British Art: July 2013

John Gibbs designed the Banbury Cross, which was erected in 1859 to celebrate the marriage of the Princess Royal to Frederick of Prussia in the previous year.

The combination of white painted panelling with Morris chintzes at Melsetter House designed by W.R. Lethaby in 1898, was characteristic of the light simplicity of the Arts and Crafts drawing room.

—Wendy Hitchmough, 2000

Valeska Suratt (June 28, 1882 – July 2, 1962) was an American stage and silent film actress. Over the course of her career, Surrat appeared in eleven silent films all of which are now lost.

Walter Crane, At Home—A Portrait, 1872.

Although this portrait of Crane’s wife was painted in Rome, the elements of an ‘aesthetic’ setting are there; tiled fireplace, embroidered hanging, black and gold overmantel mirror, Japanese fan and blue-and-white pottery vase add up to a statement of artistic and intellectual inclinations.

—Charlotte Gere and Lesley Hoskins, 2000

Woods went to Venice in 1876 on the recommendation of his lifelong friend, Luke Fildes. Venice was a fashionable place for an artist to work and Woods fell in with a cosmopolitan set, befriending the artists Whistler and Sargent, whose innovative techniques had a powerful influence on his work. This lively sketch, drenched in light, is a good example of his spontaneous process.

By 1895, the year of this painting, Clausen was aware of contradictions between the two French artists he most admired: Bastien-Lepage, whom he thought was ‘consummate’ in ‘rendering facts’, and Millet, intensely spiritual, rendering ‘sentiment’. It was the moody Symbolist landscapes of GF Watts which
provided a bridge. Clausen wrote (for a lecture on Watts that he gave at the RA in 1905): ‘...landscape does not mean only to peep out of doors... but it should express the infinite spaces of earth and sky.’ Watts’ influence is strong in this moody painting, dark but full of light.