Marie Euphrosyne Spartali Stillman

The photograph above is of the classically beautiful young Marie Euphrosyne Spartali posing as the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, and was taken by Julia Margaret Cameron in the 1860s. Mrs Cameron was much maligned as a photographer in her day. To contemporary tastes her photography was sloppy and uneven, insufficiently formal, but she found admirers among the Pre-Raphaelites, and it was among that nascent artistic circle that she associated at Little Holland House in Kensington; it was in the salon there that this photograph and others with Miss Spatali as model was taken. Here is another:

Mrs Cameron was born in Calcutta, and Little Holland House was leased by Henry Thoby Prinseps of the artistic Prinsep family, directors of the East India Company. This current blog featured an earlier post on the superb draughtsmanship of James Prinsep, once resident in the sacred city of Benares. (See here.) In this present post we begin by underlining the connection of the Prinseps to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. British India both attracted and gave birth to highly creative and intelligent men and women. Mrs Cameron, hosted by Mr Prinsep at Little Holland House, was among them. The influence of the east via these connections - an orientalist influence, that is to say - was part of the Pre-Raphaelite heritage from the outset. This is sometimes not fully appreciated.

Little Holland House, one of the places where the early circle of the Pre-Rephaelite Brotherhood met. It was demolished after the lease contracted by Mr Prinsep expired. 

In any case, Marie Euphrosyne Spartali, of wealthy Greek Orthodox background, was introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, its circle and its ideals, through the photography sessions with Mrs Cameron, the exact connection being that Mrs Cameron owned a house next to the Spartali family's vineyard on the Isle of Wight. She took this Miss Spartali to Kensington and introduced her to such figures as Dante Gabriel Rosetti and George Frederic Watts. Smitten with Miss Spartali's Hellenic beauty, these artists eagerly adopted her as a model. She features in many famous works in the Pre-Raphaelite canon. Here she is, for instance, in a work by Rosetti, A Vision of Fiammetta (1878) :

At length, however, she married an older gentleman, also part of the same circle, an American art critic named William James Stillman. The marriage was against her family's wishes, and proved to be difficult, but it furthered her connections to the world of artists and provoked her to seek training in drawing and painting. She was particularly taken by the work of Mr Rosetti and approached him to be her teacher. Rosetti, too busy, declined but recommended she approach Ford Maddox Brown. This she did - once more through the salon at the Prinsep's Little Holland House - and she began her own artistic career. She trained under Mr Brown's tutelage for some ten years. 

This is all by way of introducing her here as one of the present author's favourite Pre-Raphaelites. There are many "lost" Pre-Raphaelites, and it is fashionable these days to lament their neglect - especially the neglect of the females. In the case of the work of Mrs Spartali Stillman the neglect is particularly lamentable, because she was a very fine artist who received scant recognition in her own time or since. When she died she noted in her Will that it seemed odd to make a Will when she had nothing of worth to bequeath. In fact, she left a canon of extremely fine paintings in the Ruskinesque Pre-Raphaelite quasi-Quattrocento style; literary subjects, often neo-medievalist, characterized by complex rather than formulaic compositions, an intensity of colour - as opposed to the gloomy browns of academic painting - and a loving attention to pattern, texture and detail. 

Here is one of her most 'orientalist' works, Woman with Lute. We see the unmistakeable Pre-Raphaelite style adapted to a distinctly orientalist purpose. 

A great many of Mrs Spartali Stillman's work are depictions of single female figures in wistful poses, highly reminiscent of Mr Rosetti's work. Here is a typical example, more medieval Christian and less orientalist in tenor, Cloister Lilies:

 

Possibly her best painting in this genre is the delightful Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni, from 1884, see below. There is a sense of the mystical in this work, the Madonna clutching a dark crystal ball. Like much of Mrs Spartali Stillman's oeuvre it is done in watercolor and gouache on paper, but with heavy, opaque applications of colour that makes it seem like an oil painting, a method promoted by Edward Burne-Jones and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. It is a method that Mrs Spartali Stillman perfected. 

