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Home , Aubrey Beardsley, Frederic Leighton

DRAWING ON THE PAST: VICTORIAN INNOVATION AND TRADITION IN LIFE, LEGEND, LANDSCAPE VICTORIAN DRAWINGS AND WATERCOLOURS 17 February – 15 May 2011

THE BACKWARD GLANCE and crossed more loosely over the body the placement of these intricate, delicate In April 1861, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & than the confining corsets and bustles images across the gallery walls; one of the Co. officially opened for business, offering dictated by mainstream taste. This drawing, strongest of these is the tension between clients bespoke decorative objects made which may have been created for sale in historicism and invention. Tracing the using techniques, palettes, materials its own right, eventually informed one of means by which a cluster of the artists and designs – whether for stained glass, the many stained glass panels decorating represented in the Gallery’s present show furniture or textiles – that simultaneously the beautiful South dining engaged with the past gives us a more looked forward and backward in history. room. The Green Dining Room project refined and deeper understanding of their Edward Burne-Jones, whom Morris had combined Burne-Jones’ languid glass Victorian present and its varied attempts met when they were undergraduates designs with painted decoration in greens, to articulate a cohesive cultural identity. at Oxford in the 1850s, was the firm’s reds and ruddy oranges to create a As modernity challenged convention, the chief designer of stained glass. As such, harmonious, pleasurable public space for concept of ‘revival’ gained a revolutionary he created a series of sumptuous and refreshment, removed from the Museum’s quality in nineteenth-century Britain, serene panels for their first major secular vast collections whilst referencing them and this is evident in numerous albeit commission: the Green Dining Room of with its finely worked details (Fig. 2). The apparently disparate pictures in Life, the South Kensington Museum (now the site’s design was essentially a distillation Legend, Landscape. Three broad themes V&A) designed jointly by Burne-Jones, of medieval and Elizabethan rooms in – ideal beauty, medievalism, and ornament Philip Webb and . grand houses and as such was one of many – can be used as lenses to carefully and Burne-Jones produced a study of a girl in decorative spaces that was directly and yet insightfully focus on these drawings’ classical drapery twisted and folded across imaginatively informed by Britain’s distant different yet consistently provocative the back and waist (Fig. 1) to accentuate past. revisions of historic precedent. both the figure’s pose and to allude to the fashion of the day for ‘Aesthetic dress’, GENDER AND IDEAL BEAUTY wherein luxurious fabrics were draped ’s depictions of nude women attracted a great deal of attention – not always positive – throughout his career. In 1843 he exhibited Musidora: The Bather ‘At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed’ at the Royal Academy (Fig. 3).

Fig. 2

The drawings and watercolours displayed in the Courtauld Gallery’s Life, Legend, Landscape exhibition are a miscellany, as Fig. 3 pointed out by in the exhibition catalogue. The sheer range of subjects, artists, and techniques speaks as He made at least four versions of the a whole to the diversity and importance picture, clearly captivated by the challenge of drawing and watercolour painting for of depicting a nude young woman at the artists in Britain in the nineteenth century. anxious point of anticipating inevitable Fig. 1 Themes within the collection emerge in discovery. The subject was inspired

1 by James Thomson’s 1730 poem, The to be WOMAN, that all human beauty to the female studies, shielding his eyes Seasons: Summer in which Musidora is had been concentrated in her, I resolved or stretching. Leighton, who consistently discovered by Damon while bathing in a to dedicate myself to painting – not the worked from the nude towards clothed river alone: Draper’s or the Milliner’s – but God’s figures in his finished work, was also most glorious work, more finely than ever comfortable with the transferring of female But desperate youth, had been done.’ and male anatomical characteristics How durst thou risk the between studies in order to create soul distracting view:… Unlike Etty’s project’s reliance on gender either ambiguously composite or clearly With fancy blushing, specificity and the particular qualities gendered figures. This strategy both at the doubtful breeze of feminine beauty for its avant-garde privileged and eclipsed the central Alarmed, and startling like impetus, ’s treatment importance of working from life and the fearful fawn. of the nude form was radical precisely incorporating the nude figure into because of the artist’s consistent merging each stage of his art production. While Etty’s most controversial representations and translating of male and female bodies Leighton’s work shows a preoccupation of young, nubile British women made as artworks progressed from sketches to with idealized classical forms, his practice critics uneasy because these figures were finished oil paintings. Leighton’s interest also discloses a surprising flexibility painted without allegorical or classical in androgyny has striking parallels with regarding biological sex and pictorial gloss. Even the cited inspiration of an Burne-Jones and in the composition. eighteenth-century poet whose work had 1870s and 1880s; this is particularly evident also inspired Gainsborough could not fully in Elijah in the Wilderness, the angel for ORNAMENT AND THE DECORATIVE account for what was a nude, vulnerable which is a composite of male and female Charles Conder’s small mixed media woman surprised in the middle of a very models. Angelic androgyny is also striking picture on silk, Les Incroyables of 1892, English secluded stream. The voyeuristic in the series of works Leighton produced offers the viewer a theatrical, dreamlike opportunities afforded by this image are for the Dalziel Brothers’ 1881 biblical image of spaces and figures swathed in rich related to Etty’s earlier drawing of a female illustrations, such as Abraham and the fabrics of varying hues and textures (Fig. 7). Angel (Fig. 5).

