Gainsborough's Secret Tissot's Muse Victorian Values At The Piano Sale 6520, Lot 25 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema O,M,, R.A. (1836-1912) Water Pets: Goldfish Oil on canvas Estimate: £250,000-350,000 Victorian Values From classical beauties to departing soldiers, from fantasy to reality, this season's offerings show the breadth of Victorian vision. By Peter Brown Various Victorian obsessions are vividly displayed in this season's sales. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's exacting evocations of Ancient Rome are seen in two works, Water Pets and Play Garden, in which girls languorously luxuriate in the Mediterranean heat. Water Pets was painted on an impressive scale at the height of the artist's career. The picture proved a significant landmark in his oeuvre. He was made an associate of the Royal Academy after it was exhibited there in 1875. F.G. Stephens, a founding Pre-Raphaelite and critic, thought it 'one of the best' of the artist's pictures and praised the phenomenal precision of the tesserae in the complex mosaic floor. The simplicity of the design and the colour harmonies are reminiscent of Leighton and Moore at their most magisterial. Alma-Tadema's depiction of Clothilde Onslow Ford, daughter of the sculptor Edward, shows him working on a more domestic scale. The sitter is leaning on a massive Byzantine-style grand piano. This was the centerpiece of many musical soirées at the artist's studio house in St John's Wood. The piano lid was inscribed by those who had played it, including Clara Schumann, Anton Rubinstein and Camille Saint-Saens. The picture has never been offered for sale before and is not only a charming portrait, but also an interesting record of one of the most innovative interiors of the age, reflecting the classicism of Alma-Tadema's pictures. The medieval era was also a fertile source of inspiration to Victorian artists. Edmund Blair Leighton's Alain Chartier and Edward Southall's The Nut Brown Maid both draw on a rich vein of medieval romance, but in terms of technique Southall was perhaps the more innovative, painting in blocks of rich unmodulated color within a defined outline. In this he echoed the Italian primitives and earned the soubriquet 'a modern Gozzoli', after the master who aggrandized the courts of the Medici. Contemporary genre painting is represented in the sale by Henry Nelson O'Neil's Eastward Ho! - August 1857. This is a reduced version of one of the most popular and celebrated of all Victorian pictures, a dramatic composition depicting the departure of troops to quell the Indian Mutiny. The painting secured O'Neil's reputation. Its sequel, Home Again, 1858, was sold at Christie's in June 2000. A tour de force by Myles Birket Foster shows the artist working on an exceptionally large scale. The Meet is a complex watercolor composition, with the contrasting groups of children and huntsmen set against a magnificent panorama of the Surrey hills. The season also contains wilder flights of fancy such as John Anster Fitzgeralds's The Wounded Squirrel. It lacks the cruelty evident in so much of the artist's work - the beneficent fairies are giving the squirrel a drink from a daisy cup filled with dew. The watercolor is a fine example of the Victorian enthusiasm for fairy pictures, and of the breadth of taste encompassed by Victorian art. Peter Brown is a Specialist in the Victorian Art Department. Inquiries: Martin Beisly Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 2468 Back to top