Thursday, February 28, 2013

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Robert Gemmell Hutchison - The new toy



signed 'R. G. Hutchison' (lower right) 
oil on canvas 
22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm.) 

Charles Hunt - The song of the shirt



signed and dated 'C. HUNT./1874' (lower left) 
oil on canvas 
31 7/8 x 48 in. (81 x 121.9 cm.) 

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Edwin (Longsden) Long - An Egyptian Feast, 1887



An Egyptian Feast, 1887
oil On Canvas
87.8 x 187.7 cm.
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery
Bradford Museums and Galleries

Long was greatly influenced by the paintings of Velasquez and other Spanish masters. In 1874, he visited Egypt

and Syria, and subsequently his work took a new direction. He became thoroughly imbued with middle-eastern

archaeology and painted oriental scenes. His pictures suited the taste and appealed to the religious sentiment of

a large portion of the public, and their popularity was increased by a wide circulation of engravings.


CZ

Monday, February 25, 2013

Portrait of Miss Doris Simonette Catto, 1893



coloured chalk with pencil
81.5 x 81.5 cm. (32 x 32 in.)
signed, titled and dated u.r.: Doris Simonette Catto. 1893/ F Sandys
private collection

Catalogue Note
‘a most delightful child-picture in crayons, full of grace and refinement. The finish, delicacy and beauty of line in this work is equal to anything he has already achieved.’ (anonymous review possibly from The Times)

Doris was the only child of John and Emma Elizabeth Catto who moved from Australia to live in London at 68 Cavendish Road. She was born in 1887 and was therefore six when Sandys drew this charming portrait; she died unmarried in 1964. Her mother was also the subject of a portrait drawing by Sandys also dated 1893 (Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas).

Anne as Alice in Wonderland



Kennington was one of the founder members of the New English Art Club in 1886, and its first Secretary. He was well known for his compelling pictures of the urban poor, although he also painted less emotive scenes from everyday life, and portraits. The rich colouring, smooth handling of paint, and subject were probably inspired by the work of the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Murillo, who also painted poor children.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Sarah Sophia Beale - The pleasures of art



http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/19777/lot/4/

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with her daughter Georgiana, later Countess of Carlisle, 1808


oil on canvas
112.4 x 143.5 cm.
The Royal Collection, United Kingdom

William Etty (1787-1849) studied with Sir Thomas Lawrence for a year in 1808, before becoming a highly successful painter of erotic mythologies. In 1825 George IV promised Lawrence 400 guineas for a copy of Reynolds’s famous portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with her daughter, the original exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786 and still at Chatsworth. Lawrence passed the royal commission over to his former pupil, who produced this magnificent copy. Morant was paid £25 10s for the frame in 1828.

The Duchess sits at three-quarters length, facing half to the right, wearing a black dress with a white fishu, her right arm raised, her left about the waist of her daughter who balances on her mother's left knee, both hands raised; red drapery on the left and above the sitters.

* * *

William Etty was an English painter. He received financial support from his uncle allowed him to go to London in 1805, where he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1806. Following the death of his uncle in 1809 he became financially secure. From 1811 he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the British Institution..
His success was due to large history paintings. He was one of the few British artists to make a career out of this genre. The Classical or biblical subject-matter of the history works gave Etty the ideal pretext for painting the nude. He did, however, believe that they had a serious purpose and proclaimed that his intention in all his major paintings had been ‘to paint some great moral on the heart'. During the 1830s and 1840s Etty generally concentrated on smaller, less ambitious works. In this he catered to the market, to the point that, in his later years, he risked being accused of selling out to the dealers. Throughout his career Etty painted portraits. In his later years he also produced such landscape paintings. At their best his spontaneous oil sketches of landscape bear comparison with Constable's. Etty is the only major British painter before the 20th century to have devoted his career to the nude. Remarkably, his public recognition and success were achieved in the face of vitriolic censure from a press that accused him of indecency. Though famous and financially successful in his day, his reputation declined after his death and has never fully recovered.


