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Lot Essay
Stanhope exhibited two pictures with this title, almost certainly versions of the same composition. One appeared at the New Gallery in 1890 (no. 81), the other at the Royal Academy in 1902, together with The Vision of Ezekiel (fig. 1, sold Bonhams, London, 14 December 2021, lot 234). Our watercolour is the 1902 version, while the one exhibited 12 years earlier was a much larger oil. Showing Knowledge dressed in pink and Ignorance draped in black, it is recorded as having perished in a fire in 1991.
The present watercolour is a late work, and has a number of features in common with The Vision of Ezekiel. Particularly notable are the very linear and angular treatment of the drapery and the way in which blue wash is used to lend distance to the background. Yet despite Stanhope being 73 years old, there is no falling off in quality. The forms are realised with care and precision, and the two allegorical figures are well characterised. Nor is there any diminution of the sense of colour for which Stanhope had been admired by his fellow artists at the beginning of his career. The way the red of Knowledge's wings is picked up by the tattered banner and the roofs, and then offset against passages of blue and gold, is a fine chromatic invention.
The moated and turretted castle is a motif that Stanhope had used many years before in Our Lady of the Water Gate, a masterpiece of the late 1860s or early 1870s that appeared at Christie’s in November 1992. The white sky is also a familiar Stanhopian touch. As for the protagonists - a female figure with flying drapery leaning over a naked man, with unkempt hair, seated on the ground - there is perhaps the faintest echo here of the central group in Botticelli's Calumny of Apelles in the Uffizi (inv. no. 1496). Stanhope, who lived in Florence from the early 1870s until his death in 1908, occupying the Villa Nuti at Bellosguardo, would have known this picture well, but any relationship with his watercolour can hardly be more than a matter of unconscious reminiscence.
The present watercolour is a late work, and has a number of features in common with The Vision of Ezekiel. Particularly notable are the very linear and angular treatment of the drapery and the way in which blue wash is used to lend distance to the background. Yet despite Stanhope being 73 years old, there is no falling off in quality. The forms are realised with care and precision, and the two allegorical figures are well characterised. Nor is there any diminution of the sense of colour for which Stanhope had been admired by his fellow artists at the beginning of his career. The way the red of Knowledge's wings is picked up by the tattered banner and the roofs, and then offset against passages of blue and gold, is a fine chromatic invention.
The moated and turretted castle is a motif that Stanhope had used many years before in Our Lady of the Water Gate, a masterpiece of the late 1860s or early 1870s that appeared at Christie’s in November 1992. The white sky is also a familiar Stanhopian touch. As for the protagonists - a female figure with flying drapery leaning over a naked man, with unkempt hair, seated on the ground - there is perhaps the faintest echo here of the central group in Botticelli's Calumny of Apelles in the Uffizi (inv. no. 1496). Stanhope, who lived in Florence from the early 1870s until his death in 1908, occupying the Villa Nuti at Bellosguardo, would have known this picture well, but any relationship with his watercolour can hardly be more than a matter of unconscious reminiscence.