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Lot Essay
Spencer Stanhope was unique in the Pre-Raphaelite circle for his aristocratic background; his mother, Lady Elizabeth Spencer Stanhope, was the youngest daughter of Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester. Yet it was against much parental opposition that he struggled to forge his reputation as an artist.
It was under the tutelage of G. F. Watts that he first came into contact with celebrities in the worlds of art, literature, politics and science. He soon fell victim to the emotive art of Rossetti and his follower Burne-Jones and joined them and others in painting the famous murals illustrating the Morte d'Arthur in the Oxford Union. Having cemented a friendship in Oxford, Stanhope and Burne Jones remained close friends. They shared a mutual admiration and it is hard to think that Stanhope can have remained unaffected by the striking painted furniture adorning the flat Burne-Jones shared with William Morris and the other decorative work - stained glass, painted furniture, textiles, ceramics - produced by the youthful firm of Morris & Co..
On his marriage in 1860 he commissioned a house from the architect Philip Webb, one of the partners of the Morris firm, who had just designed the famous 'Red House' for Morris himself. With other figures such as Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown also involved in such work he would have proved an exception had he not too explored decorative schemes.
It was in the early 1870s, when settled at the Villa Nuti at Bellosguardo outside Florence, that this work came to fruition. His villa there was a centre for the English expatriate community, Morris and Burne-Jones visited him in 1873, and in later years his niece and her husband, Evelyn and William De Morgan, were regular guests.
The clock is one of a number of pieces of furniture that Stanhope painted in Italy. The case was presumably designed by the artist with classical detailing and seems to have been made for him by a furniture maker in England. The decoration consists of allegorical and scriptural subjects on the theme of Time, precisely the kind of symbolic concept that he so often explored in his easel pictures; the style shows him in his full maturity, echoing Burne-Jones, Botticelli and the other old masters that surrounded him in Italy.
Contemporary photographs of the Villa Nuti show the clock standing in the salone, surrounded by other examples of his work, and it has remained in his family ever since.
It was under the tutelage of G. F. Watts that he first came into contact with celebrities in the worlds of art, literature, politics and science. He soon fell victim to the emotive art of Rossetti and his follower Burne-Jones and joined them and others in painting the famous murals illustrating the Morte d'Arthur in the Oxford Union. Having cemented a friendship in Oxford, Stanhope and Burne Jones remained close friends. They shared a mutual admiration and it is hard to think that Stanhope can have remained unaffected by the striking painted furniture adorning the flat Burne-Jones shared with William Morris and the other decorative work - stained glass, painted furniture, textiles, ceramics - produced by the youthful firm of Morris & Co..
On his marriage in 1860 he commissioned a house from the architect Philip Webb, one of the partners of the Morris firm, who had just designed the famous 'Red House' for Morris himself. With other figures such as Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown also involved in such work he would have proved an exception had he not too explored decorative schemes.
It was in the early 1870s, when settled at the Villa Nuti at Bellosguardo outside Florence, that this work came to fruition. His villa there was a centre for the English expatriate community, Morris and Burne-Jones visited him in 1873, and in later years his niece and her husband, Evelyn and William De Morgan, were regular guests.
The clock is one of a number of pieces of furniture that Stanhope painted in Italy. The case was presumably designed by the artist with classical detailing and seems to have been made for him by a furniture maker in England. The decoration consists of allegorical and scriptural subjects on the theme of Time, precisely the kind of symbolic concept that he so often explored in his easel pictures; the style shows him in his full maturity, echoing Burne-Jones, Botticelli and the other old masters that surrounded him in Italy.
Contemporary photographs of the Villa Nuti show the clock standing in the salone, surrounded by other examples of his work, and it has remained in his family ever since.