a language of literary ideas.
One other treatment of the subject is, however, worth recalling. Flora is the theme of the picture that is generally considered to be the masterpiece of Stanhope's niece Evelyn De Morgan (De Morgan Foundation; repr. The Last Romantics, exh. Barbican Art Gallery, 1989, cat. p.14). She was a frequent visitor to her uncle's villa, and the painting was executed if not there then certainly in Florence in 1894. It is true the figure is draped, but the artist may well have known her uncle's version, and certainly her picture owes an even more obvious debt to Botticelli's Primavera.
Though similar in size, the two paintings are not a pair; rather they belong to a group of nude female figures illustrating mythological or allegorical themes that Stanhope painted during this period. Another example, The Birth of Venus, possibly the picture of this title that he exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, is reproduced by Percy Bate in his book The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters (1901). The poses of Venus and of Flora in our picture are in fact identical, as if the artist had used the same study for both, although the backgrounds and accessories are entirely different.
As the compilers of the catalogue of the Heaven on Earth exhibition point out, the obvious influence on Flora is Botticelli's two great paintings in the Uffizi, the Primavera and The Birth of Venus. The figure of Flora scattering flowers is prominent in the Primavera, but she is clothed; Stanhope's seductive nude derives rather from Venus in The Birth of Venus, her auburn hair, flowing but caught casually by strings of pearls, being particularly reminiscent of her prototype. Needless to say, the fact that Stanhope actually painted a Birth of Venus, and that the figure closely resembles our Flora, only reinforces the Botticellian connection.
The foreground flowers and the roses are another echo of the Florentine master, who powders the ground with flowers in the Primavera and makes roses flutter in the wake of Venus as she is wafted to the shore by zephyrs. Here, however, Stanhope also had the stimulus of his own natural surroundings. Burne-Jones, reporting on his visit to Bellosguardo in 1873, wrote that the artist had 'a pretty house that looks all over Florence, and you go up to it by a long wall with roses in full flower showing over the top ...' Burne-Jones himself treated the subject of Flora in a painting conceived in the mid-1860s and finally exhibited in 1889, and in a design for one of the tapestries that William Morris began to weave on a commercial basis in the 1880s. But neither is particularly relevant to Stanhope's painting, both figures being clothed and very different in conception. They merely make the obvious point that these later Pre-Raphaelites shared a language of literary ideas.
One other treatment of the subject is, however, worth recalling. Flora is the theme of the picture that is generally considered to be the masterpiece of Stanhope's niece Evelyn De Morgan (De Morgan Foundation; repr. The Last Romantics, exh. Barbican Art Gallery, 1989, cat. p.14). She was a frequent visitor to her uncle's villa, and the painting was executed if not there then certainly in Florence in 1894. It is true the figure is draped, but the artist may well have known her uncle's version, and certainly her picture owes an even more obvious debt to Botticelli's Primavera.