Sale 6520, Lot 2 John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937) Isabella Oil with gold paint on canvas Estimate: £400,000-600,000 The De Morgan Foundation The De Morgan Foundation Masterpieces of Victorian Art. By Peter Brown William (1839-1917) and Evelyn (1855-1919) De Morgan were artistic polymaths. He was a ceramic and stained-glass artist, inventor, chemist and novelist who rediscovered the lost art of lustre decoration and adapted the brilliant colors of Islamic and Iznik pottery for use in contemporary 19th-century design. She was a painter fêted by Watts as 'the first woman artist of the day', whose style and technique owed much to the masters of the Italian Renaissance. They married in 1887 and jointly became interested in many social issues including education, prison reform, the suffragette movement, pacifism and spiritualism. Evelyn died in 1919, but her memory was kept alive by her sister, Mrs. Wilhelmina Stirling, who preserved her collection of 80 paintings and numerous works on paper, William's collection of ceramics and their joint archive in Old Battersea House, a fine 17th-century building on the banks of the Thames, which had been leased from Battersea Borough Council. After Mrs. Stirling's death in 1965, a few days short of her 100th birthday, the De Morgan Foundation was established, to preserve the collection and 'further the knowledge and appreciation of art in general, and that of the De Morgans' time in particular'. Owing to the generosity of the late Malcolm Forbes and his family, who assumed the lease of Old Battersea House, the majority of the collection has remained there since 1983. Wandsworth Borough Council has now given the Foundation a permanent home in the former West Hill Library in London, SW18. To finance the move, and establish the gallery and study center envisaged, the trustees have decided to part with certain pictures that are not by De Morgan and are not central to the collection. These works, which are of superb quality, have never before been available to contemporary collectors. They are principally paintings and drawings by Evelyn's uncle, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, a protégé of Watts who collaborated with Burne-Jones and Rossetti on the Oxford Union murals in 1857. His mature style can be seen as a fusion between that of Burne-Jones and the early Italian masters, particularly Botticelli, whose influence he absorbed while living at the Villa Nuti, outside Florence. Penelope, seen dreaming of Ulysses' return, is typical of his work, exhibiting a refined sense of color which Burne-Jones extravagantly described as 'beyond any the finest in Europe'. Stanhope's house was a center for English artists visiting Italy and his work influenced De Morgan's development. The sale's tour de force is Strudwick's Isabella, which again displays a debt to Burne-Jones in the willowy female figure, and in the window showing another part of the narrative. Isabella's brothers forbade her to love Lorenzo. They killed him and she kept his severed head in a pot of basil, which she watered with her tears. The brothers discovered this, destroyed the pot, and Isabella died of a broken heart. Strudwick shows Isabella bereft with the empty pot stand, while through the window, her brothers are shown making off with the pot. The picture is undoubtedly one of Strudwick's finest and shows the influence of Italy on all the works in the collection. Cadogan Cowper's Rapunzel, for example, owes a debt to 16th-century Venetian masters in the prominence given to the bold decoration of Rapunzel's sleeve. It is intended that the sale of these works will secure the Foundation's financial future in perpetuity, enabling future generations to study its masterpieces of Victorian Art. Inquiries: Martin Beisly Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 2468 Back to top