Fig. 7

The male ‘Incroyables’ (Incredibles) and female ‘Merveilleuses’ (literally, the Marvelous ones) refer to fashionable youths who resisted the Reign of Terror’s violent implications for France by dressing flamboyantly to mark themselves out as politically critical of the Jacobin regime. Conder’s image is, however, also suggestive of a decadent fin-de-siecle lushness and Symbolist ambiguity; this is Fig. 5 Leighton’s chalk studies for his ambitious especially located in the gestures and dress apocalyptic scene, ’And the Sea gave of the figure on the right, whose deep blue up the Dead which were in it’ date from cloak and hat contrast vibrantly against the c.1877-84 (Fig. 6). coolness of the sparsely leafy background, Fig. 4 which leads the eye towards the shadowy nude posing with a cast of the Venus de Incroyables in their grand black hats at the Medici (Fig. 4). very rear of the stage-like space. Figures in this work take on decorative qualities The celebrated Venus in the Uffizi in in their patterned costumes; they are all was replicated as a plaster cast for artifice and intrigue as Conder displays student inspiration at the drawing school their bodies not to suggest an intelligible of the Royal Academy, where Etty spent narrative, but to confound clarity and many years refining his technique. In this foreground the decorative for its own sake. image he fuses together drawing from the In this sense, Conder could be usefully antique and drawing from life, suggesting connected to one of the Victorian period’s that the dynamism and fleshy sensuality of most significant draughtsmen, Aubrey the live model outstrips even the renowned Beardsley. classical beauty of the Medici Venus. Moreover, what is hidden in Etty’s rendition of the plaster cast is revealed in the contrived pose of the nude model, whose crossed legs and outstretched arm allow for playful embrace of the plaster statue Fig. 6 and the simultaneous exposure of pubic hair, an aspect of mature womanhood The earlier of the drawings shows a woman so typically overlooked in traditional with her white neck craned upward and representations of ideal female beauty. back arched, her arms bent sharply at Of representing women, Etty claimed that the elbows in two related positions on a he ‘never painted with a lascivious motive’. single sheet. A later drawing depicts a Rather, ‘finding God’s most glorious work draped male figure in a similar position Fig. 8

