拍品專文
This important document, a likeness of one of the two greatest poets of the Victorian age by a leading member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, has only recently been re-discovered. It shows Browning at the age of sixty-nine and was commissioned by George Lillie Craik (d. 1905), a partner in th publishing house of Macmillan & Co. and the husband of Dinah Mulock (1826-1887), the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1857), Craik also commissioned from Sandys a portrait of another well-known author, Mrs Oliphant, together witha likeness of himself. These two portraits, dated respectively 1881 and 1882, were with the Maas Gallery in 1970 and appeared in the Sandys exhibition held at Brighton and Sheffield in 1974, nos. 124-5 (both rept. in cat.).
In commissiioning the portraits Craik was no doubt inspired by the series of chalk portraits of Macmillan authors commissioned by Alexander Macmillan in 1820. This series, which is still in the firm's possession, included likenesses of Tennyson, Mathew Arnold, John Morley, James Russell Lowell and others. Browning was not one of Macmillan's authors, his publisher being Smith Elder & Co., so presumably he was a personal friend of Craik's. At all events his reputation was at its height at this period; indeed the portrait is contemporary with the launching, by F.J. Furnivall and Emily Hickey, of the Browning Society, the inaugural meeting of which took place on 28 October 1881. By 1884 there were no fewer than twenty-two of these Societies across the world, dedicated to the reading, discussion and elucidation of the poet's works.
Since Sandys was a notoriously slow worker, the portrait was probably drawn mainly in the early months of 1881 when Browning wa at his London home, 19 Warwick Crescent. As usual at this period, he spent the late summer and autumn in Venice, but he was back in London by November when the drawing must have received its finishing touches and been dated.
In an article published in the Magazine of Art in 1890, William Michael Rossetti, who had known Browning well, said of the Sandys portrait that 'it would be difficult to find a face better drawn or more carefully and delicately realised'. While admitting that it 'gives us Browning observant, as assured by he was', he questioned whether the expression was not oo 'sedate', since 'his countenance even when most in repose, seemed constantly ready to light up at any incentive or suggestion'. 'We should not, howevr', he concluded, 'be the less grateful to the artist for having us so exact, deliberate, and skilful a record of the moulding and modelling of our poet's lineaments'.
Browning was frequently portrayed. Others who recorded his likeness included (roughly in chronological order) D.G. Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, Michele Gordigiani, Frederic Leighton, Field Talfourd, Rudolf Lehmann, Samuel Laurence, G.F. Watts, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alphouse Legros, Felix Moscheles, William Blake Richmond, Carlo Pellegrini, and his son Robert Barrett Browning. Indeed the habit of sitting grew on him until (as the DNB puts it) 'in his last years, with extreme good-nature, he was willing to sit for his portrait to anyone who asked him. He was once discovered in Venice, surrounded, like a model in a
life-class, by a group of artistic ladies, each taking him off from a different point of view'.
We are grateful to his Betty Elzea for her help in preparing this entry
In commissiioning the portraits Craik was no doubt inspired by the series of chalk portraits of Macmillan authors commissioned by Alexander Macmillan in 1820. This series, which is still in the firm's possession, included likenesses of Tennyson, Mathew Arnold, John Morley, James Russell Lowell and others. Browning was not one of Macmillan's authors, his publisher being Smith Elder & Co., so presumably he was a personal friend of Craik's. At all events his reputation was at its height at this period; indeed the portrait is contemporary with the launching, by F.J. Furnivall and Emily Hickey, of the Browning Society, the inaugural meeting of which took place on 28 October 1881. By 1884 there were no fewer than twenty-two of these Societies across the world, dedicated to the reading, discussion and elucidation of the poet's works.
Since Sandys was a notoriously slow worker, the portrait was probably drawn mainly in the early months of 1881 when Browning wa at his London home, 19 Warwick Crescent. As usual at this period, he spent the late summer and autumn in Venice, but he was back in London by November when the drawing must have received its finishing touches and been dated.
In an article published in the Magazine of Art in 1890, William Michael Rossetti, who had known Browning well, said of the Sandys portrait that 'it would be difficult to find a face better drawn or more carefully and delicately realised'. While admitting that it 'gives us Browning observant, as assured by he was', he questioned whether the expression was not oo 'sedate', since 'his countenance even when most in repose, seemed constantly ready to light up at any incentive or suggestion'. 'We should not, howevr', he concluded, 'be the less grateful to the artist for having us so exact, deliberate, and skilful a record of the moulding and modelling of our poet's lineaments'.
Browning was frequently portrayed. Others who recorded his likeness included (roughly in chronological order) D.G. Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, Michele Gordigiani, Frederic Leighton, Field Talfourd, Rudolf Lehmann, Samuel Laurence, G.F. Watts, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alphouse Legros, Felix Moscheles, William Blake Richmond, Carlo Pellegrini, and his son Robert Barrett Browning. Indeed the habit of sitting grew on him until (as the DNB puts it) 'in his last years, with extreme good-nature, he was willing to sit for his portrait to anyone who asked him. He was once discovered in Venice, surrounded, like a model in a
life-class, by a group of artistic ladies, each taking him off from a different point of view'.
We are grateful to his Betty Elzea for her help in preparing this entry