Henry Woods - La Promessa Sposa

signed, inscribed and dated l.r.: Henry Woods/ Venice/ 1890

oil on canvas
36 1/2 by 20 1/2 in.
http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?sale_number=L05133&live_lot_id=9

20,000—30,000 GBP
Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 37,200 GBP

EXHIBITED

Royal Academy, 1890, no. 278;
London, The Guildhall Art Gallery, 1895, no. 8


LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Art Journal, 1891, p.56, repr. p. 57;
'The Art of Henry Woods, R.A.', by James Greig, special number of The Art Annual, 1915, repr. p. 10


CATALOGUE NOTE


The setting is the steps of an overgrown canale in Venice, where three young local girls take a rest from their daily chores repairing flags and fishing nets, to admire the golden engagement band proudly held aloft by one of the girls. In the background a swarthy gondolier dangles his feet towards the water in idle contemplation and we can assume that he is intended to be the giver of the ring. It would seem that Woods used the same Venetian girls as models for La Promessa Sposa as his brother-in law Luke Fildes had used for his last Venetian picture An Al-Fresco Toilette of the previous year (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). Fildes had painted his famous picture in the courtyard of Woods' studio in Venice. The same models also appear in Woods' Rivals painted a year after the present work which was bought for the Royal Collection to hang at Buckingham Palace. Woods had a genuine respect for the people of Venice and a love and knowledge for every corner and canal of the noble ancient city. He regarded the city not as a museum of the past but as a living, breathing michrocosm of the world of his day, as Greig noted; 'It is the Venetian life of to-day that appeals to him, he no doubt holding that the life of to-day is the best mirror of Venetian life of the past. And if his presentation of its architecture is not quickened by spiritual significance, its artistic distinction and homely charm are suggested by him with rare fidelity. In his work we find Venice always gay in colour and peopled with happy men, women, and children.' (James Greig, 'The Art of Henry Woods, R.A.', special number of The Art Annual, 1915, p. 12-14)

A critic for the Art Journal of 1891 gave the following summary of the subject of La Promessa Sposa in an article devoted to the picture which accompanied a full page reproduction of the painting; 'The Venetian girl is still the subject of artistic attention. Perhaps her chief charm is that she may be so treated as to seem realistic, whereas she is all the while undergoing just that touch of exaggeration that takes her out of the range of facts. The conventions that pretended all kinds of bygone, picturesque, and improbable things about the natives of Italy have at last been cast aside... Mr. Keeley Halswelle is the last man in England who pretended that Roman women wore tovaglie, or had Roman noses, or the grand figures of tradition. But there are lesser conventions that have sprung up under the hand of Mr. Luke Fildes, Mr. Henry Woods, and the painters of their following. Their Venetian girl is a far more brilliant creature than she is in fact, with hair touzled, stays unlaced, after a fashion that sounds, but does not look, like the truth. The obvious answer is that the truth would be not only less charming, but less pictorial than this slight degree of fiction. Mr. Henry Woods' technical qualities are fine enough to second him in anything, however fresh, or even audacious, that he might attempt. Atmosphere, ensemble, movement, light, and vitality - it has them all. He knows the turn of life in a figure, the look of life in a face, the truth of life in the air. His execution, moreover, is never dull. ' (Art Journal, 1890, p. 56)

The first owner of La Promessa Sposa was George Gurney of 8 Devonshire Place in Eastbourne who owned a fine collection of modern and early British pictures which included works by Landseer, Turner, Millais and Samuel Palmer. It was owned in the early twentieth century by Edwin Tate the son of the sugar millionaire Sir Henry Tate whose collection of Victorian pictures was perhaps the most famous and comprehensive of its day and now forms part of the collection at Tate Britain. Sir Henry had owned a work by Woods entitled Cupid's Spell painted in 1885, depicting a scene which could be regarded as a prelude to the present picture of the courtship of a gondolier and the girl who mends his nets. A later picture with the same subject entitled The Fisherman's Courtship was exhibited in 1898.