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Lot Essay
This magnificent and virtually unknown study from the female nude is one of Poynter's finest drawings. In the late 1850s Poynter had studied in Paris under Charles Gleyre, a follower of Ingres. Belonging to the so-called Paris Gang that was later immortalised by George du Maurier in Trilby (1894), he had been the 'industrious apprentice' and Whistler his 'idle' counterpart. Many regarded him as the greatest academic draughtsman of the day, the supreme exponent in England of the noble tradition he had not only inherited but sought to pass on through his teaching at South Kensington and the Slade. 'I believe', wrote Sickert in 1914, 'that the painters of the future are much more likely to turn for guidance to the excellent Ingres tradition that lingers in Sir Edward's painting, and ... I consider his drawings to belong to the rapidly diminishing category of real drawings.' It would be hard to find a better 'real drawing' by Poynter than the present example.
The drawing is a study for the figure of Andromeda in Perseus and Andromeda (destroyed but represented here by a sketch, fig. 1), one of four large canvases that Poynter painted in the 1870s to decorate the Billiard Room at Wortley Hall, near Sheffield, in Yorkshire. The house had been built in the eighteenth century by Edward Wortley-Montagu, husband of the famous Lady Mary; but though enormously rich he was parsimonious, and it was not until the early nineteenth century that the first Baron Wharncliffe set about making the house an appropriate seat for an English nobleman. The process was continued by his grandson, the third Baron and first Earl, who undertook a series of substantial alterations in the 1860s and 1870s. The greater part of this work was carried out by the architect John McVicar Anderson, but Lord Wharncliffe also sought the advice of his friend John Everett Millais, and it was he who recommended Poynter to decorate the Billiard Room, situated on the ground floor. Poynter had established his reputation in the late 1860s with two large archeological pictures that had won acclaim at the Royal Academy: Israel in Egypt (1866; Guildhall Art Gallery, London) and The Catapault (1867; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle). Since then he had also proved himself as a decorator by his involvement in schemes at the South Kensington (Victoria and Albert) Museum and the Palace of Westminster. He would soon embark on yet another project of this kind, the murals in St Stephen's Church, Dulwich.
The first two pictures for Wortley, commissioned in August 1871 for a total of £800, were dramatic scenes, each measuring 5 x 13 feet, in which heroes rescue maidens from the jaws of dragons. The first illustrated 'The Dragon of Wantley', an old English ballad which had close links with the Wortley family and the local area, and therefore reflected Lord Wharncliffe's ancient lineage. As a pair to this Poynter was asked to paint Perseus rescuing Andromeda, a subject he had already treated in a small picture of Andromeda chained to the rock which he had exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870 (private collection; see Victorianische Malerei Von Turner bis Whistler, exhibition organised by the British Council, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, and the Prado, Madrid, 1993, cat. no. 84, illustrated). Poynter was naturally concerned about the overall decorative effect of the room, as well as the paintings' thematic unity; but he also saw them as independent works of art, each of which he exhibited at the Academy before it was installed. Perseus and Andromeda was completed first and shown at the RA in 1872, while The Fight between More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley appeared the following year.
In embarking on the subject of Perseus and Andromeda, Poynter was showing an iniative which two of his most eminent confrères would follow. In 1875 his brother-in-law Edward Burne-Jones accepted a commission to paint a series of canvases illustrating the story of Perseus for the music room of Arthur Balfour's London house, 4 Carlton Gardens. The series as a whole was never completed, but the two paintings which correspond most closely with Poynter's picture, The Rock of Doom and The Doom Fulfilled (both Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), were finished and exhibited at the New Gallery in 1888. The other exponent of the theme was Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy from 1878 and something of a hero to Poynter. His interpretation, one of his weirdest and most ambitious conceptions (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), was exhibited at the RA in 1891.
All this, however, lay in the future, and in early 1870s Poynter faced a real problem in deciding to paint a large canvas in which a woman would appear naked. Would he not offend the susceptibilities of that delicate flower, Mrs Grundy? After all, as Alison Inglis has reminded us, Millais had caused shock when he exhibited his picture The Knight Errant (Tate Gallery) at the RA in 1870, the eponymous knight being shown rescuing a naked maiden, while in 1871 Burne-Jones had been asked to remove his Phyllis and Demophoön (Birmingham Art Gallery) from the walls of the Old Water Colour Society when objections were raised to the nude male figure. This was also the period when Rossetti and Swinburne came under attack from Robert Buchanan in his article 'The Fleshy School of Poetry', published in the Contemporary Review in October 1871.