CZ

First Steps



oil on canvas
69 x 92.4 cm.
Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Frederick Morgan, was an English painter of portraits, animals, domestic and country scenes. He became famous for his idyllic genre scenes of childhood.
Morgan was born in London. He was commonly known as Fred Morgan and was the son of John Morgan, a successful genre artist sometimes known as 'Jury Morgan' (after one of his paintings "The Gentlemen of the Jury").
At the age of fourteen he was taken out of school by his father who then tutored him in art. At the age of 16, while still studying with his father, his first picture, "The Rehearsal", was exhibited at the Royal Academy, and, after a hiatus of several years, his paintings were shown there regularly. For a while he worked as a portrait artist for an Aylesbury photographer, - this training proved to be crucial as it "taught him how to observe closely and to give the greatest attention to detail."
Although an excellent portrait artist, Morgan had problems in depicting pets and barnyard animals - he enlisted the aid of either Arthur John Elsley or Allen Sealey (1850–1927) when such problems needed resolving.
He is known mostly for his romantic and sentimental paintings of children in the same style as his contemporary Arthur John Elsley. His paintings achieved great popularity in his lifetime and were widely published.
In 1872 he married another painter, Alice Mary Havers (1850–1890); they had three children. Their eldest son, known as Val Havers, also developed into a painter. Frederick Morgan married twice more, producing two children from the second marriage.


CZ

With a Babe in the Woods, 1879-80



oil on canvas mounted on panel
31.1 × 22.9 cm. (12.2 × 9 in.)
signed bottom right: Laura T.A.T.
Brooklyn Museum, USA

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema was from 1871 the second wife of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema and a painter in her own right. A daughter of Dr George Napoleon Epps (who was brother of Dr John Epps), her two sisters were also painters (Emily studied under John Brett, a Pre-Raphaelite, and Ellen under Ford Madox Brown), whilst Edmund Gosse and Rowland Hill were her brothers-in-law. It was at Madox Brown's home that Alma-Tadema first met her in December 1869, when she was aged 17 and he 33. (His first wife had died in May that year.) He fell in love at first sight, and so it was partly her presence in London (and partly the fact that only in England had his work consistently sold) that influenced him into relocating in England rather than elsewhere when forced to leave the continent by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870. Arriving in London at the beginning of September 1870 with his small daughters and sister Artje, Alma-Tadema wasted no time in contacting Laura, and it was arranged that he would give her painting lessons. During one of these, he proposed marriage. As he was then thirty-four and Laura was now only eighteen, her father was initially opposed to the idea. Dr Epps finally agreed on the condition that they should wait until they knew each other better. They married in July 1871 and, though this second marriage proved childless, it also proved enduring and happy, with Laura acting as stepmother to her husband's children by his first marriage, Laurence and Anna.

The Paris Salon in 1873 gave Laura her first success in painting, and five years later, at the Paris International Exhibition, she was one of only two English women artists exhibited. Her other venues included the Royal Academy (from 1873), the Grosvenor Gallery and others in London. She also had occasional work as an illustrator, particularly for the English Illustrated Magazine, and was well known as a hostess in their London residences at Regents Park and Grove-end Road. A memorial exhibition of her work was held at the Fine Art Society in 1910.

As well as frequently being painted by her husband after their marriage (The Women of Amphissa of 1887 being a notable example), she is also shown in a seated statuette by Amendola in 1879, a bust by Jules Dalou in 1876, and a portrait by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

She specialised in highly sentimental domestic and genre scenes of women and children, often in Dutch seventeenth-century settings and style, like Love's Beginning, Hush-a-bye, The Carol, At the Doorway (c.1898) and Sunshine. She did paint some classical subjects and landscapes akin to those of her husband, but in general her main influence was 17th century Dutch art, which was a far less restrained influence in her work than his.


CZ

Friday, February 22, 2013

Thursday, February 21, 2013

The death of Cleopatra



Born in Calcutta, India, his parents were Henry Thoby Prinsep, for sixteen years a member of the Council of India, and Sarah Monckton Pattle, sister of pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle) and Maria Jackson (née Pattle), grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Henry and Sarah had settled at Little Holland House and made it a centre of artistic society.

Prinsep was an intimate friend of G. F. Watts, under whom his son first studied. Val Prinsep also worked in Paris in Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre's atelier: 'Taffy' in his friend George du Maurier's novel Trilby, is said to have been sketched from him. He was an intimate friend of John Everett Millais and of Edward Burne-Jones, with whom he travelled in Italy. He had a share with Rossetti and others in the decoration of the hall of the Oxford Union. With other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he taught at the Working Men's College during the mid 19c.

CZ

Cleopatra, 1876



Thomas Francis Dicksee was an English painter born in Condom. He was a portraitist and painter of historical, genre subjects - often from Shakespeare - who was the pupil of H. P. Briggs. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1841 until the year of his death. His brother John Robert Dicksee was also a painter, and his children, Frank Bernard Dicksee and Margaret likewise became painters. In The Dictionary of Victorian Painters, Herbert Dicksee is given as his son also, but according to the City of London School, where Herbert taught, he was the son of John Robert Dicksee.
Thomas Dicksee produced a series of portraits of family members, and also painted idealised portraits, including the Shakespearean characters Ophelia, Miranda and Ariel. A Juliet is in the Sunderland Art Gallery, and At the Opera is in the collection of Leicester Art Gallery. A portrait of Lady Teasdale is in the Adelaide Art Gallery, Australia.

