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Lot Essay
This charming example of Crane's mature style, exhibited at the Royal Water-Colour Society in 1894 when he was nearly fifty, conflates two iconographical ideas that were central to his work. Five years earlier, in 1889, he had produced Flora's Feast: A Masque of Flowers, a picture-book for children in which flowers take the form of human figures dressed in appropriate attributes. As Isobel Spencer has observed, the remarkably confident linear designs, while clearly indebted to William Blake, also 'herald the decade of Art Nouveau'. Published by Cassell & Co., the book 'contains forty unframed colour-lithographed pages illustrating Flora calling the flowers from their winter sleep, each one appearing according to its place in the yearly cycle... Crane must have been familiar with Grandville's designs for Les Fleurs Animées (1847), but his floral figures have none of the formality which lingers on even in these lively creations. Such apparently effortless invention is misleading, however, because Crane's effects could not possiblty have been achieved without considerable understanding of plant form' (Walter Crane, 1975, pp. 99-100).
Whatever the book's sources and influence, it proved immensely popular, and Crane did not hesitate to exploit its success. Four more books were to follow, offering variations on the same theme: Queen Summer, or The Tourney of the Lily and the Rose (1891). A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden (1899). A Flower Wedding (1905) and Flowers from Shakespeare's Garden (1906). Other illustrations of this type remain unpublished (fig. 2).
Ensigns of Spring also belongs to this genre, although there seems to be no exact correspondence with any of the designs in the series of flower books. Flower imagery of this kind is far less common in Crane's easel paintings, although parallels do exist. They include A Water Lily, a picture shown at the New Gallery in 1888; Poppies and Corn, which appeared at the RWS in 1893, no. 180 (illustrated in catalogue); and The Mower (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe), an unusually dark allegory of 1901 in which Death takes his scythe to a field of personified daisies (illustrated in Spencer, op.cit., p.130).
In Ensigns of Spring the three figures are all closely associated with flowers emblematic of this season: the bluebell, the lily, the orchid, the iris, and so on. They wear them as hats, carry them like martyrs' palms, or tread them underfoot. The colours of the blooms, the dresses and the background foliage combine to create a wonderfully subtle Aesthetic harmony in which greens, blues, purples and whites predominate.
The fact that Crane chooses to focus on spring flowers brings us to the second iconographical obsession that the watercolour represents, one of far more weight and philosophical significance. Time and again in his work he returns to the theme of rebirth and renewal, usually expressing it in terms of the changing seasons. Pictures embodying the concept are legion: A Herald of Spring, The Advent of Spring, Winter and Spring, The Earth and Spring, The Coming of May, La Primavera, The Triumph of Spring, and so on ad infinitum. They date from all periods of his career, and nearly all are concerned with the sense of joy and wellbeing that spring brings with it. Even in Sorrow and Spring, a rather feeble late work exhibited at the Royal Water-Colour Society in 1901, we are invited to consider how the arrival of spring banishes misery and grief. But occasionally Crane strikes a more melancholy note, emphasising decline and decay rather than renewal. An instance is The Death of the Year, a picture inspired by Shelley that he painted in Rome in 1872. It showed, he recalled in his Reminiscences, 'a procession of the Months following the bier of the Year, preceeded by a winged figure swinging incense, and a priest-like one in a cape reading from a book and passing into the pillared porch of a temple - the House of Time'.
In June 2002 Christie's sold in London one of Crane's most ambitious meditations on this theme, his enormous mural-like painting The Fate of Persephone, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878 (fig. 3.). It shows Persephone, the goddess of spring, being abducted by Pluto, the lord of the underworld, as she gathers flowers in the vale of Enna. At the behest of her mother, Demeter, Zeus would decree that Persephone must return to earth for half the year, and the ancient world saw the myth as a metaphor for the rotation of the seasons. The goddess's retreat to Hades heralded the onset of autumn and winter, her re-appearance the advent of spring and summer.
Crane had already treated his favourite subject in mythological terms when, at the opening of the Grosvenor the previous year, he showed The Renascence of Venus (Tate Gallery), using the birth of the goddess of beauty as a symbol of cultural renewal highly appropriate to this landmark event. The Fate of Persephone represented the reverse process, although Crane was careful to drop strong hints that life and beauty would return in due course, showing a pomegranate tree spreading its flowering branches over the cavernous entrance to Hades, and daffodils, jonquils, anemones and narcissi blooming luxuriantly in the foreground.
When he submitted The Fate of Persephone to the Grosvenor, Crane quoted a relevant passage from Paradise Lost in the catalogue, Morna O'Neill has suggested that this was significant; far from merely picking a convenient literary tag, she argues, the artist was deliberatley invoking one of the supreme expressions of the theme of redemption and regeneration. Crane undoubtedly saw allegory as a means of conveying profound moral truths. It is no accident that he chose to paint The Fate of Persephone on such a heroic scale; it places the picture firmly in the tradition of monumental history painting, the art form that, ever since the Renaissance, had been regarded as having a uniquely ethical and didactic purpose. Crane was not a conventionally religious man, describing himself as a free-thinker influenced by Shelley, Darwin and Herbert Spencer. If anything, he subscribed to the so-called 'religion of humanity' that appealed to so many Victorians, including his early hero John Ruskin following his loss of Christian faith in 1858. Crane would have known that, as a result of his new-found humanism, Ruskin had come to see myths as on a par with scripture in embodying 'spiritual truth', and his own pictorial metaphors of renewal seem a perfect example of this theory put into practice. If The Renascence of Venus symbolises the rebirth of the arts, this was only part of the general process of social regeneration to which Crane looked forward. There is every connection between his obsession with the imagery of spring and his passionate support of the infant Socialist movement.