Mindful, no doubt, of the setbacks experienced by his colleagues, Poynter raised the subject with his patron. 'One point', he wrote on 18 December 1871, 'I should like to make sure of before going further - that is whether you think you will have any objection to the naked figure of Andromeda ... I myself not only think there is nothing objectionable, but much prefer not covering any part of it with drapery, as the composition would lose greatly by the figure being cut in two - but it has occurred to me that when you saw how large a space the figure covers and how conspicuous it is, you might think I had made two much of it'. Lord Wharcliffe, however, seems to have been unconcerned, and the figure of Andromeda was not altered. Nor did it raise any eyebrows at the Royal Academy. Indeed critics tended to single it out for praise, even if they covered themselves by references to the picture's 'seriousness of intention'. Classical subject matter, as one of them was careful to point out, 'afforded a motive ... for treating the nude ... without ... furnishing any suggestion whatever of sensuousness'.
Even after the exhibition had ended, Poynter remained preoccupied with the figure of Andromeda, retouching it over a period of several months. It was not until the end of 1872 that the picture was finally considered finished and he turned his attention to its companion, The Fight between More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley. When they were installed, the pictures faced each other across one end of the Billiard Room, which was cruciform in shape with the billiard table in the middle. Lord Wharncliffe then proceeded to commission two pictures for the other end of the room. The original intention to have two more 'dragon' subjects was soon abandoned in favour of illustrations to the story of Atalanta and Milanion, which William Morris had recently popularised in the Earthly Paradise (1868-70), and eventually the paintings were divided between this subject and that of Nausicaa and her Maidens playing at Ball. Thus the first two canvases celebrated legendary heroes, the second pair classical heroines. Atalanta's Race was exhibited at the RA in 1876 and Nausicaa in 1879.
In the early 1880s Poynter devised a decorative setting for the pictures, an elaborate scheme in the 'Renaissance' style involving painted ornament, relief plasterwork, wood carving and stained glass. He took over the commission from his friend and neighbour in London, Walter Crane, whom he had recommended to Lord Wharncliffe but whose proposals were eventually abandoned after misunderstandings and delays. Poynter also painted one more picture for the scheme, a portrait of his patron dressed for shooting to hang above the chimney-piece. This was commissioned in June 1879 and exhibited at the RA two years later. Today the scheme is a shadow of its former self. The decoration has been restored, but the four subject paintings were destroyed during the second world war, and the portrait of Lord Wharncliffe was sold in 1986. His other great acquisition from a contemporary painter, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid by Burne-Jones, fared better, being purchased by subscribers for the Tate Gallery in 1900.
Despite their destruction, the pictures are not unknown. Three, including Perseus and Andromeda, are illustrated in Cosmo Monkhouse's monograph on Poynter published as the Art Journal's Easter Annual for 1897, and the scheme is the subject of an article by Alison Inglis, 'Sir Edward Poynter and the Earl of Wharncliffe's Billiard Room', which appeared in Apollo, vol. CXXVI, October 1987, pp. 249-55. This article, from which much of the information given here is taken, reproduces photographs showing the paintings in situ, as well as a large composition drawing for Perseus and Andromeda, highly worked in charcoal and coloured chalks, in the possession of Rugby School. Finally, there are oil sketches for three of the compositions, Perseus and Andromeda, Atlanta's Race and Nausicaa and her Maidens playing at Ball. The first is illustrated here (fig.1), the other two were sold in these Rooms on 9 June 1995, lot 341. The sketches for Perseus and Andromeda and Atalanta's Race were once in the same collection as the present drawing, all being part of a group of works which were purchased from Poynter by William Henry Doeg in the later 1870s. Some letters on the subject, written by the artist to Doeg in 1876, were quoted in our previous catalogue entry.
Poynter made an equally fine head study for the figure of Andromeda, now in the British Museum (fig. 2). Both were modelled by Antonia Caiva, one of the most popular of the Italian models, both female and male, who found employment in Victorian artists' studios, where they were appreciated for their fine physique and ability to strike a dramatic, uninhibited pose. Antonia worked not only for Poynter but for Burne-Jones, Leighton and others. Burne-Jones used her for the nude studies he made for the figures in The Golden Stairs (Tate Gallery), exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880. One of these studies, inscribed 'Antonia' and thus, most unusually, identifying a professional model in the context of Victorian painting, is illustrated here (fig. 3). Burne-Jones described her, a little unkindly, as 'like Eve and Semiramis, but if she had a mind at all, which I always doubted, it had no ideas. She had splendour and solemnity: her glory lasted nearly ten years'. Later she fell on hard times. Burne-Jones received a pathetic note from her in hospital, ill-spelt and ill-written: 'Sir, I was always obedient to you. I am poor and ill'. Then, like so many of her kind, despite their enormous contribution to the visual arts, she disappears from view.
