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Lot Essay
This magnificent picture, the largest Waterhouse ever painted, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887. It was a vintage year, Leighton was showing The Last Watch of Hero (Manchester), Albert Moore Midsummer (Bournemouth), Alma-Tadema The Women of Amphissa (private collection) and Sargent his seemingly revolutionary Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Tate Gallery). Waterhouse had fierce competition as well as a reputation to maintain, having been elected ARA two years before. He was thirty-eight at the time.
Stylistically, the picture marks the climax of his early phase, characterised by a preference for classical subjects in the Alma-Tadema mode. The following year, 1888, saw a radical departure, when Waterhouse (as they say today) re-invented himself as an academic interpreter of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. The picture which announced the change was The Lady of Shalott (fig. 1), exhibited at the RA that year. Few works, with the possible exception of Burne-Jones's King Cophetua (Tate Gallery), suffered more from Victorian art's long decades of eclipse. For years it was a subject of amusement or ridicule, languishing under such unofficial titles as After the May Ball. But revival brough rehabilitation, and it is now one of the most popular and widely reproduced images in the national collection.
Waterhouse found the subject of Mariamne in the Jewish Antiquities of the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, although it had also been handled by Byron in his poem Herod's Lament for Mariamne (1815). Mariamne was a princess renowned for her beauty who was married, as his second wife, to Herod the Great, king of Judaea (reigned 73-4BC). Falsely accused of adultery by the king's sister, Salome, and other members of his family, she was arrested and condemned to death. Herod, who had been passionately attached to his wife, wished to commute the sentence, but was urged by Salome to have it carried out, which was accordingly done. The painting shows Mariamne going to her execution. She turns to look at Herod, who is seated on the right in an agony of conflicting emotions, while Salome stands beside him, strengthening his resolve.
It should perhaps be mentioned that the Herod and Salome who figure in Mariamne are not the same as those in the story of John the Baptist. It was Herod the Great's son, Herod Antipas, who ordered John's execution, and his grand-daughter, the niece of Herod Antipas, also called Salome, who danced before her uncle and so obtained John's head on a charger. This was the subject which so appealed to the Symbolists, who saw in Salome a supreme example of the femme fatale. The cult was started by Gustave Moreau, whose famous painting The Apparition appeared at the Paris Salon in 1876 and was re-exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London a year later. This was followed by Oscar Wilde's play with its Beardsley illustrations (1893), a masterpiece by Lovis Corinth (1897-1900), and the opera by Richard Strauss (1905). But although Waterhouse's subject is different, it is obviously related to the more famous story both historically and in terms of the strong element of sadism common to both. In fact at the time they seem to have been seen as almost interchangeable. In his catalogue of the Royal Academy Revisited exhibition, Christopher Forbes makes the interesting point that Kaiser Wilhelm originally suggested to Strauss that the subject of his opera should be Herod and Mariamne.
The conclusion that Waterhouse's picture belongs, at least in part, to this context, is reinforced by its theatricality. Many critics at the time were struck by this, as Peter Trippi observers in his recent monograph on the artist. George Bernard Shaw, in a review in The World, discussed the work in terms of stage production, with Mariamne advancing on her audience as if she was coming 'nearly straight-forward out of the frame.' Harry Quilter, formerly the art critic on the Times, wrote that Waterhouse presented 'a Sarah Bernhardt conception of the scene, the tragedy of a star actress surrounded by lay figures', and D.S. MacColl, in the Spectator, compared the picture to 'a tableau at the Porte St Martin [Sarah Bernhardt's theatre] or the Chatelet.'
The Gallic dimension which these comparisons suggest was underlined by the French academic style that Waterhouse had adopted. Although he himself had not studied abroad, many of his artistic associates had, including members of the Newlyn School, and there is a close relationship between their handling of paint - the so-called 'square brush' technique - and that seen in Mariamne. The sensational subject is also very French; as Trippi puts it, 'brooding queens were the stock-in-trade of such internationally-renowned French Academicians as Laurens and Cabanel.' In fact Waterhouse had attempted this mode before in St Eulalia (fig. 2), the picture which had earned him associateship of the RA two years earlier, but if anything Mariamne was an even more blatant example. In a rather jaundiced review in the Athenaeum, F.G. Stephens observed that the picture's 'background of a gilded semi-dome and lofty ambo, with mosaics in blue and gold, is quite worthy of one of the best of the third-rate French painters who supply the staple of every Salon.'
