拍品專文
These pictures are of considerable interest and art-historical importance, being the only known easel paintings by Peter Paul Marshall of the famous firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 'Fine Art Workmen'. A large, ebullient character, Marshall was born in Edinburgh and spent his early life in Liverpool. By profession he was a surveyor and sanitary engineer, but he painted in his spare time and exhibited at the Liverpool Academy. He was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings shown there in the 1850s, and married Gussy, daughter of John Miller, a Liverpool merchant of Scottish descent who was an enthusiastic patron of the Pre-Raphaelites themselves and their Liverpool followers (see lot ). By 1861 he had settled in London, becoming a partner in the Morris firm when it was launched that year. He never played a very active role, but during the early 1860s he produced some ten or eleven cartoons for stained glass, being represented in such important commissions as St Michael's, Brighton, St Martin's, Scarborough, and the east window of Bradford Cathedral. A.C. Sewter wrote that 'the best of his cartoons testify to a high degree of natural talent', and suggested that the influence of Rossetti on some of them might indicate that he attended Rossetti's evening classes at the Working Men's College (The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, I, 1974, pp.73-4). However, his closest friend among the Pre-Raphaelites was Madox Brown, in whose diary he often appears (see Virginia Surtees (ed.), The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, 1981, passim). There is also an attractive glimpse of him and his family in Lady Burne-Jones's Memorials (1904, I, p.238). 'It must have been in April of this year [1862] that we paid a Saturday to Monday visit to the Marshalls at Tottenham. A cheery, reckless household it was, with big Peter Paul ("Poll" was the sound his little wife gave to the name she called him) at the head of it: I remember a small cup of gunpowder being given to the boys to keep them quiet in the morning. Marshall sang the Scotch songs for which we always asked, and besides "Clerk Saunders" we got from him the beautiful tunes of "Sir Patrick Spens" and "Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride!"' Marshall remained a partner of the firm until 1875, when it was re-organised and he was bought out. We last hear of him in 1877 when he made his first and only appearance at the Royal Academy with a portrait of Miss Bessie Currie. By this time he seems to have been living in Dartford, perhaps having retired.
The pictures have the additional interest of being rare early illustrations to George Eliot. Datable to the years 1861-65 on the evidence of the label on one of them (the firm's premises were at 8 Red Lion Square during this period), they are inspired by her Scenes of Clerical Life, the three stories with which she made her debut as novelist, publishing them serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857 and in book form from the following January. One picture clearly illustrates the first story, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton. Amos himself is seen with his long-suffering wife Milly and two of their six children, while outside the vicarage garden is covered with snow as it is described in the early chapters. The other picture is more problematical. It is tempting to see it as an illustration to the third story, Janet's Repentance, showing the heroine and her brutal husband, the lawyer Robert Dempster. The glass and decanter on the table would contain the brandy which leads to his downfall, while the screen, with its reproductions of Raphael's Charge to Peter and Holman Hunt's Light of the World, would refer to the religious crisis in Janet's life on which the story hinges. However, the woman in the picture is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, not the ample, black-haired girl of the story; and the subject is more likely to be two other characters from Amos Barton, the handsome, selfish Countess Czerlaski and her taciturn brother Mr Bridmain. The following description of the pair in their drawing-room seems to supply several of the details: 'there is a bright fire ..., casting a pleasant but uncertain light on the delicate silk dress of a lady who is reclining behind a screen in the corner of the sofa, and allowing you to discern that the hair of the gentleman who is seated in the arm-chair opposite, with a newspaper over his knees, is becoming decidedly grey'. If this is the subject, then the images on the screen would still be relevant as reflections of the Countess's religiosity; but whatever the case they have a further significance. The choice of these particular images is surely inspired by the important chapter on 'The False Religious Ideal' in Modern Painters, III (1856), in which Ruskin contrasts Raphael's cartoon - 'that infinite monstrosity and hypocrisy', with the Holman Hunt - 'a real vision of real things' representing 'Christ as a living presence among us now'. The passage was praised by Rossetti in a letter to Browning of 6 February 1856, and discussed by Burne-Jones in a review of the book published in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine the following April. It must have been well known to Marshall too.
The pictures have the additional interest of being rare early illustrations to George Eliot. Datable to the years 1861-65 on the evidence of the label on one of them (the firm's premises were at 8 Red Lion Square during this period), they are inspired by her Scenes of Clerical Life, the three stories with which she made her debut as novelist, publishing them serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857 and in book form from the following January. One picture clearly illustrates the first story, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton. Amos himself is seen with his long-suffering wife Milly and two of their six children, while outside the vicarage garden is covered with snow as it is described in the early chapters. The other picture is more problematical. It is tempting to see it as an illustration to the third story, Janet's Repentance, showing the heroine and her brutal husband, the lawyer Robert Dempster. The glass and decanter on the table would contain the brandy which leads to his downfall, while the screen, with its reproductions of Raphael's Charge to Peter and Holman Hunt's Light of the World, would refer to the religious crisis in Janet's life on which the story hinges. However, the woman in the picture is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, not the ample, black-haired girl of the story; and the subject is more likely to be two other characters from Amos Barton, the handsome, selfish Countess Czerlaski and her taciturn brother Mr Bridmain. The following description of the pair in their drawing-room seems to supply several of the details: 'there is a bright fire ..., casting a pleasant but uncertain light on the delicate silk dress of a lady who is reclining behind a screen in the corner of the sofa, and allowing you to discern that the hair of the gentleman who is seated in the arm-chair opposite, with a newspaper over his knees, is becoming decidedly grey'. If this is the subject, then the images on the screen would still be relevant as reflections of the Countess's religiosity; but whatever the case they have a further significance. The choice of these particular images is surely inspired by the important chapter on 'The False Religious Ideal' in Modern Painters, III (1856), in which Ruskin contrasts Raphael's cartoon - 'that infinite monstrosity and hypocrisy', with the Holman Hunt - 'a real vision of real things' representing 'Christ as a living presence among us now'. The passage was praised by Rossetti in a letter to Browning of 6 February 1856, and discussed by Burne-Jones in a review of the book published in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine the following April. It must have been well known to Marshall too.