But it is in larger paintings set in landscapes that we see more of her unique talent. It is in these paintings that she stands apart. For example, see one of her very best paintings, the dramatic, bleak isolation of Antigone, below:

Another beautiful painting captures a scene from Boccaccio's Decameron. From 1889 it is entitled, The Enchanted Garden, or more fully, The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo, or, more fully still, Messer Ansaldo showing Madonna Dionara his Enchanted Garden. Messer Ansaldo falls in love with Madonna Dionara, a faithfully married woman. In an attempt to woo her - deploying sorcery - he makes his winter garden blossom like spring (though, gallantly, does not dishonour her in the end.) It is likely that Mrs Spartali Stillman's painting was the inspiration for the more famous Enchanted Garden of Mr John Waterhouse from 1916. Mrs Spartali Stillman's work is here below:

Several very charming paintings of a distinctly neo-medievalist tone, all of them set on the grounds of Kelmscott Manor, the home of Mr William and Mrs Jane Morris - another artistic centre like Little Holland House - are among this writer's personal favorites and demonstrate the best aspects of Mrs Spartali Stillman's talent. Morris, and Rosetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, took inspiration from the gothic manor and its organic surrounds. Mrs Spartali Stillman did as well. Her paintings of the manor and its grounds are especially attractive, although they deviate from many of the Pre-Raphaelite norms. They are not literary, for example, or based upon Renaissance models. They are more folkish, more naif. The artist is more herself and less an admirer of Rosetti in these works. Here are four such paintings, all of them splendid:

Kelmscott Manor: Feeding Doves in Kitchen Yard

The Long Walk at Kelmscott Manor

A Lady in the Garden, Kelmscott Manor

From the Field, Kelmscott Manor

In her later career, Mrs Spartali Stillman moved to Italy where her husband was working. There she turned to Tuscan landscapes and other Italian themes, building upon the Quattrocento themes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. To this writer's tastes, though, her Tuscan work is not so enchanting, although much of it remains in private collections and is rarely available for public display. This, rather than some Victorian conspiracy against female artists, is largely what accounts for the on-going neglect of her work. Unfortunately, almost all discussion of her art is today part of the tiresome oppressed-woman-artist narrative typical of our times. There is much more of interest in her work than what can be seen through the filter of her gender. Quite apart from such contemporary preoccupations, she is a deserving artist with a distinct character who used the Pre-Raphaelite style as a medium for her own unique viewpoint. Readers can be assured that she is not featured here because she is a woman, but because she is good. 


Yours,


Harper McAlpine Black

Pamela Colman Smith - A Savant With a Child's Heart

Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the tarocci or “tarot” cards will be acquainted with the work of Miss Pamela Colman Smith, although they may be excused for not knowing her name. In the early years of the XXth century Miss Smith – an Anglo-American illustrator – was commissioned by the Masonic occultist Mr Arthur Waite to design a complete set of all seventy-eight cards of the traditional tarot deck. She completed this work in a remarkably short period of time between April and October 1909 and some time after this the cards were published by William Rider & Sons of London under the title ‘A Pictorial Key to the Tarot’. They have thereafter been known as the ‘Rider-Waite’ tarot and the name of the illustrator was not included in the title or on the box. This omission was then duplicated in 1971 when the American company US Games Inc. purchased the copyright to the cards and reissued them to the American market, making them the most well-known and popular tarot cards of the modern era. Today, the ‘Rider-Waite’ cards have become infused into popular culture to the extent that they may be regarded as prototypal; there are countless new sets on the market today, each with new illustrations on new themes, but the Rider-Waite cards are, as it were, a standard. It is a great pity then that the illustrator, the person most responsible for the indelible images of the cards, is not better known. It was an injustice she suffered in her own lifetime. Mr. Waite paid her only a token fee for her work and she received no royalties from sales. Born in 1878, she died penniless, debt-ridden and forgotten in 1951. 

By virtue of the ‘Rider-Waite’ tarot, however, Miss Smith – she was generally known as “Pixie” – must be credited as having had a profound impact upon the visual imagination of the modern West. Her tarot cards, rendered in her simple, linear style with Art Nouveau influence, are her masterpiece. The remarkable thing is that she was able to translate the instructions of the verbose and tedious Mr. Waite into compelling images that arrest the imagination and, most importantly, impose themselves upon the memory. No other design of the tarot comes near to Miss Smith’s in this respect. Others are more beautiful and yet others are more symbolically exact, perhaps, but Miss Smith made the tarot her own. She entered into the spirit of the cards and conjured images of a strongly mnemonic concrete lyricism that truly captured something of the zeitgeist of the modern occult revival, a defining counter-modernist trend that shaped early XXth century. 