But Waterhouse was alive to influences nearer home. That 'gilded semi-dome and lofty ambo' is a little reminiscent of the famous Arab Hall that Leighton had added to his house in Holland Park Road, Kensington, in 1877-9, and it is not hard to imagine Waterhouse seeing this at some gathering to which the PRA had invited him following his election as an Associate in 1885. Trippi does not consider this possibility, but he does suggest a connection with the apsidal-ended studio that Alma-Tadema created for himself at his house in St John's Wood, completed and revealed to a fascinated public in 1886 (see lots 274-7). Waterhouse, who was widely regarded as the Anglo-Dutch artist's follower, may well have been an early guest at one of his celebrated soirées, even though he himself was not to settle in St John's Wood, by then the ultimate must-have address for a successful Academician, until 1901.
Quite apart from any possible echo of this kind, contact with Alma-Tadema would have encouraged Waterhouse to see his picture in terms of theatre. The interior at 17 Grove End Road was intensely dramatic. Alma-Tadema's own work was nothing if not theatrical, and he was becoming increasingly involved in stage design. Although the great days of his collaboration with Irving and Beerbohm Tree still lay in the future, he had desinged Coriolanus for Irving as early as 1880, even if production was delayed for twenty years.
And yet, as Trippi observes, there is an 'English decorum' about Mariamne, a conceptual reserve that separates it decisively from the over-the-top theatricality, the often gruesome melodrama, in which Waterhouse's French contemporaries loved to indulge. We know that Waterhouse was profoundly impressed by the Millais retrospective that was held at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886, and both Trippi and Anthony Hobson see a connection between Mariamne and Millais' Esther (private collection), 'a Hebrew heroine who triumphed where Mariamne failed', which appeared in this exhibition. First shown at the RA in 1865, Millais' picture personifies 'English decorum' in its restrained treatment of a powerfully dramatic theme.
Though everyone recognised the importance of Mariamne, press comment was mixed. For some, the picture was almost beyond criticism. 'For pathos, conception, and execution,' wrote the critic on the Illustrated London News, 'it is unsurpassed by any work in the present Exhibition.' In its concentration of interest in the central figure of the deeply-wronged wife, it surpasses even the work of Mr Waterhouse's master, Mr Alma-Tadema...Apart from the depth of feeling displayed in this work, too much praise can scarcely be awarded to the artist for his delicate treatment of the three tones of white - the cashmere dress, the marble steps, and the ivory throne - which form the basis of his scheme of colour.'
The Times was hardly less enthusiastic:
Mr J.W. Waterhouse...has turned to his Josephus and found in the blood-stained annals of the Herod family a subject for a fine picture...Mariamne herself...is a fine dramatic figure, animated but not exaggerated, and the work of a man who can paint human beings and not mere studio 'subjects'. Technically, the work is full of ability; Mr Waterhouse can both draw and paint. We should have much preferred the picture, however, had it been half the size.
The picture's scale bothered others, while some had deeper worries. One of F.G. Stephens's rather acid comments in the Athenaeum has already been quoted. He felt the artist showed 'real picture-making skill', but concluded that while he was 'greatly superior to Mr Long [i.e. Edwin Long], he has much to do before he will produce a truly noble, sound design.'
Stephens was also unhappy with the element of melodrama, which, he remarked drily, 'ought to prove popular with the British public.' Some of his distaste can be attributed to his Pre-Raphaelite background, but he was not alone in voicing doubts. For the Art Journal, Waterhouse had produced 'emphatically one of the pictures of the year, showing all this true artist's painstaking accuracy of detail, combined with poetic imagination.' And yet, the writer continued, 'somehow it does not quite satisfy; perhaps the canvas is too large, or else it wants placing on a low skirting-board, so that Mariamne's face could be better seen, or more probably the accessories are too pronounced, and the principal group of actors take too subordinate a position.'