The drawing is a study for the figure of Andromeda in Perseus and Andromeda (destroyed but represented here by a sketch, fig. 1), one of four large canvases that Poynter painted in the 1870s to decorate the Billiard Room at Wortley Hall, near Sheffield, in Yorkshire. The house had been built in the eighteenth century by Edward Wortley-Montagu, husband of the famous Lady Mary; but though enormously rich he was parsimonious, and it was not until the early nineteenth century that the first Baron Wharncliffe set about making the house an appropriate seat for an English nobleman. The process was continued by his grandson, the third Baron and first Earl, who undertook a series of substantial alterations in the 1860s and 1870s. The greater part of this work was carried out by the architect John McVicar Anderson, but Lord Wharncliffe also sought the advice of his friend John Everett Millais, and it was he who recommended Poynter to decorate the Billiard Room, situated on the ground floor. Poynter had established his reputation in the late 1860s with two large archeological pictures that had won acclaim at the Royal Academy: Israel in Egypt (1866; Guildhall Art Gallery, London) and The Catapault (1867; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle). Since then he had also proved himself as a decorator by his involvement in schemes at the South Kensington (Victoria and Albert) Museum and the Palace of Westminster. He would soon embark on yet another project of this kind, the murals in St Stephen's Church, Dulwich.
The first two pictures for Wortley, commissioned in August 1871 for a total of £800, were dramatic scenes, each measuring 5 x 13 feet, in which heroes rescue maidens from the jaws of dragons. The first illustrated 'The Dragon of Wantley', an old English ballad which had close links with the Wortley family and the local area, and therefore reflected Lord Wharncliffe's ancient lineage. As a pair to this Poynter was asked to paint Perseus rescuing Andromeda, a subject he had already treated in a small picture of Andromeda chained to the rock which he had exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870 (private collection; see Victorianische Malerei Von Turner bis Whistler, exhibition organised by the British Council, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, and the Prado, Madrid, 1993, cat. no. 84, illustrated). Poynter was naturally concerned about the overall decorative effect of the room, as well as the paintings' thematic unity; but he also saw them as independent works of art, each of which he exhibited at the Academy before it was installed. Perseus and Andromeda was completed first and shown at the RA in 1872, while The Fight between More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley appeared the following year.
In embarking on the subject of Perseus and Andromeda, Poynter was showing an iniative which two of his most eminent confrères would follow. In 1875 his brother-in-law Edward Burne-Jones accepted a commission to paint a series of canvases illustrating the story of Perseus for the music room of Arthur Balfour's London house, 4 Carlton Gardens. The series as a whole was never completed, but the two paintings which correspond most closely with Poynter's picture, The Rock of Doom and The Doom Fulfilled (both Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), were finished and exhibited at the New Gallery in 1888. The other exponent of the theme was Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy from 1878 and something of a hero to Poynter. His interpretation, one of his weirdest and most ambitious conceptions (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), was exhibited at the RA in 1891.
All this, however, lay in the future, and in early 1870s Poynter faced a real problem in deciding to paint a large canvas in which a woman would appear naked. Would he not offend the susceptibilities of that delicate flower, Mrs Grundy? After all, as Alison Inglis has reminded us, Millais had caused shock when he exhibited his picture The Knight Errant (Tate Gallery) at the RA in 1870, the eponymous knight being shown rescuing a naked maiden, while in 1871 Burne-Jones had been asked to remove his Phyllis and Demophoön (Birmingham Art Gallery) from the walls of the Old Water Colour Society when objections were raised to the nude male figure. This was also the period when Rossetti and Swinburne came under attack from Robert Buchanan in his article 'The Fleshy School of Poetry', published in the Contemporary Review in October 1871.