They bear comparison and contrst to the cards made by Lady Frieda Harris under the instruction of the sinister Aleister Crowley. Superficially, those of Lady Harris have a deeper artistic merit, and Mr. Crowley has packed the designs with Qabbalistic allusions, but finally, compared to the charming directness of the Pixie Smith designs, they are turgid and pretentious. Miss Smith understood one of the keys to the tarot: the images on the cards are essentially caricatures. This is so in the medieval designs and she has retained that medieval flavor. The Crowley or ‘Thoth’ deck is, in contrast, a modernist mess. The same can be said of other more recent designs. They are contrived by comparison. No one quite captures the spirit of the tarot, and renders it modern yet integral, like Miss Smith.

The actual processes by which the Waite-Smith collaboration took place are not certain, but it seems likely that Mr. Waite’s input was largely restricted to the twenty-two Major Arcana. Of the fifty-six pip cards – the Minor Arcana – it is likely that Miss Smith had a very free hand. They, therefore, are her creation, and it is there that we see her genius. Mr. Waite’s Major Trumps display elements of his eclectic and sometimes misleading mash of symbols. Miss Smith’s Minor Arcana is a playhouse of little dramas and quaint allegories that bring the much-neglected minor cards new vitality. The chief inspiration for the Major Arcana seems to have been the XVIIIth century Tarot of Marseilles, while for the Minor Marcana Miss Smith appears to have looked to the Sola Busca Tarot of the XVth century for her model. The illustrator has successfully retained the essence of those earlier decks and recreated them in a new pictorial vocabulary. This is no small achievement. It is an achievement that is too often underestimated by those who like to criticize this tarot and sing the virtues of newer designs that are full of reckless innovations and artistic egoism. Miss Smith’s designs are not technically accomplished, but at least she shows faultless judgment as to how and when to depart from her medieval models and there is no egoism to be seen in the least.

The present writer, in any case, is an outspoken enthusiast for what should rightly be called the ‘Pixie Smith’ Tarot, and more broadly for Miss Smith’s art in general. Her tarot – even where Arthur Waite imposed his cranky symbolism upon the Major cards - is simply unsurpassed. She made the form her own. Her designs define the tarot in this epoch. She was not, admittedly, a great artist by the usual standards, and she was certainly not a successful one in monetary terms or in terms of wide recognition. Had she not made tarot cards for Mr. Waites she might have disappeared into obscurity entirely. But her work is beautiful and distinctive by other standards, with a unique charm, a delightful sense of decorative whimsy, a lovely innocence, an enchanting sense of the fay. Stuart Kaplan, director of US Games Inc., once remarked that had she lived in his day he could have made her a millionaire.

Miss Smith designed bookplates, made illustrations for numerous books and at one stage edited and illustrated her own magazine, the ‘Green Sheath’ which claimed its own ‘school’ of fellow artists. She came into contact with Mr. Waites through the poet W. B. Yeats who employed her as an illustrator for his poems and who inducted her into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Despite this dalliance with the occult, however, she later converted to Catholicism and throughout her later years ran a boarding house for old priests in Cornwall. 

Her real qualifications for illustrating the tarot was her passion for folklore; wrote or co-wrote and illustrated several books on the subject, including one of Jamaican folklore entitled Annancy Stories. It sold poorly but it was the work that first attracted the attention of the Yeats family who were, at the time, looking for an artist to illustrate Gaelic tales. The father of W. B. Yeats, John, once described her work in an extant letter as follows: “Pamela,” he said…

“…is bringing out a book of Jamaica folklore. Her work, whether a drawing or telling of a piece of folklore, is very direct and sincere and therefore original - its originality being its naïveté. I should feel safe in getting her to illustrate anything. She does not draw well, but has the right feeling for line and expression and colour.”

Then he adds in summary:

“I don't think there is anything great or profound in her, or very emotional or practical. She has the simplicity and naïveté of an old dry-as-dust savant - a savant with a child's heart.”

This is a blunt assessment but also a very accurate account of her character and work - nothing great or profound but a savant with a child’s heart. This is the quality that Mr. Yeats recognized in her and that she brought to Mr. Waite’s tarot cards. It is the quality that makes her one of the most endearing of the supposedly lesser female artists of her time. We see this quality in all her work, samples of which are given below. It is her folkish lack of sophistication and her naïveté that made her the perfect vehicle for the spirit of the modern tarot. In the estimation of the present author, at least, Pamela Colman Smith – Pixie Smith – deserves far greater appreciation than she received in her lifetime or since and should be counted as an important artist in her own right. It is fashionable in some circles to disparage the ‘Rider-Waite’ tarot because it is now deemed ‘old fashioned’ or lacking in a contemporary aesthetic. This is a miscalculation of its worth. It is still the best tarot. The inspired naïveté of Pixie Smith lives still. The simplicity of the 'Rider-Waite' designs – the simplisticity of their illustrator – is an original and honest simplicity that taps deep into the medieval roots of the tarot and speaks directly to the modern Western consciousness. Her other work has the same charm and deserves to be celebrated in wider circles today. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Charles, Churchill and Hitler: Three Painters

According to numerous syndicated news reports in recent times, the current best-selling painter in the United Kingdom is none other than His Royal Highness, Charles, Prince of Wales. The Prince is an enthusiastic and prolific amateur watercolorist, and lithograph reproductions of his paintings have been on sale for some time. They sell well. He donates the money made from the sales to charity. It is estimated that every year he sells something in the order of two million pounds worth of paintings. 