A similar combination of general admiration and nit-picking criticism is found in Claude Phillips's review in the Academy. Having complained that Alma-Tadema's Women of Amphissa lacked some 'essential element,' a dramatic dimension which would have saved it from becoming merely 'an exquisite piece of classic genre,' he contined:
We cannot, in fairness, exampt from a measure of the same crticism, Mr. Waterhouse's important "Mariamne before Herod the Great" (134). Here is shown the beautiful queen going from the presence of Herod to her death, at the moment when her condemnation has just been pronounced by her judges; she appears, as she turns to depart, with one parting look of half-repressed reproach and anguish cast at the hesitating king, into whose ear his sister Salome whispers poisonous counsels of hatred and revenge. The scene is laid in a curious half-Assyrian hall of marble, mosaic, and gold, the glittering semi-dome of which, sheltering the judges, has in form, though not in decoration, a Byzantine aspect that recalls the altar-pieces of Bellini and Carpaccio. Here, too, the execution is of the most solid, and in parts - such as the dome, the marble, and the rich accessories - of the most consummate kind. But the colour is not happily massed, or sufficiently bold for a work of such a type; it lacks both brilliancy and unity of general effect. As the presentment of a dramatic conception, requiring for its adequate realisation the most spontaneous energy combined with the greatest subtlety in the delineation of shades of character and of phases of fleeting passion, the work cannot be pronounced adequate. The figure of the white-robed queen, with its mingled expression of unconquered pride and mute appeal, with the clever suggestion of impending downward movement, is admirable; but the king and his evil counsellor are a group too trivial and too much effaced to form an adequate balance to the central personage, while the judges and the executioner are mere accessories, rather serving to fill up the canvas than forming, as they might be expected to do, necessary elements contributing to the unity and balance of a dramatic whole.
Victorian art critics were hard to please, but it is amazing today to see to what lengths they were prepared to go in discussing individual pictures, and how much space their editors allowed them. Their enormously long reviews, often couched in what now seems tediously pompous language, must reflect a genuine thirst on the part of the public.
The picture was bought by Cuthbert Quilter, the elder brother of Harry Quilter, the erstwhile art critic on the Times and the victim of Whistler's mercilessly caustic wit. Cuthbert Quilter was a wealthy corporate capitalist who invested in the nascent telephone system, entered Parliament, and was rewarded with a knighthood in 1897. He belonged to a well-known type of collector, buying large, well-reviewed pictures and being almost over-eager to lend them to exhibitions, well aware that this reflected advantageously on himself and enhanced the value of the work in question. Mariamne, with her dramatic, affecting subject and monumental scale, was perfectly tailored to big international exhibitions, and during his twenty-two years of ownership, Quilter allowed her to travel at least eighteen times across Europe and America. In the process, she collected medals at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1869, the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, and the Exposition Internationale in Brussels in 1897.
The picture fetched 480 guineas when Sir Cuthbert sold it in 1909, two years before his death, in a sale totalling £87,780 at Christie's, but the price had dropped to a mere 48 guineas when it came under the hammer again in 1938. The case is fairly typical of the reaction against the Victorians. Burne-Jones's Love leading the Pilgrim was bought for the Tate Gallery in 1943 for 90 guineas, and the pathetic neglect of Leighton's Flaming June between the 1930s and the early 1960s is legendary.
Stylistically, the picture marks the climax of his early phase, characterised by a preference for classical subjects in the Alma-Tadema mode. The following year, 1888, saw a radical departure, when Waterhouse (as they say today) re-invented himself as an academic interpreter of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. The picture which announced the change was The Lady of Shalott (fig. 1), exhibited at the RA that year. Few works, with the possible exception of Burne-Jones's King Cophetua (Tate Gallery), suffered more from Victorian art's long decades of eclipse. For years it was a subject of amusement or ridicule, languishing under such unofficial titles as After the May Ball. But revival brough rehabilitation, and it is now one of the most popular and widely reproduced images in the national collection.
Waterhouse found the subject of Mariamne in the Jewish Antiquities of the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, although it had also been handled by Byron in his poem Herod's Lament for Mariamne (1815). Mariamne was a princess renowned for her beauty who was married, as his second wife, to Herod the Great, king of Judaea (reigned 73-4BC). Falsely accused of adultery by the king's sister, Salome, and other members of his family, she was arrested and condemned to death. Herod, who had been passionately attached to his wife, wished to commute the sentence, but was urged by Salome to have it carried out, which was accordingly done. The painting shows Mariamne going to her execution. She turns to look at Herod, who is seated on the right in an agony of conflicting emotions, while Salome stands beside him, strengthening his resolve.
It should perhaps be mentioned that the Herod and Salome who figure in Mariamne are not the same as those in the story of John the Baptist. It was Herod the Great's son, Herod Antipas, who ordered John's execution, and his grand-daughter, the niece of Herod Antipas, also called Salome, who danced before her uncle and so obtained John's head on a charger. This was the subject which so appealed to the Symbolists, who saw in Salome a supreme example of the femme fatale. The cult was started by Gustave Moreau, whose famous painting The Apparition appeared at the Paris Salon in 1876 and was re-exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London a year later. This was followed by Oscar Wilde's play with its Beardsley illustrations (1893), a masterpiece by Lovis Corinth (1897-1900), and the opera by Richard Strauss (1905). But although Waterhouse's subject is different, it is obviously related to the more famous story both historically and in terms of the strong element of sadism common to both. In fact at the time they seem to have been seen as almost interchangeable. In his catalogue of the Royal Academy Revisited exhibition, Christopher Forbes makes the interesting point that Kaiser Wilhelm originally suggested to Strauss that the subject of his opera should be Herod and Mariamne.
