LONDON, ENGLAND.- Important paintings by some of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian era will be offered in Sotheby’s sale of Important British Paintings in London on Thursday, June 12, 2003. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, John William Waterhouse, John Frederick Lewis and Edward Lear will all be represented, as well as increasingly sought-after artists such as Alfred Morgan, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and John Willliam Godward.
Taken together, the paintings tell the story of the radically changing fortunes of Victorian art  during the course of the last century. A number of the more valuable works in the sale were acquired for relatively small amounts in the mid-20th century, when Victorian art was considered unfashionable. Similarly, in spite of the dazzling careers they enjoyed during their lifetime, a number of artists represented in the sale have only recently begun to reemerge into the public eye. Among these is the increasingly sought-after artist John William Godward (1861-1922) whose work will be represented in the sale by one of the finest groups of his paintings to be seen in London for many years.
A highly successful talent whose work was much appreciated by his contemporaries, Godward was nonetheless an extremely unhappy man who ended his life with "his head lying in a packing case and his mouth touching the turned-on jets of a gas-ring" (Fulham Gazette, 13 December, 1922). Ashamed of his suicide, and indignant at the disgrace it had brought upon them, his family made every effort to expunge his memory, cropping photographs to remove the offending sections and discouraging any public celebration of his work. With this, his paintings and his name were quickly forgotten, and it is only recently that he has begun to enjoy the appreciation he knew during his lifetime. After years of neglect, he now ranks among the most keenly collected Victorian artists.
Godward’s work is often likened to that of Lawrence Alma-Tadema but, although the subject of their work is often similar (both excelled in painting serene, highly-finished studies of female beauty in classical settings), the way they painted was in fact quite different. Certainly their lives could not have been further apart. Crippled with insecurity and plagued by ill-health, Godward was a quiet, reclusive man whose lonely life was a far cry from the dazzling parties and glittering social world of Alma-Tadema. Working alone in the studio of his house in Fulham, he rarely went out, feeding from a pot of constantly reheated stew to which he added the occasional lump of fresh meat. Cut off from society, he created an imaginary, utopian world to take its place. In two important rediscovered works - Idleness of 1907 and A Congenial Task of 1915 - this illusory world is breath-takingly reproduced. Estimated at £120,000-£180,000 each, both works are, typically, studies of beautiful women in warm, sunlit classical settings, and both demonstrate Godward’s exceptional skill in rendering textures and fabrics to make them almost tactile.
In Reverie (est: £180,000-£220,000), Godward lovingly reproduces the voluptuous forms of Dolcissima, the Italian model he adored. For years too shy to pursue her, towards the end of his life he took the unusually bold step of following her to Rome. She rejected him, however, and he returned home to hostile slatings from the press who had grown tired of the repetitive nature of his work. Dated 1821, Praxilla (est: £20,000-£30,000) was one of the first pictures he painted on his return. Full of the serene beauty of his earlier works, it gives no indication of the depression that drove him to take his life a year later.
Unlike Godward, Dante Gabriel Rossetti can never be said to have suffered from unrequited love. Though he managed to charm most of his models, one in particular would not yield to his approaches. Alice Wilding, or Alexa as she preferred to be known, was Rossetti’s favourite model - and she was the only one to whom he paid a professional fee. At a time when artists’ models were often considered (and for the most part were) prostitutes, Alexa clung to her respectability. She was fully aware of Rossetti’s reputation (his wife committed suicide when she found him with another woman) and was determined not to take a place among his conquests. Rossetti painted her for over ten years and she posed for some of his most famous paintings, including The Blessed Damozel and The Bower Meadow. His studies of her stand apart from those of his other models in that they are unusually free of the symbolic trappings of his own romantic - and carnal - love. Estimated at £200,000-£300,000, a large and finely finished drawing of Alexa (above) demonstrates the distance between the model and his muse. With her cupid’s-bow mouth, brooding eyes and thick red hair, Alexa was everything the Pre-Raphaelites found beautiful and Rossetti’s drawing of her is a pure study of this beauty.
Like many Victorian artists, John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) was little appreciated in the mid-20th century. In the 1940s, an important study for one of his most celebrated subjects, The Lady of Shalott, was bought in London by an Icelandic fisherman. It is now estimated at £40,000-£60,000. A passionate collector of Victorian art, the owner would trawl the markets and dealers of London whenever his fishing boats brought him to England. It was a time when Victorian paintings were generally considered worthless, and he was able to indulge his passion at little cost. Until its recent re-discovery in Iceland, the study was widely considered lost. The sketch is one of two known preparatory studies for the painting of 1894 that now hangs in Leeds City Art Gallery. Depicting the cursed maiden entangled in the threads of her loom, stumbling blindly to escape her doom, the study casts invaluable light on the evolution of the finished work.
Later on in his career, Waterhouse moved away from the depiction of literary scenes and began to investigate the relationship between femininity and nature. Estimated at £150,000-£200,000, Listen to My Sweet Pipings of 1911 shows a nymph in fields of flowers being lulled to sleep by the music from Pan’s pipes. The forms of the figures echo those of their surroundings and there is a sense of total harmony between the human and the natural world.
The beauties of women and the natural world form a stark contrast to the work of Alfred Morgan (fl. 1862-1917), whose Omnibus Ride to Picadilly Circus - Mr Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers, is strongly rooted in the political realities of the day. Estimated at £200,000-£300,000, the painting ranks among the best-known political images of the Victorian era - it is also generally considered to be Morgan’s most important work. By placing the Prime Minister firmly among his people in a bus carriage full of "ordinary passengers", Morgan refers directly to Gladstone’s Liberal ideals. The setting is particularly apt as Gladstone was responsible for the Railway Bill, preventing companies from charging third-class passengers more than a penny a mile and thus ensuring that travel was affordable to all passengers, irrespective of class.
While Waterhouse and Rosetti confined themselves to the depiction of literary subjects and to the evocation of their own particular ideas of beauty, artists such as John Frederick Lewis (1805-1875) sought more exotic inspiration. Lewis lived in Cairo between 1840 and 1851. Enchanted by the bustle of the place, the rich colors of the markets and the dazzling sunlight, he immersed himself in local life, living "far away from the haunts of European civilization, in the Arab quarter....like a languid lotus-eater - a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life." (William Makepeace Thackeray Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo). Painted in 1875, Lewis’s A Cairo Bazaar, The Dellál (est: £300,000-£400,000) perfectly captures his love of the place. Full of colour, vitality and atmosphere, it fully demonstrates the qualities that make Lewis the finest of the British Oriental artists.
Just as Lewis was captivated by Cairo, Edward Lear (1812-1888) felt that in Corfu he had found his own Paradise on Earth. He wrote: "The more I see of this place, so the more I feel that no other spot on earth can be fuller of beauty & variety of beauty." He lived on the island from 1855 to 1861, drawing enormous inspiration from the olive-clad hills and dramatic coastline. Corfu shows the view from one of his favorite vantage points - the hillside behind a small village called Ascension, from where he could look out over the olive groves and cypresses across the water to the barren coast of Albania. It is estimated at £200,000-£300,000.