CZ

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Portrait of a Young Woman, 1864



pencil
9.8 x 7.9 cm. (3 7/8 x 3 1/8 in.)
The Huntington Library, California

Born in Calcutta, India, his parents were Henry Thoby Prinsep, for sixteen years a member of the Council of India, and Sarah Monckton Pattle, sister of pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle) and Maria Jackson (née Pattle), grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Henry and Sarah had settled at Little Holland House and made it a centre of artistic society.

Prinsep was an intimate friend of G. F. Watts, under whom his son first studied. Val Prinsep also worked in Paris in Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre's atelier: 'Taffy' in his friend George du Maurier's novel Trilby, is said to have been sketched from him. He was an intimate friend of John Everett Millais and of Edward Burne-Jones, with whom he travelled in Italy. He had a share with Rossetti and others in the decoration of the hall of the Oxford Union. With other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he taught at the Working Men's College during the mid 19c.


CZ

**

"Prinsep feels like a rather unusual name, so I wondered where I had seen it recently. Gavrilo Princip was the marksman who shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914, plunging most of the world into war.

No relation, I am assuming. But just as famous."

Helen Webberley

Portrait of a Young Woman, Possibly Kate Perugini,



pencil on paper
44 x 39 cm. (17 5/16 x 15 3/8 in.)
signed with monogram (lower right)
private collection

Charles Edward Perugin was a genre and portait painter. Born in Naples, Italy, he was encouraged by Leighton to come to England in 1863. Under his influence Perugini painted one or two very fine classical pictures, such as 'The Loom'. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1863. His pictures are mostly of elegant ladies in interiors, sometimes with a romantic or humourous theme. He married Kate Dickens (which is very likely to be depicted here), daughter of Charles Dickens and widow of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Charles Allston Collins.


CZ

Shrimp Leading Two Hunters, 1912



oil on canvas
20 1/4 x 24 in. (51.4 x 61 cm.)
signed A. J. Munnings and dated 1912 (lower right)
private collection

Lot Notes:
Though he was small in stature, Fountain George Page, a gypsy horse handler working in Norwich in the early 1900s, was one of Munnings’ most famous models—the aptly nicknamed “Shrimp.” The artist was first introduced to Shrimp by his employer, the horse dealer Drake, and upon their meeting, Munnings found him an “undersized, tough, artful young brigand” (Sir Alfred Munnings, An Artist’s Life, London, 1950, p. 207). Though the two had an often combative relationship, Shrimp, who “slept under the caravan with the dogs, and had no home of his own, no family ties, no parents that he knew” would become “an indispensable model, an inspiring rogue, an annoying villain” for the artist (Munnings, p. 207). Shrimp prominently appeared in a number of Munnings' compositions from 1908 through 1912, with the present work probably among the last of the series.
Shrimp's gypsy heritage — in addition to his skill with horses — made him a particularly intriguing model for Munnings. Shrimp with Two Hunters was painted after a period of several years during which Munnings spent his summers travelling through the English countryside as a vagabond, in a romanticized imitation of the gypsies who fascinated him. The gypsies traveled in caravans, working as hop-pickers, horse traders, itinerant laborers and roundabouts for traveling fairs. Munnings saw them as a poignant symbol of England’s rural life, one then threatened with industrialization and mechanized farming. The artist’s Romantic notions of the gypsy life were influenced by the writings of George Burrow, popular author and founder of the Gypsy Lore Society. Artists such as Augustus John and others in the Newlyn School shared Munnings’ interest in the nomadic and exotic-seeming people. At the same time, Munnings continued to explore his long-standing interest in the hunt, and by 1912 had painted several scenes of red-coated riders on powerful horses observed in the great vistas of Cornwall’s countryside. Seemingly on opposite sides of social history, England’s rural people and the refined hunting traditions of Britain’s great country homes are combined in the present work. Eschewing the ponies of Munnings’ earlier Shrimp compositions, in the present work, the groom rides a sleek light chestnut hunter while holding the reins of what appears to be the artist’s own Bay Mare, one of his most important equine models of the time. The artist gives Shrimp the same heroic, visual stature as many of the more traditional huntsmen he painted. Munning's naturalistic technique, coupled with impressionistic vigor, infuses the composition with a sense of movement; light and dark green swipes of paint suggest the open landscape rushing past the group, who appear to be about to move out of the picture space.