The conclusion that Waterhouse's picture belongs, at least in part, to this context, is reinforced by its theatricality. Many critics at the time were struck by this, as Peter Trippi observers in his recent monograph on the artist. George Bernard Shaw, in a review in The World, discussed the work in terms of stage production, with Mariamne advancing on her audience as if she was coming 'nearly straight-forward out of the frame.' Harry Quilter, formerly the art critic on the Times, wrote that Waterhouse presented 'a Sarah Bernhardt conception of the scene, the tragedy of a star actress surrounded by lay figures', and D.S. MacColl, in the Spectator, compared the picture to 'a tableau at the Porte St Martin [Sarah Bernhardt's theatre] or the Chatelet.'
The Gallic dimension which these comparisons suggest was underlined by the French academic style that Waterhouse had adopted. Although he himself had not studied abroad, many of his artistic associates had, including members of the Newlyn School, and there is a close relationship between their handling of paint - the so-called 'square brush' technique - and that seen in Mariamne. The sensational subject is also very French; as Trippi puts it, 'brooding queens were the stock-in-trade of such internationally-renowned French Academicians as Laurens and Cabanel.' In fact Waterhouse had attempted this mode before in St Eulalia (fig. 2), the picture which had earned him associateship of the RA two years earlier, but if anything Mariamne was an even more blatant example. In a rather jaundiced review in the Athenaeum, F.G. Stephens observed that the picture's 'background of a gilded semi-dome and lofty ambo, with mosaics in blue and gold, is quite worthy of one of the best of the third-rate French painters who supply the staple of every Salon.'
But Waterhouse was alive to influences nearer home. That 'gilded semi-dome and lofty ambo' is a little reminiscent of the famous Arab Hall that Leighton had added to his house in Holland Park Road, Kensington, in 1877-9, and it is not hard to imagine Waterhouse seeing this at some gathering to which the PRA had invited him following his election as an Associate in 1885. Trippi does not consider this possibility, but he does suggest a connection with the apsidal-ended studio that Alma-Tadema created for himself at his house in St John's Wood, completed and revealed to a fascinated public in 1886 (see lots 274-7). Waterhouse, who was widely regarded as the Anglo-Dutch artist's follower, may well have been an early guest at one of his celebrated soirées, even though he himself was not to settle in St John's Wood, by then the ultimate must-have address for a successful Academician, until 1901.
Quite apart from any possible echo of this kind, contact with Alma-Tadema would have encouraged Waterhouse to see his picture in terms of theatre. The interior at 17 Grove End Road was intensely dramatic. Alma-Tadema's own work was nothing if not theatrical, and he was becoming increasingly involved in stage design. Although the great days of his collaboration with Irving and Beerbohm Tree still lay in the future, he had desinged Coriolanus for Irving as early as 1880, even if production was delayed for twenty years.
And yet, as Trippi observes, there is an 'English decorum' about Mariamne, a conceptual reserve that separates it decisively from the over-the-top theatricality, the often gruesome melodrama, in which Waterhouse's French contemporaries loved to indulge. We know that Waterhouse was profoundly impressed by the Millais retrospective that was held at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886, and both Trippi and Anthony Hobson see a connection between Mariamne and Millais' Esther (private collection), 'a Hebrew heroine who triumphed where Mariamne failed', which appeared in this exhibition. First shown at the RA in 1865, Millais' picture personifies 'English decorum' in its restrained treatment of a powerfully dramatic theme.
Though everyone recognised the importance of Mariamne, press comment was mixed. For some, the picture was almost beyond criticism. 'For pathos, conception, and execution,' wrote the critic on the Illustrated London News, 'it is unsurpassed by any work in the present Exhibition.' In its concentration of interest in the central figure of the deeply-wronged wife, it surpasses even the work of Mr Waterhouse's master, Mr Alma-Tadema...Apart from the depth of feeling displayed in this work, too much praise can scarcely be awarded to the artist for his delicate treatment of the three tones of white - the cashmere dress, the marble steps, and the ivory throne - which form the basis of his scheme of colour.'
