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Lot Essay
Spain, its historic cities, landscape, history and culture, was a source of great curiosity in Britain, throughout the nineteenth century, since the days of Wellington – such that by the 1890s, for many young artists, it was almost regarded as a rite of passage. An overland tour that began or ended in Tangier or Gibraltar would take them to the principal cities and in William Rothenstein’s case, this meant spending time in Seville with his travelling companion, RB Cunninghame Graham, and meeting the young Spanish painter, Ignacio Zuloaga.
He had seen John Singer Sargent’s glamorous Carmencita 1890 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), and fired by an old print of the legendary mid-century dancer, Aurora la Cujiñi, he set off to find her modern equivalent. It may well have been Graham who pointed him to the city’s old Bohemian ‘Triana’ district where, in cafés-cantantes, one would find the true passion of the flamenco. Here the glittering gown of the stage performer was exchanged for garments that were shabby, ‘ill-fitting and ill-made’. At first the dancer looked ‘heavy and dull’, but when she took to floor, she shed her ennui. ‘Never had I seen such dancing,’ he wrote, ‘beginning slowly and gracefully, getting more and more impassioned, while the men shouted and took off their hats and even coats, in their excitement, and flung them at the feet of the dancers.’ (William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, vol 1, 1931, pp. 223-4).
Now in its ninth year, the New English Art Club, having ejected the conservative members of the Newlyn School, remained controversial. Reporters who viewed Spain through a lens of saccharine sweetness derived from an even earlier generation were, it must be said, mostly critical of Rothenstein’s realistic truth. Such reservations were, to a great extent contradicted by DS MacColl in The Saturday Review when he praised the young artist’s fine sense of colour and ‘certainty of touch which mark him out as one of the ablest members of this confraternity’.
In Hablant Espagñol there was no concession to popular taste. Cunninghame Graham could have had the picture in mind when he evoked the Cujiñi performances, suggesting that ‘at witches’ Sabbaths she still dances … sometimes the curious may see her still, dancing before a Venta … her head thrown back, her hair, en catagon, with one foot pointing to a hat to show her power over, and her contempt for all the sons of man’ (RB Cunninghame Graham, Charity, 1912, p. 161). Echoes of Goya? – the artist on whom Rothenstein would publish his short monograph, some five years later.
Professor Kenneth McConkey
He had seen John Singer Sargent’s glamorous Carmencita 1890 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), and fired by an old print of the legendary mid-century dancer, Aurora la Cujiñi, he set off to find her modern equivalent. It may well have been Graham who pointed him to the city’s old Bohemian ‘Triana’ district where, in cafés-cantantes, one would find the true passion of the flamenco. Here the glittering gown of the stage performer was exchanged for garments that were shabby, ‘ill-fitting and ill-made’. At first the dancer looked ‘heavy and dull’, but when she took to floor, she shed her ennui. ‘Never had I seen such dancing,’ he wrote, ‘beginning slowly and gracefully, getting more and more impassioned, while the men shouted and took off their hats and even coats, in their excitement, and flung them at the feet of the dancers.’ (William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, vol 1, 1931, pp. 223-4).
Now in its ninth year, the New English Art Club, having ejected the conservative members of the Newlyn School, remained controversial. Reporters who viewed Spain through a lens of saccharine sweetness derived from an even earlier generation were, it must be said, mostly critical of Rothenstein’s realistic truth. Such reservations were, to a great extent contradicted by DS MacColl in The Saturday Review when he praised the young artist’s fine sense of colour and ‘certainty of touch which mark him out as one of the ablest members of this confraternity’.
In Hablant Espagñol there was no concession to popular taste. Cunninghame Graham could have had the picture in mind when he evoked the Cujiñi performances, suggesting that ‘at witches’ Sabbaths she still dances … sometimes the curious may see her still, dancing before a Venta … her head thrown back, her hair, en catagon, with one foot pointing to a hat to show her power over, and her contempt for all the sons of man’ (RB Cunninghame Graham, Charity, 1912, p. 161). Echoes of Goya? – the artist on whom Rothenstein would publish his short monograph, some five years later.
Professor Kenneth McConkey