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拍品專文
This large and attractive watercolour was one of four works in this medium that Poynter exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1910. He also showed two portraits, one being of King Edward VII, who died on 6 May, causing the RA to shut for several days. Garden subjects in watercolour represented a large proportion of Poynter's RA exhibits during the last years of his life. Another of the 1910 examples, In a London Garden, was of this type, and they were followed by The Rose Garden (1912), Wallflowers at Cherkley Court, In a Kensington Garden (both 1916). Spiraeas in the Rock Garden (1917), The Rose Arch (1918), The Garden Path (1919) and others.
Poynter had been president of the Academy since 1896, succeeding Leighton and Millais, who died in quick succession that year. He was now in his seventies and a widower, his wife Agnes, one of the Macdonald sisters who linked him by marriage to Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, having died of cancer in June 1906. Poynter was devastated by her death, all the more since he knew he had not been the most considerate or sympathetic of husbands; and there is something touching about these late garden subjects, as if he gained comfort from the close communion with nature at her most appealing that their execution involved. He himself was a keen gardener, and many of his subjects were found in the garden at his house in Kensington, 70 Addison Road.
A Hot-House Flower may well have been painted in the house's conservatory. A very English-looking model, dressed in a Japanese or Chinese kimono, reclines on an Indian ottoman while languidly fondling the blooms of an amaryllis that grows in a Chinese pot beside her. The watercolor's title, with its deliberate association of the girl herself with the exotic flower she is admiring, introduces an element of symbolism that, so far as we can judge from their titles, was absent from the subsequent garden subjects.
The watercolour seems to belong to more than one tradition. It looks back, first, to the Romantic era, with its passion for scenes of eastern luxuriance focussed on the harem. J.F. Lewis is an obvious example in England (fig. 2), but in a sense more relevant are the odalisques of J.-A.-D. Ingres, under whose associate, Charles Gleyre, Poynter had studied in Paris in the late 1850s. Poynter's demure little Kensington odalisque, almost every inch of her anatomy chastely covered, gives, as it were, a final touch of life to this tradition, some hundred years after Ingres' svelte, langurous and unashamedly naked houris had begun to make their appearance.
Poynter's watercolour might also be described as an essay in Aesthetic survival, recalling those pictures, so popular in the 1860s, '70s and '80s, in which beautiful models, flowers and exotic textiles combine to create seductive colour harmonies. He himself had made contributions to this genre. His watercolour portrait of Mary Elcho, the eldest of the Wyndham sisters (private collection), is a case in point. Dating from 1886, it shows the sitter, a renowned beauty, reclining on cushions to form the centrepiece of a chromatic ensemble based on that most Aesthetic of colours, yellow. While her dress strikes the dominant note, it is picked up throughout the composition in book-covers, vases of flowers, a Chinese screen, and, most notably of all, a bowl of goldfish prominently displayed on a marble-topped Indian table in the foreground (for an illustration, see Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls, 1984, p.109).
But the names that leap to mind in this context are those of Poynter's older and younger contemporaries, D.G. Rossetti and Albert Moore. Having more or less invented the genre in his Bocca Baciata of 1859 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Rossetti had gone on to re-interpret it in a series of dazzling canvases featuring glamorous models: The Blue Bower (1865), Monna Vanna (1866), Lady Lilith (1868), Veronica Veronese (1872), La Bella Mano (1875) and others. Albert Moore, of whom Rossetti tended to be dismissive, had in fact done something similar, although his pictorial language was more classical and he was far more consistent in his aim to create formal and chromatic harmonies based on strict internal logic. Both artists relied heavily on flowers and fabrics to create their effects, providing many precedents for Poynter's watercolour. If the model's almost intimate relationship with her amaryllis seems essentially Rossettian, Moore anticipated the picture's conception in terms of intricate pattern, and in the use of flowers and drapery to build up his shimmering effect.
Aestheticism and Symbolism used to be thought of as fundamentally opposed, one denying, the other affirming meaning, but we are increasingly aware of the extent to which they overlapped, especially in the area of mood and atmosphere. Rossetti represents this duality in a particularly striking form, frequently introducing symbolist elements into his more Aesthetic productions. Colour and music symbolism, for instance, play a part in Veronica Veronese, while Lilith and La Bella Mano are accompanied by sonnets to elucidate their meaning. As for Moore, who could hardly have represented a purer form of Aesthticism throughout the central part of his career, he suddenly developed an interest in symbolism during the closing years of his life, possibly in response to a decade-long terminal illness. An Idyll, the last picture he showed at the RA (1893), is typical, combining all his old interest in drapery- and flower-based pattern with the idea of a lovers' quarrel (fig.3).
Poynter was no exception to this rule. In his portrait of Lady Elcho the books that surround the sitter not only provide essential colour notes but evoke a mood of intellectual enquiry appropriate to someone who was a leading member of The Souls. Similarly, in A Hot-House Flower, the title endows the model with an aura of exoticism and underlines her relationship with the magnificent blooms she handles. That the amaryllis stands for pride in the traditional language of flowers is perhaps irrelevant, but the watercolour does seem to operate on two levels. On the one hand it is a charming, very late, example of the Aesthetic cult of the beautiful, employing once again all the elements- models, flowers, draperies - on which that cult had so often been focused, At the same time hints are dropped that the girl herself has been bred or cultivated in hot-house circumstances, though whether we should read anything sinister into this is left for us to decide. It was always the essence of Symbolism not to be too specific.