Mindful, no doubt, of the setbacks experienced by his colleagues, Poynter raised the subject with his patron. 'One point', he wrote on 18 December 1871, 'I should like to make sure of before going further - that is whether you think you will have any objection to the naked figure of Andromeda ... I myself not only think there is nothing objectionable, but much prefer not covering any part of it with drapery, as the composition would lose greatly by the figure being cut in two - but it has occurred to me that when you saw how large a space the figure covers and how conspicuous it is, you might think I had made two much of it'. Lord Wharcliffe, however, seems to have been unconcerned, and the figure of Andromeda was not altered. Nor did it raise any eyebrows at the Royal Academy. Indeed critics tended to single it out for praise, even if they covered themselves by references to the picture's 'seriousness of intention'. Classical subject matter, as one of them was careful to point out, 'afforded a motive ... for treating the nude ... without ... furnishing any suggestion whatever of sensuousness'.
Even after the exhibition had ended, Poynter remained preoccupied with the figure of Andromeda, retouching it over a period of several months. It was not until the end of 1872 that the picture was finally considered finished and he turned his attention to its companion, The Fight between More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley. When they were installed, the pictures faced each other across one end of the Billiard Room, which was cruciform in shape with the billiard table in the middle. Lord Wharncliffe then proceeded to commission two pictures for the other end of the room. The original intention to have two more 'dragon' subjects was soon abandoned in favour of illustrations to the story of Atalanta and Milanion, which William Morris had recently popularised in the Earthly Paradise (1868-70), and eventually the paintings were divided between this subject and that of Nausicaa and her Maidens playing at Ball. Thus the first two canvases celebrated legendary heroes, the second pair classical heroines. Atalanta's Race was exhibited at the RA in 1876 and Nausicaa in 1879.
In the early 1880s Poynter devised a decorative setting for the pictures, an elaborate scheme in the 'Renaissance' style involving painted ornament, relief plasterwork, wood carving and stained glass. He took over the commission from his friend and neighbour in London, Walter Crane, whom he had recommended to Lord Wharncliffe but whose proposals were eventually abandoned after misunderstandings and delays. Poynter also painted one more picture for the scheme, a portrait of his patron dressed for shooting to hang above the chimney-piece. This was commissioned in June 1879 and exhibited at the RA two years later. Today the scheme is a shadow of its former self. The decoration has been restored, but the four subject paintings were destroyed during the second world war, and the portrait of Lord Wharncliffe was sold in 1986. His other great acquisition from a contemporary painter, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid by Burne-Jones, fared better, being purchased by subscribers for the Tate Gallery in 1900.
Despite their destruction, the pictures are not unknown. Three, including Perseus and Andromeda, are illustrated in Cosmo Monkhouse's monograph on Poynter published as the Art Journal's Easter Annual for 1897, and the scheme is the subject of an article by Alison Inglis, 'Sir Edward Poynter and the Earl of Wharncliffe's Billiard Room', which appeared in Apollo, vol. CXXVI, October 1987, pp. 249-55. This article, from which much of the information given here is taken, reproduces photographs showing the paintings in situ, as well as a large composition drawing for Perseus and Andromeda, highly worked in charcoal and coloured chalks, in the possession of Rugby School. Finally, there are oil sketches for three of the compositions, Perseus and Andromeda, Atlanta's Race and Nausicaa and her Maidens playing at Ball. The first is illustrated here (fig.1), the other two were sold in these Rooms on 9 June 1995, lot 341. The sketches for Perseus and Andromeda and Atalanta's Race were once in the same collection as the present drawing, all being part of a group of works which were purchased from Poynter by William Henry Doeg in the later 1870s. Some letters on the subject, written by the artist to Doeg in 1876, were quoted in our previous catalogue entry.
Poynter made an equally fine head study for the figure of Andromeda, now in the British Museum (fig. 2). Both were modelled by Antonia Caiva, one of the most popular of the Italian models, both female and male, who found employment in Victorian artists' studios, where they were appreciated for their fine physique and ability to strike a dramatic, uninhibited pose. Antonia worked not only for Poynter but for Burne-Jones, Leighton and others. Burne-Jones used her for the nude studies he made for the figures in The Golden Stairs (Tate Gallery), exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880. One of these studies, inscribed 'Antonia' and thus, most unusually, identifying a professional model in the context of Victorian painting, is illustrated here (fig. 3). Burne-Jones described her, a little unkindly, as 'like Eve and Semiramis, but if she had a mind at all, which I always doubted, it had no ideas. She had splendour and solemnity: her glory lasted nearly ten years'. Later she fell on hard times. Burne-Jones received a pathetic note from her in hospital, ill-spelt and ill-written: 'Sir, I was always obedient to you. I am poor and ill'. Then, like so many of her kind, despite their enormous contribution to the visual arts, she disappears from view.