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Lot Essay
In composition and mood, Sisters bears all the hallmarks of Campbell Taylor's best work. Languid, decorous; his sitters serve to strengthen a mood rather than inspire narrative. In keeping with the oriental artists he admired, and in particular the Aesthetic pioneer James MacNeill Whistler, Taylor is as preoccupied with design as he is with subject. Symptomatic of this are the number of pictures by Taylor that represent interiors or even incidents of decor, for example: Interior: Walnut and Delft (1918), The White Drawing Room and The Japanese Room (1927). Taylor's 1915 Academy exhibit, About 1830, showed a woman in period dress examining a collection of prints and drawings.
Themes of taste and connoisseurship, with the emphasis on reproducing in meticulous verisimilitude the nuances of a particular time, are central to Taylor's work. Carefully judged in terms of colour and composition, they function almost as pieces of craftsmanship: repeated details, echoed passages, symmetry and overall harmony supporting the aesthetic axiom that a painting can be compared to a piece of music, or share the studious integrity of an arts and crafts objet de art.
Sisters is one of a series, featuring the same two or three models in diaphanous white, executed by Taylor between 1905-8. "It Rain, it raineth every day" and Battledore (both 1906) are direct forerunners. The present mise-en-scene places the three protagonists outside a Queen Anne house; a preference for this style of architecture, with its apparent simplicity and formal elegance, having succeeded Gothic revivalism in the latter part of the 19th Century.
Taylor's most famous work, The Rehearsal (1907), which was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for the Tate, incorporated two white-clad musicians within its representation of an informal evening recital.
Themes of taste and connoisseurship, with the emphasis on reproducing in meticulous verisimilitude the nuances of a particular time, are central to Taylor's work. Carefully judged in terms of colour and composition, they function almost as pieces of craftsmanship: repeated details, echoed passages, symmetry and overall harmony supporting the aesthetic axiom that a painting can be compared to a piece of music, or share the studious integrity of an arts and crafts objet de art.
Sisters is one of a series, featuring the same two or three models in diaphanous white, executed by Taylor between 1905-8. "It Rain, it raineth every day" and Battledore (both 1906) are direct forerunners. The present mise-en-scene places the three protagonists outside a Queen Anne house; a preference for this style of architecture, with its apparent simplicity and formal elegance, having succeeded Gothic revivalism in the latter part of the 19th Century.
Taylor's most famous work, The Rehearsal (1907), which was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for the Tate, incorporated two white-clad musicians within its representation of an informal evening recital.