-- Lorian Peralta-Ramos


CZ

Monday, February 18, 2013

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Orphans, 1885



oil on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 cm.
Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom

Kennington was one of the founder members of the New English Art Club in 1886, and its first Secretary. He was well known for his compelling pictures of the urban poor, although he also painted less emotive scenes from everyday life, and portraits. The rich colouring, smooth handling of paint, and subject were probably inspired by the work of the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Murillo, who also painted poor children.

CZ

Lilly Martin Spencer - Conversation Piece, ca. 1851-52



oil on canvas
71.9 x 57.5 cm. (28 5/16 x 22 5/8 in.)
traces of signature at lower right
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States

Lilly Martin Spencer's still-life and portrait paintings were popular, but she became particularly well known for humorous domestic genre scenes. In 1830, the eight-year-old Angélique Marie Martin, called Lilly, arrived in the U.S. from her native England. Her parents, a politically progressive couple of French descent, raised their daughter in the small town of Marietta, Ohio.

When her artistic abilities and ambitions outstripped the cultural resources available there, her father took her to Cincinnati, where she studied with the portrait painter John Insco Williams.At 22, Lilly Martin married Benjamin Rush Spencer. They made their home first in New York City, then in Newark, New Jersey, and then moved into a large house in Highland, New York, across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie. The couple had 13 children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Lilly was the principal breadwinner, while Benjamin managed their growing household. In the late 1840s and 1850s, the artist's work became popular in Europe and America.

Spencer exhibited her paintings at the National Academy of Design and was represented at the Women's Pavilion of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. She also produced work for a number of prominent patrons. However, much of Spencer's fame resulted from the widespread sale of inexpensive engraved copies of her oil paintings.


CZ

Philip Hermogenes Calderon - Letter from Daddy, 1873



oil on panel
21.9 x 16.8 cm. (8.62" x 6.61")
public collection

Philip Hermogenes Calderon was an English painter of French birth (mother) and Spanish (father) ancestry who initially worked in the Pre-Raphaelite style before moving towards historical genre. He was Keeper of the Royal Academy in London. From the beginning he was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, and some of his work showed the detail, deep colors, and realistic forms that characterize the style.

CZ

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Frederic Leighton - Bianca



oil on canvas
70 x 56.5 cm. (14 x 19.5 in.)
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Culture Service, Leighton House Museum, London, United Kingdom

Bianca is a character in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. She is the sister of Kate the shrew.

The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592.
The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself. The nobleman then has the play performed for Sly's diversion.
The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship, but Petruchio tempers her with various psychological torments—the "taming"—until she becomes a compliant and obedient bride. The subplot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's more desirable sister, Bianca.

The play's apparent misogynistic elements have become the subject of considerable controversy, particularly among modern audiences and readers. It has nevertheless been adapted numerous times for stage, screen, opera, and musical theatre; perhaps the most famous adaptations being Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate and the 1967 film version of the original play, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The film 10 Things I Hate About You is also loosely based on the play.

model: Dorothy Dene (1859-1899)


CZ

Charles Edward Perugini - Silvia



oil on canvas
24 x 20.1 in. (61 x 51 cm.)
signed with a monogram l.l.
s.l.

The dimensions of the present picture confirm that this painting is Silvia, Perugini's contribution to the series of paintings commissioned by the Graphic magazine for a volume entitled Heroines of Shakespeare, which was published by Sampson & Low in 1889. Twenty-one artists were involved in the volume, each painting a different female figure from the bard's tales. Among the more notable pictures in the series were Alma-Tadema's picture of Portia from The Merchant of Venice, Leighton's Desdemona from Othello (Leighton House), Waterhouse's Cleopatra (private collection) and Calderon's Juliet. The series proved extremely popular and Queen Victoria was so impressed by the paintings that she invited the managing director of the Graphic, William Luson Thomas, to Osborne House to inspect the pictures herself.


CZ

Friday, February 15, 2013

Edmund Blair Leighton - Maternity, 1917



oil on canvas 
51 7/8 x 46¾ in. (131.8 x 118.8 cm.) 
signed with initials and dated '1917' (lower left) 
private collection

cz

Harold Knight - Reading at the window



oil on board
24 x 20 inches ( 61 x 51 cm)
signed "Harold Knight" (lower left)
private collection, Toronto

cz

John Duncan - Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1587), at Fotheringhay,



1929
oil on canvas
91 x 79 cm.
University of St. Andrews

cz

Edmund Blair Leighton - Vanquised, 1884


I'm still not very well, though I keep

http://preraphaelitepaintings.blogspot.co.uk/

and

http://janeymorris.blogspot.co.uk/

but my good friend  Christa Zaat has given me permission to use her collections on facebook

https://www.facebook.com/christa.zaat

Her posts will have a cz after them. Thanks Christa.