The Times was hardly less enthusiastic:
Mr J.W. Waterhouse...has turned to his Josephus and found in the blood-stained annals of the Herod family a subject for a fine picture...Mariamne herself...is a fine dramatic figure, animated but not exaggerated, and the work of a man who can paint human beings and not mere studio 'subjects'. Technically, the work is full of ability; Mr Waterhouse can both draw and paint. We should have much preferred the picture, however, had it been half the size.
The picture's scale bothered others, while some had deeper worries. One of F.G. Stephens's rather acid comments in the Athenaeum has already been quoted. He felt the artist showed 'real picture-making skill', but concluded that while he was 'greatly superior to Mr Long [i.e. Edwin Long], he has much to do before he will produce a truly noble, sound design.'
Stephens was also unhappy with the element of melodrama, which, he remarked drily, 'ought to prove popular with the British public.' Some of his distaste can be attributed to his Pre-Raphaelite background, but he was not alone in voicing doubts. For the Art Journal, Waterhouse had produced 'emphatically one of the pictures of the year, showing all this true artist's painstaking accuracy of detail, combined with poetic imagination.' And yet, the writer continued, 'somehow it does not quite satisfy; perhaps the canvas is too large, or else it wants placing on a low skirting-board, so that Mariamne's face could be better seen, or more probably the accessories are too pronounced, and the principal group of actors take too subordinate a position.'
A similar combination of general admiration and nit-picking criticism is found in Claude Phillips's review in the Academy. Having complained that Alma-Tadema's Women of Amphissa lacked some 'essential element,' a dramatic dimension which would have saved it from becoming merely 'an exquisite piece of classic genre,' he contined:
We cannot, in fairness, exampt from a measure of the same crticism, Mr. Waterhouse's important "Mariamne before Herod the Great" (134). Here is shown the beautiful queen going from the presence of Herod to her death, at the moment when her condemnation has just been pronounced by her judges; she appears, as she turns to depart, with one parting look of half-repressed reproach and anguish cast at the hesitating king, into whose ear his sister Salome whispers poisonous counsels of hatred and revenge. The scene is laid in a curious half-Assyrian hall of marble, mosaic, and gold, the glittering semi-dome of which, sheltering the judges, has in form, though not in decoration, a Byzantine aspect that recalls the altar-pieces of Bellini and Carpaccio. Here, too, the execution is of the most solid, and in parts - such as the dome, the marble, and the rich accessories - of the most consummate kind. But the colour is not happily massed, or sufficiently bold for a work of such a type; it lacks both brilliancy and unity of general effect. As the presentment of a dramatic conception, requiring for its adequate realisation the most spontaneous energy combined with the greatest subtlety in the delineation of shades of character and of phases of fleeting passion, the work cannot be pronounced adequate. The figure of the white-robed queen, with its mingled expression of unconquered pride and mute appeal, with the clever suggestion of impending downward movement, is admirable; but the king and his evil counsellor are a group too trivial and too much effaced to form an adequate balance to the central personage, while the judges and the executioner are mere accessories, rather serving to fill up the canvas than forming, as they might be expected to do, necessary elements contributing to the unity and balance of a dramatic whole.
Victorian art critics were hard to please, but it is amazing today to see to what lengths they were prepared to go in discussing individual pictures, and how much space their editors allowed them. Their enormously long reviews, often couched in what now seems tediously pompous language, must reflect a genuine thirst on the part of the public.
The picture was bought by Cuthbert Quilter, the elder brother of Harry Quilter, the erstwhile art critic on the Times and the victim of Whistler's mercilessly caustic wit. Cuthbert Quilter was a wealthy corporate capitalist who invested in the nascent telephone system, entered Parliament, and was rewarded with a knighthood in 1897. He belonged to a well-known type of collector, buying large, well-reviewed pictures and being almost over-eager to lend them to exhibitions, well aware that this reflected advantageously on himself and enhanced the value of the work in question. Mariamne, with her dramatic, affecting subject and monumental scale, was perfectly tailored to big international exhibitions, and during his twenty-two years of ownership, Quilter allowed her to travel at least eighteen times across Europe and America. In the process, she collected medals at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1869, the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, and the Exposition Internationale in Brussels in 1897.
The picture fetched 480 guineas when Sir Cuthbert sold it in 1909, two years before his death, in a sale totalling £87,780 at Christie's, but the price had dropped to a mere 48 guineas when it came under the hammer again in 1938. The case is fairly typical of the reaction against the Victorians. Burne-Jones's Love leading the Pilgrim was bought for the Tate Gallery in 1943 for 90 guineas, and the pathetic neglect of Leighton's Flaming June between the 1930s and the early 1960s is legendary.