We are grateful to Dr Alison Inglis for her help in preparing this catalogue entry.
Poynter had been president of the Academy since 1896, succeeding Leighton and Millais, who died in quick succession that year. He was now in his seventies and a widower, his wife Agnes, one of the Macdonald sisters who linked him by marriage to Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, having died of cancer in June 1906. Poynter was devastated by her death, all the more since he knew he had not been the most considerate or sympathetic of husbands; and there is something touching about these late garden subjects, as if he gained comfort from the close communion with nature at her most appealing that their execution involved. He himself was a keen gardener, and many of his subjects were found in the garden at his house in Kensington, 70 Addison Road.
A Hot-House Flower may well have been painted in the house's conservatory. A very English-looking model, dressed in a Japanese or Chinese kimono, reclines on an Indian ottoman while languidly fondling the blooms of an amaryllis that grows in a Chinese pot beside her. The watercolor's title, with its deliberate association of the girl herself with the exotic flower she is admiring, introduces an element of symbolism that, so far as we can judge from their titles, was absent from the subsequent garden subjects.
The watercolour seems to belong to more than one tradition. It looks back, first, to the Romantic era, with its passion for scenes of eastern luxuriance focussed on the harem. J.F. Lewis is an obvious example in England (fig. 2), but in a sense more relevant are the odalisques of J.-A.-D. Ingres, under whose associate, Charles Gleyre, Poynter had studied in Paris in the late 1850s. Poynter's demure little Kensington odalisque, almost every inch of her anatomy chastely covered, gives, as it were, a final touch of life to this tradition, some hundred years after Ingres' svelte, langurous and unashamedly naked houris had begun to make their appearance.
Poynter's watercolour might also be described as an essay in Aesthetic survival, recalling those pictures, so popular in the 1860s, '70s and '80s, in which beautiful models, flowers and exotic textiles combine to create seductive colour harmonies. He himself had made contributions to this genre. His watercolour portrait of Mary Elcho, the eldest of the Wyndham sisters (private collection), is a case in point. Dating from 1886, it shows the sitter, a renowned beauty, reclining on cushions to form the centrepiece of a chromatic ensemble based on that most Aesthetic of colours, yellow. While her dress strikes the dominant note, it is picked up throughout the composition in book-covers, vases of flowers, a Chinese screen, and, most notably of all, a bowl of goldfish prominently displayed on a marble-topped Indian table in the foreground (for an illustration, see Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls, 1984, p.109).
But the names that leap to mind in this context are those of Poynter's older and younger contemporaries, D.G. Rossetti and Albert Moore. Having more or less invented the genre in his Bocca Baciata of 1859 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Rossetti had gone on to re-interpret it in a series of dazzling canvases featuring glamorous models: The Blue Bower (1865), Monna Vanna (1866), Lady Lilith (1868), Veronica Veronese (1872), La Bella Mano (1875) and others. Albert Moore, of whom Rossetti tended to be dismissive, had in fact done something similar, although his pictorial language was more classical and he was far more consistent in his aim to create formal and chromatic harmonies based on strict internal logic. Both artists relied heavily on flowers and fabrics to create their effects, providing many precedents for Poynter's watercolour. If the model's almost intimate relationship with her amaryllis seems essentially Rossettian, Moore anticipated the picture's conception in terms of intricate pattern, and in the use of flowers and drapery to build up his shimmering effect.
Aestheticism and Symbolism used to be thought of as fundamentally opposed, one denying, the other affirming meaning, but we are increasingly aware of the extent to which they overlapped, especially in the area of mood and atmosphere. Rossetti represents this duality in a particularly striking form, frequently introducing symbolist elements into his more Aesthetic productions. Colour and music symbolism, for instance, play a part in Veronica Veronese, while Lilith and La Bella Mano are accompanied by sonnets to elucidate their meaning. As for Moore, who could hardly have represented a purer form of Aesthticism throughout the central part of his career, he suddenly developed an interest in symbolism during the closing years of his life, possibly in response to a decade-long terminal illness. An Idyll, the last picture he showed at the RA (1893), is typical, combining all his old interest in drapery- and flower-based pattern with the idea of a lovers' quarrel (fig.3).
Poynter was no exception to this rule. In his portrait of Lady Elcho the books that surround the sitter not only provide essential colour notes but evoke a mood of intellectual enquiry appropriate to someone who was a leading member of The Souls. Similarly, in A Hot-House Flower, the title endows the model with an aura of exoticism and underlines her relationship with the magnificent blooms she handles. That the amaryllis stands for pride in the traditional language of flowers is perhaps irrelevant, but the watercolour does seem to operate on two levels. On the one hand it is a charming, very late, example of the Aesthetic cult of the beautiful, employing once again all the elements- models, flowers, draperies - on which that cult had so often been focused, At the same time hints are dropped that the girl herself has been bred or cultivated in hot-house circumstances, though whether we should read anything sinister into this is left for us to decide. It was always the essence of Symbolism not to be too specific.
We are grateful to Dr Alison Inglis for her help in preparing this catalogue entry.