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Lot Essay
Murray was an intimate of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, having come to the notice of Ruskin at an early age. He had grown up in Sudbury, Gainsborough’s home town in Suffolk, and it was possibly Gainsborough’s great nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, who taught him to draw. After being taken up by Ruskin at the age of 16, he progressed to being Burne-Jones’s first studio assistant in 1867. He was given work as an artist and glass painter for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. working to Burne-Jones’s designs, and he also illuminated Morris’s manuscripts.
When still associated with Ruskin, Murray worked as his copyist in Rome, Siena, Pisa and Venice, recording Old Masters and leaving England for Italy in 1872. There he married and settled in Florence. He acted as agent for Sir Frederick Burton, Director of the National Gallery, and also for Dr Wilhelm von Bode, Director of Berlin’s Gemaldegalerie in sourcing works for the nascent national collections. He partnered with Thomas Agnew, the dealer, to bring pictures to market in London and returned there in 1882, feted as a respected connoisseur. He amassed a number of important pictures of his own including Rembrandt’s Portrait of his Brother, Botticelli’s Infant Jesus with the Virgin and St John and Van Dyck’s Lucas Vosterman. Determined that his works should enter public collections, he sold his collection of more than 800 Pre-Raphaelite drawings to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was given Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, more than a dozen Constables, four early Gainsboroughs and a Corot, along with Morris proofs and manuscripts from William Morris’s collection. The Dulwich Picture Gallery received 46 English portraits alongside other gifts.
Shown at the New Gallery in 1890, this picture was bought by the architect Thomas Collcutt for Richard D’Oyly Carte, as decoration for the foyer of the latter’s new Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, London, which opened in 1891. It shows Fairfax Murray’s deep appreciation for Italian painting, but also demonstrates a central tenet of the Aesthetic Movement that art should be devoid of narrative and seek instead to be beautiful and to evoke mood. It also echoes Walter Pater’s famous dictum that 'all art should aspire to the condition of music’.
For another version of the same subject, see lot 131. In addition to these two, a further version is known (Finarte auctions, Milan, 13 October 1987, lot 197, as Concerto campestre).