Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931)
PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931)

The Dawn of Womanhood

Details
Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931)
The Dawn of Womanhood
signed 'T.C. Gotch' (lower left)
oil on canvas
44½ x 71 in. (113 x 180.3 cm.)
Literature
Academy Notes, 1900, p. 95.
Royal Academy Pictures, 1900, p. 25.
'The Royal Academy II', The Magazine of Art, 1900, p. 388.
F. Rinder, 'The Royal Academy of 1900', The Art Journal, 1900, p. 179, illustrated, p. 183.
'The Royal Academy: Second Notice', The Athenaeum, 26 May 1900, p. 663.
M. Hepworth Dixon, 'A Painter of Womanhood', The Ladies Realm, vol. 17, 1904-5, p. 176, illustrated.
C. Fox & F. Greenacre, Painting in Newlyn, 1880-1930, exh. cat., Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1985, p. 77.
P. Lomax, The Golden Dream, A Biography of Thomas Cooper Gotch, Bristol, 2004, p. 118.
Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1900, no. 392.
Derby, 1904.
Bury, 1907.

Brought to you by

Clare Keiller
Clare Keiller

Lot Essay

In 1900, in his review of Thomas Cooper Gotch's Academy piece, the critic Frank Rinder remarked that The Dawn of Womanhood was ‘handled with utmost daintiness’. He then provided a succinct description of the picture, paraphrasing that given in the Academy catalogue,

‘The spirit of childhood, a winged figure, is taking leave for ever of the throned girl, as Womanhood, in opalescent drapery, the face partially hidden by a gauze veil, approaches on the left’.

What he faced was an impressive secular allegory, grappling with the moment a girl ‘puts away childish things’ to become a woman. While its undoubted qualities impressed The Athenaeum - its ‘naiveté’, its emulation of the ‘devout temper of the early Low Country masters’ - pictures of this type contained ‘secrets’ that sometimes ‘we have failed to understand’. The whole is confected in a faux-Northern Renaissance style with the child dressed in rich, colourful brocades, seated on a dais in a carved, polychrome interior under a legend that reads ‘AD OLESCENCE’.

To the uninitiated, this might be dismissed as an aberration for an artist whose career began with painting fishwives, Sharing Fish, were it not for the fact that during the 1890s Gotch struck out on a very individual path, placing great distance between himself, Stanhope Forbes, Walter Langley, Frank Bramley and the other prominent Newlyn painters. The turning point came when, disgruntled with the treatment of his work at the Academy, he and his wife, Caroline, embarked on an extended holiday in Florence over the winter of 1891-2. As R. Jope Slade pointed out, ‘to the delight of critics, Florence awakened in him the most joyous sense of colour...’ (R. Jope Slade, 'The Outsiders', Black and White Handbook to the Royal Academy, London, 1893, p. 23). Although early works such as Destiny, 1886 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide) reveal his propensity for allegory and mythology, the unveiling of A Golden Dream (Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston) in 1892 set a pattern that continued until well into the 20th Century. In one sense this was no more than a working out of the influences of Bastien-Lepage - particularly his Jeanne d'Arc écoutant les voix, 1880 (Metropolitan Museum, New York) which was brought back into currency when shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 - yet at another it brought ideas of childhood, adolescence and dream states to the forefront of Gotch's thinking. Potent allusions to spirituality, to inner longings and mystic power caught the mood of the times and Gotch was fêted at the Salon and won medals in Chicago and Berlin.

However, it was not just colour and spirituality that Gotch imbibed in Santa Croce. The great friezes, the religious processions, the decorous, heavenly choirs, in all their frozen solemnity deeply impressed him and in a series of ornate depictions of local children - Alleluia, 1896 (Tate Britain); A Pageant of Childhood, 1899 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) - the painter developed his own evocation of innocence and youth. These were both literal and symbolic in that they recorded the theatrical pageants staged by Caroline in their garden, while reflecting the growing interest in Cornish mythology and folklore.

Gotch’s reflections on the rising consciousness of women's place in society and the freedoms achieved by the 'New Woman' at the 'dawn' of the new century, may wear a mystic cloak, but they were no less real for that.

KMc.

More from Victorian Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art

View All
View All