William Wise (1847–1889)

Academic study of a seated male

Oil on canvas 28 x 38 cm (11 x 15 in) Signed and dated: W. WISE / May 1868

Painted by William Wise in May of 1868, whilst studying at the South Kensington Schools of Design, this academic study depicts a seated black model, turning away from the viewer, with his left arm posed casually across his knee. In the visual arts of 1860s Britain, black subjects appear primarily as figures evoking the exotic (fig. 1), as figures of curiosity (fig. 2) or of propaganda, highlighting imperial largesse.1 On the Continent, especially in Paris, black models were employed more habitually. However, it is rare in British art of this period to see a neutral representation of a black sitter in an academic study.2

Drawings and paintings of the nude figure executed in life classes were known as ‘academies’ and over the course of the 19th century they formed the essential practice of a traditional arts education, allowing students to familiarise themselves with light, shade,

Fig. 1. (1828-1882), The Bride, 1865, oil on canvas, 80 x 76 cm, Britain

1 For example, Thomas Jones Barker’s The Secret of ’s Greatness, 1863, oil on canvas, 167 x 214 cm, National Portrait Gallery. 2 See J. Marsh, Black Victorians. Black People in British Art 1800-1900, Lund Humphries 2005. 1

Fig. 2. (1786-1863), The Toy Seller, 1862, oil on canvas, 112 x 142 cm, of Ireland

volume and contours. Painting a black model challenged young artists, offering them the ‘possibility to study, in a different way, the effects of light on the body and the relationship between the figure and the background’.3 With the earthy daubs of paint of various tonalities at the upper right, we see William Wise refining his palette, attempting to find the best match for the skin colour of the sitter. Interestingly, the execution itself is not done with the tightness and formality seen in the majority of academic studies by young artists but rather with a looseness and sense of spontaneity that better captures the naturalness of the pose and the reflected light that highlights the model’s skin.

In Britain, very little is known of the lives of black models, and their role within the academies, particularly in comparison to France, where recent investigations have done much to unearth the identities of these models and document the level of their engagement with the visual arts in the 19th century.4 Indeed, our knowledge of black Victorians in general is lacking, particularly when compared to other periods, partly because neither skin colour nor origin was recorded in the various records and national censuses of the time. That said, it is reasonable to posit that, whilst the African diaspora was not large, neither was it negligible, and in certain port cities, such as London, Liverpool and Edinburgh, black residents were common, with available evidence suggesting that black men and women in Britain were predominately employed as seafarers or servants.5 Towards the end of the century one could also find churchmen, sportsmen, entertainers, professionals and students, primarily of medicine and theology, amongst the black population. Of his time in London in the early 1850s, the African-American abolitionist William Wells Brown wrote that ‘in an hour’s walk

3 E. Bégue and I. Pludermacher, ‘Les Modéles Noirs dans le Paris du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siecle’ in Le Modèle Noir de Géricault à Manet, Paris 2019, p. 195. 4 See ibid and D. Murrell, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse, Yale 2018; see also M. Postle, The Artist’s Model from Etty to Spencer, Merrell Holberton 1999, no. 68, and p. 2, fig. 7, which describes a man called Wilson who modelled to Etty and other Academicians. Wilson is also described in R. Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, Routledge 2003. 5 See J. Marsh, Black Victorians. Black People in British Art 1800-1900 Lund Humphries 2005, pp. 14-15. 2

Fig. 3, John Boyne (c. 1750 - 1810), A Meeting of Connoisseurs, c. 1800, watercolour, 41 x 55 cm, Victoria & Albert Museum through the Strand, Regent or Piccadilly streets in London, one may meet half a dozen coloured young men, who are inmates of various colleges’.6

Although there are few examples of academy-drawn studies of black models in Britain, and the practice was not as widespread as across the Channel, black models were still clearly sought after in 19th-century England.7 Indeed, the ‘fashion’ for black models at the turn of the century was satirised in John Boyne’s watercolour A Meeting of Connoisseurs, in which a group of smartly-dressed gentleman admire the muscular body of a black model in an artist’s studio (fig. 3).

One securely identified black model at mid-century was Fanny Eaton (fig. 4), a Jamaican- born domestic worker and mother of ten, who modelled out of necessity. She featured primarily in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, painted most notably by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and Sir (1829-1896), who used her as a figure in narrative works. Earlier in the century the celebrated American actor Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) had also worked as a model, appearing, for example, in John Simpson’s (1782-1847) The Captive Slave (fig. 5). However, neither of these personalities, as far as we know, was employed in the more formal setting of an artistic academy.

Born in 1847, William Wise was best known as a designer of tile decorations, collaborating in this field with the celebrated Staffordshire pottery firm Mintons. Described as a ‘man of considerable wide-ranging talents’,8 Wise on occasion turned his hand to etching and painting. He was a skilled figurative painter, as evinced by his portrait of a young girl against a floral backdrop in the Potteries Museum, exhibited under the titled Childhood at the Royal Academy in 1872, or a recently discovered portrait of Burne-Jones. In the early 1870s, fresh

6 Ibid, p. 15 7 See examples such as The Wrestlers, 1840, William Etty (1787-1849), Art Gallery; The Black Boy, c. 1844, William Lindsay Windus (1822-1907), Walker Art Gallery; A life study of John Mongo (‘The Punka-walla’), 1847, Thomas Faed (1826-1900), National Galleries Scotland; and Head of a Zulu, 1881, Constance Wood (fl. 1880-1900) and A Girl with Fruit, 1882, Sir John Gilbert (1817-1887), Guildhall Art Gallery 8 T. Lockett, Collecting Victorian Tiles, London 1979, p. 195. 3 out of the South Kensington Schools of Design, which he attended from 1867 to 1871, Wise was chosen to assist with the decorative panels at the South Kensington Museum, painting a design for a mosaic of Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), whose mastery of diverse media may well have chimed with the young artist. Wise died suddenly in 1889, aged only forty-two at Stoke-on-Trent, where he had moved following the death of his first wife. He left behind a second wife and eight children.

Fig. 4, Walter Fryer Stocks (1842-1915), Fanny Eaton, c. 1860, chalk on paper, 43 x 35 cm, Princeton University Art Museum

Fig. 5, John Simpson (1782-1847), The Captured Slave, 1827, oil on canvas, 127 x 105 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

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