Their popularity, however, is not matched by critical acclaim. Critics have been almost uniformly unkind in their appraisal of his work, with one noted critic describing them as “laughable”. Others are less savage and merely denounce them as “torpor-inducingly conventional.” The London gallery which displays his work is more positive; the curator describes his paintings as “charming works in the British watercolor tradition”. Below are several of the paintings in question:

Much as the present writer is an unabashed apologist for the Prince in nearly all the fields to which His Royal Highness devotes himself – from his advocacy for organic gardening to his contempt for modernist eyesores in urban architecture – he is, all the same, not so keen for the Prince’s artwork and for once feels compelled to side with the critics. 

Many posts ago on this blog he gave a somewhat positive response to the paintings of another unlikely amateur painter, George W. Bush, (see here). As it happens, he has no love of the man as a public figure, but he does admit some charm to his paintings. In the case of Prince Charles, it is the other way around; he has much love for the man but does not find many redeeming qualities in the paintings. They are, perhaps, “charming” additions to the “British watercolor tradition” but they are also, as the critics rightly say, dull in their conventionality and lacking in insight, imagination and flair. There is nothing quirky in them to make them interesting. At best, they are competent and skilled, but the selection of subject matter and viewpoint is conventional in the worst sense. Here below are several more to demonstrate:

Alas, His Royal Highness is not a great painter. 

His paintings deserve comparison with those of other British artists in the same tradition, and the artist that springs most to mind is Winston Churchill. Mr. Churchill took up painting as a relaxing pastime during World War II, and continued painting for the rest of his life. His work is certainly much better than that of the Prince of Wales. In fact, he might really have become a painter of note had he found the time to devote all his energies to it. Unlike those of the Prince of Wales, there is nothing pedestrian or deadly dull about Churchill’s works. They often fail for being too conventional as well, but others are refreshing and vibrant and manage to surprise. He is a better observer, as well as more skilful with color and brush. Below are some of Mr. Churchill's better works:

As readers can see, Churchill was a considerable talent. His paintings of scenes in Morocco, Egypt and other orientalist subjects are particular favorites of this present writer:

These paintings, it must be said, have everything that is lacking in those of the Prince of Wales. There is depth, engagement, intimacy, imagination and a distinct viewpoint matched by keen observation. Churchill makes a genuine personal contribution to British painting. Those of the Prince, regardless of how well they sell, are flaccid, dull, mere imitations of much better works in that same tradition, postcard reproductions. They are not, for all of that, bad. They are probably much better than many people might have expected. But they are ordinary and undistinguished, whereas the paintings of Mr. Churchill – the better ones at least – manage to rise above those categories and become artworks of real interest and character. 

The paintings of Mr. Churchill, in turn, invite comparison with those of yet another famous amateur, the German Chancellor, Herr Adolf Hitler. Hitler had pretensions to become a professional artist early in his life and was passionate about both painting and architecture. It is even reported that as late as 1939 he remarked, "I'm am artist, not a politician. As soon as this matter of Poland is settled I'm going back to art." Those of his paintings which survived the War now fetch very high prices among a certain circle of conoscenti. He was, in fact, a more technically sound painter than either Charles or Churchill, as the following examples illustrate:

There is no gainsaying the fact that he was quite a good painter (a much better painter than a military strategist!) He shows the sensibility of an architect, whereas Prince Charles - for all his love of traditional architecture and his well-known horror of modernist buildings - shows no such sensitivity in his paintings. Churchill's paintings show a more intimate sensibility, most evident in his interiors. Herr Hitler is primarily interested in buildings. Accordingly - as we well know - he was a man of large projects. He shows a sensitivity to things solid and concrete - Germanic order. Mr. Churchill was a man more sensitive to situations, atmosphere, ambiance. Charles, unfortunately, shows neither trait, and although his paintings are not technically poor and they may be loved by the Mums and Dads of England they are empty of force and vision.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black