But Crane was not always so serious. As his illustrated books for children show, he could be playful as well as solemn, and in Ensigns of Spring it is this approach to his favourite theme that is uppermost. Rebirth for Crane may have been a social imperative, but it could also be the pretext for an essay in light-hearted whimsy and a particularly delightful demonstration of Aesthetic taste.
We are grateful to Charles Nugent for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
Whatever the book's sources and influence, it proved immensely popular, and Crane did not hesitate to exploit its success. Four more books were to follow, offering variations on the same theme: Queen Summer, or The Tourney of the Lily and the Rose (1891). A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden (1899). A Flower Wedding (1905) and Flowers from Shakespeare's Garden (1906). Other illustrations of this type remain unpublished (fig. 2).
Ensigns of Spring also belongs to this genre, although there seems to be no exact correspondence with any of the designs in the series of flower books. Flower imagery of this kind is far less common in Crane's easel paintings, although parallels do exist. They include A Water Lily, a picture shown at the New Gallery in 1888; Poppies and Corn, which appeared at the RWS in 1893, no. 180 (illustrated in catalogue); and The Mower (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe), an unusually dark allegory of 1901 in which Death takes his scythe to a field of personified daisies (illustrated in Spencer, op.cit., p.130).
In Ensigns of Spring the three figures are all closely associated with flowers emblematic of this season: the bluebell, the lily, the orchid, the iris, and so on. They wear them as hats, carry them like martyrs' palms, or tread them underfoot. The colours of the blooms, the dresses and the background foliage combine to create a wonderfully subtle Aesthetic harmony in which greens, blues, purples and whites predominate.
The fact that Crane chooses to focus on spring flowers brings us to the second iconographical obsession that the watercolour represents, one of far more weight and philosophical significance. Time and again in his work he returns to the theme of rebirth and renewal, usually expressing it in terms of the changing seasons. Pictures embodying the concept are legion: A Herald of Spring, The Advent of Spring, Winter and Spring, The Earth and Spring, The Coming of May, La Primavera, The Triumph of Spring, and so on ad infinitum. They date from all periods of his career, and nearly all are concerned with the sense of joy and wellbeing that spring brings with it. Even in Sorrow and Spring, a rather feeble late work exhibited at the Royal Water-Colour Society in 1901, we are invited to consider how the arrival of spring banishes misery and grief. But occasionally Crane strikes a more melancholy note, emphasising decline and decay rather than renewal. An instance is The Death of the Year, a picture inspired by Shelley that he painted in Rome in 1872. It showed, he recalled in his Reminiscences, 'a procession of the Months following the bier of the Year, preceeded by a winged figure swinging incense, and a priest-like one in a cape reading from a book and passing into the pillared porch of a temple - the House of Time'.
In June 2002 Christie's sold in London one of Crane's most ambitious meditations on this theme, his enormous mural-like painting The Fate of Persephone, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878 (fig. 3.). It shows Persephone, the goddess of spring, being abducted by Pluto, the lord of the underworld, as she gathers flowers in the vale of Enna. At the behest of her mother, Demeter, Zeus would decree that Persephone must return to earth for half the year, and the ancient world saw the myth as a metaphor for the rotation of the seasons. The goddess's retreat to Hades heralded the onset of autumn and winter, her re-appearance the advent of spring and summer.
Crane had already treated his favourite subject in mythological terms when, at the opening of the Grosvenor the previous year, he showed The Renascence of Venus (Tate Gallery), using the birth of the goddess of beauty as a symbol of cultural renewal highly appropriate to this landmark event. The Fate of Persephone represented the reverse process, although Crane was careful to drop strong hints that life and beauty would return in due course, showing a pomegranate tree spreading its flowering branches over the cavernous entrance to Hades, and daffodils, jonquils, anemones and narcissi blooming luxuriantly in the foreground.
When he submitted The Fate of Persephone to the Grosvenor, Crane quoted a relevant passage from Paradise Lost in the catalogue, Morna O'Neill has suggested that this was significant; far from merely picking a convenient literary tag, she argues, the artist was deliberatley invoking one of the supreme expressions of the theme of redemption and regeneration. Crane undoubtedly saw allegory as a means of conveying profound moral truths. It is no accident that he chose to paint The Fate of Persephone on such a heroic scale; it places the picture firmly in the tradition of monumental history painting, the art form that, ever since the Renaissance, had been regarded as having a uniquely ethical and didactic purpose. Crane was not a conventionally religious man, describing himself as a free-thinker influenced by Shelley, Darwin and Herbert Spencer. If anything, he subscribed to the so-called 'religion of humanity' that appealed to so many Victorians, including his early hero John Ruskin following his loss of Christian faith in 1858. Crane would have known that, as a result of his new-found humanism, Ruskin had come to see myths as on a par with scripture in embodying 'spiritual truth', and his own pictorial metaphors of renewal seem a perfect example of this theory put into practice. If The Renascence of Venus symbolises the rebirth of the arts, this was only part of the general process of social regeneration to which Crane looked forward. There is every connection between his obsession with the imagery of spring and his passionate support of the infant Socialist movement.
But Crane was not always so serious. As his illustrated books for children show, he could be playful as well as solemn, and in Ensigns of Spring it is this approach to his favourite theme that is uppermost. Rebirth for Crane may have been a social imperative, but it could also be the pretext for an essay in light-hearted whimsy and a particularly delightful demonstration of Aesthetic taste.
We are grateful to Charles Nugent for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.