Lot Essay
'A picture by Albert Moore', wrote his friend A. C. Swinburne in 1868, 'is to artists what the verse of Thophile Gautier is to poets, the faultless and secure expression of an exclusive worship of things formally beautiful'. Born in York, one of a large family of artists, Moore became a leading exponent of the ideal of Aestheticism, the cult of beauty for its own sake which developed in the 1860s. This approach, revolutionary at a time when for most artists telling a story or pointing a moral was paramount, brought him very close to the American artist James McNeill Whistler, who had recently settled in London. They met in 1865, became close friends, and for several years developed on similar lines, drawing inspiration from Greek sculpture and Japanese prints in their search for formal perfection. Whistler gave his pictures musical titles -'Symphony', 'Harmony', 'Nocturne', and so on - to emphasise their self-sufficient character, and Moore did the same by naming them after some detail, as in the present example. There is even a similarity in the way they signed their pictures, Moore adopting a Greek anthemion device and Whistler a butterfly - and both of course using these motifs to decorative advantage.
Moore had links with other artists with Aesthetic credentials. He designed a stained glass cartoon for William Morris in the early 1860s. Like Burne-Jones, Whistler and others, he exhibited regularly at the Grosvenor Gallery, the bastion of Aestheticism which opened its doors in 1877; and like Burne-Jones, Whistler and Rossetti, he made a major contribution to the great Aesthetic interiors created in London at this period for the wealthy Liverpool shipowner F.R. Leyland.
Crocuses was exhibited with Roses, a companion pastel of the same size, at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. The two pastels are larger versions of a pair of watercolours, entitled Oranges and Lanterns respectively, which Albert Moore had shown at the Royal Watercolour Society earlier that year. Roses was sold at Christie's London, 25 October 1991, lot 47 for 46,000 and was exhibited at York City Art Gallery and Julian Hartnoll, London, The Moore Family Pictures, 1980, no. 84, illustrated p. 36, lent by the Pre-Raphaelite Trust. Oranges is in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford; Lanterns remains untraced.
In the two watercolours, Baldry records that Moore had 'aimed at the swing and play of moving draperies and the pose and gesture of limbs rythmically stirred', and this aim similarly underlies the two pastels, which like the watercolours depict dancing girls. The representation of movement was, generally speaking, avoided by Moore, most of whose works show figures in poses of languid immobility. Follow my Leader, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873, had been a notable exception to this rule and the theme of movement was taken up again by Moore in the mid-1880s. Kingcups, (York City Art Gallery) exhibited in 1883, for example, shows two female figures jumping off a bank.
The colouring of Crocuses is a harmony of yellow and yellow-greens following the keynotes provided by the crocuses themselves and the lemons in a bowl in the right foreground. In this there is a marked contrast with the watercolour Oranges, the colouring of which reflects its title, despite the similarity of composition. The colouring of Crocuses is in fact close to that of Kingcups.
From the mid-1880s onwards Moore experimented with pastel, and it was not unusual for him to repeat in this medium compositions already employed in oil paintings or watercolours: there is, for example, a pastel version of Kingcups. Having thus already resolved problems of composition, Moore was free in such pastels to create a dazzling surface of apparently spontaneous marks all but liberated from the forms they ostensibly define. Crocuses, untraced for many years , is undoubtedly the finest of these works to appear at auction this decade.
We are grateful to Richard Green of York City Art Gallery, for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
Moore had links with other artists with Aesthetic credentials. He designed a stained glass cartoon for William Morris in the early 1860s. Like Burne-Jones, Whistler and others, he exhibited regularly at the Grosvenor Gallery, the bastion of Aestheticism which opened its doors in 1877; and like Burne-Jones, Whistler and Rossetti, he made a major contribution to the great Aesthetic interiors created in London at this period for the wealthy Liverpool shipowner F.R. Leyland.
Crocuses was exhibited with Roses, a companion pastel of the same size, at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. The two pastels are larger versions of a pair of watercolours, entitled Oranges and Lanterns respectively, which Albert Moore had shown at the Royal Watercolour Society earlier that year. Roses was sold at Christie's London, 25 October 1991, lot 47 for 46,000 and was exhibited at York City Art Gallery and Julian Hartnoll, London, The Moore Family Pictures, 1980, no. 84, illustrated p. 36, lent by the Pre-Raphaelite Trust. Oranges is in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford; Lanterns remains untraced.
In the two watercolours, Baldry records that Moore had 'aimed at the swing and play of moving draperies and the pose and gesture of limbs rythmically stirred', and this aim similarly underlies the two pastels, which like the watercolours depict dancing girls. The representation of movement was, generally speaking, avoided by Moore, most of whose works show figures in poses of languid immobility. Follow my Leader, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873, had been a notable exception to this rule and the theme of movement was taken up again by Moore in the mid-1880s. Kingcups, (York City Art Gallery) exhibited in 1883, for example, shows two female figures jumping off a bank.
The colouring of Crocuses is a harmony of yellow and yellow-greens following the keynotes provided by the crocuses themselves and the lemons in a bowl in the right foreground. In this there is a marked contrast with the watercolour Oranges, the colouring of which reflects its title, despite the similarity of composition. The colouring of Crocuses is in fact close to that of Kingcups.
From the mid-1880s onwards Moore experimented with pastel, and it was not unusual for him to repeat in this medium compositions already employed in oil paintings or watercolours: there is, for example, a pastel version of Kingcups. Having thus already resolved problems of composition, Moore was free in such pastels to create a dazzling surface of apparently spontaneous marks all but liberated from the forms they ostensibly define. Crocuses, untraced for many years , is undoubtedly the finest of these works to appear at auction this decade.
We are grateful to Richard Green of York City Art Gallery, for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.