2 In both Servant Carrying Slippers (1893) and a network of artists including Daniel in detail and careful observation. This (Fig. 8) and with Mandolin Maclise. Maclise’s careful rendering of plate represented the development (1894), the vibrant tension of Beardsley’s minutiae in his interpretation of Tennyson’s of acanthus ornament from Greek use deftly handled ink lines create zones Idylls of the King dates from c.1860 through to Roman, Gothic, and finally the of concentrated ornament, contrasting (Fig. 10). Its crisp lines, particularly in Renaissance. ‘The Nature of Gothic’, which satisfyingly with expanses of negative the strands of hair, musculature of the was profoundly influential for numerous space. Whether a mild smugness or a steed, and stiffly folded drapery of Enid’s scholars and enthusiasts of the Middle practiced deference, the character of garb, allude to Northern Renaissance Ages in the nineteenth century, was first each figure is described with a graceful masters such as Albrecht Durer and Martin published within Stones as a plea for economy that drew on Japanese graphic Schoengauer. The image takes up an event and architecture to return to art and distilled it into an unprecedented described by Tennyson, the Victorian poet what Ruskin believed was a utopian period yet attractive set of artistic parameters laureate, as a suspicious and uncertain yet of labour and dignity. Ruskin’s point in for an eager British public. His first major intimate encounter between the lovers images like the representations of acanthus commission was for the publisher J. M. Enid and Geraint: ornamentation from the Doge’s Palace Dent’s illustrated edition of Malory’s Le in Venice was not only to show variety of Morte D’Arthur in 1893, for which he …Geraint upon the horse artistic interpretation of this single plant, produced detailed imagery organized into Mounted, and reached a hand, but also to use architectural examples to tense zones of ornament, such as ‘The and on his foot demonstrate his view on the primacy of Lady of the Lake’, conveying the crushing She set her own and climbed; Gothic ornament (marked as number 12 together of elements in a densely wooded he turn’d his face on the drawing) for its vitality, sculptural and evocatively mysterious setting; and And kissed her climbing… craft, and tense pairing of restraint and ‘How King Arthur saw the Questing Beast dynamism. and thereof had great marvel’, where the Maclise’s care in depicting the ringlets artist has divided the picture surface with of chainmail, Enid’s braided and knotted With the notion of craft, we must return a series of jagged overlapping marks hair, and the forlorn slipper cast to the finally to the careful folds of classical expressive of anxiety and a dreamlike, far left of the picture, invite the eye to drapery surrounding the body of Burne- visionary state (Fig. 9). linger upon details of Geraint and Enid’s Jones’ finely drawn figure for the Green romance. Perhaps less noticeable but just Dining Room at South Kensington. William as crucial in the production of atmosphere Morris and Burne-Jones both believed and setting is Maclise’s attention to the firmly in the interdependence of painting, carved Romanesque details surrounding drawing, architecture and the decorative the open doorway. Grotesques, interlaced arts. Indeed, Morris was one of the patterns and hunting scenes decorate the foremost champions of art as integral to portal in a manner corresponding to what the very concept of civilization at every referred to in The Stones of level of human dignity, relationship and Venice as sacrificial, bringing to mind the evolution. With this in mind alongside painstaking time and energy freely given these brief analyses of Victorian images by the stone carver in elevating mere at once declaring their historic sources of building to the status of architecture. inspiration and their aspiration for newness Maclise’s drawing was completed around and freshness, it becomes increasingly clear the same time that Thomas Deane and that in the nineteenth century, drawing Benjamin Woodward worked with Ruskin and watercolour painting – these small- on final details of the opulently carved scale instances of mark-making on paper monument to the Gothic Revival and the – offered liberating outlets for interpreting triumph of Victorian scientific taxonomy the world. Each of these works compels the in Oxford, the Natural History Museum. viewer to look closely and take pleasure Effulgent natural elements featured on the in detail, execution, observation, and capitals of this modern and controversial the touch of pencil, pen or brush upon Victorian structure, many of which were a flat, yielding surface. In such a diverse Fig. 9 inspired by Ruskin’s studies of architectural exhibition of works, there are numerous details in Venice in the 1840s and 50s. The paths that one can take through the display Beardsley’s interaction with medievalism three-volume Stones of Venice, published in order to discern particular themes, shared commonalities with illustrated between 1851 and 1853, include numerous values or approaches common to a cluster projects such as William Morris and Edward plates of Ruskin’s own drawings. of artists or a period within the nineteenth Burne-Jones’ Kelmscott Chaucer, which century’s numerous and overlapping artistic was also produced in the last decade of the sustained moments. The beauty of Life, nineteenth century. Legend, Landscape is in its miscellany, and what it can teach us about the Victorian MEDIEVALISM AND THE GOTHIC creative impulse and the desire to sketch, REVIVAL to study, and to express in nineteenth- The Victorian taste for the intricate century Britain. narratives and representational opportunities of medievalism had gripped IMAGE CREDITS Fig. 1. Edward Burne-Jones Study of a draped female figure for ‘The the nation from the 1840s through Alfred Garland Weavers’ Probably 1866; Fig. 2. Philip Webb Design for Wall Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Cornice in Green Dining Room, 1866, V&A; Fig. 3. William Etty Musidora: The Bather ‘At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed’, 1843, ; Fig. 4. William Etty Female nude with a cast of the ‘Venus de’Medici’, c.1835-37; Fig. 5. Frederic Leighton Abraham and the Angel, 1881, Tate; Fig. 6. Frederic Leighton Two studies of a female nude for ‘And the Sea gave up the Dead which were in it’, c.1877-84; Fig. 7. Charles Conder Les Incroyables, 1892; Fig. 8. Aubrey Beardsley Servant carrying slippers, 1893; Fig. 9. Aubrey Beardsley How King Arthur saw the Questing Beast and thereof had great marvel’, 1893, V&A; Fig. 10. Daniel Maclise Geraint and Enid: Illustration to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, c.1860; Fig. 11. John Ruskin Leafage of the Venetian Capitals, c.1849–52.

Fig. 11 Unless otherwise stated all images © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery,

The illustrations, such as Leafage of the WITH THANKS: Written by Ayla Lepine for Venetian Capitals (Fig. 11), show the art The Courtauld Gallery Fig. 10 critic and theorist’s obsessive interest Public Programmes Department

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