Jan Marsh is one of the world's leading experts on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the women associated with the movement. Her most recent exhibition focusses on Marie Spartali Stillman and reassesses her oeuvre to show her as a great and diverse late-Victorian artist, who art history has until now resigned to the status of artists' muse. Spartali was a renowned Pre-Raphelite 'stunner' best know for her sittings with Rossetti, Whistler and Julia Margaret Cameron.
Spartali's (Stillman is her married name) work has previously been unknown to the art world, due to her prolific career and commercial appeal in the USA during her own lifetime. Through meticulous research Marsh has identified works by Spartali still held in private collections today and assigned these to known works shown at the cutting edge Grosvenor Gallery in London in the 1860s and 1870s.
In addition to the known, and classically Pre-Raphaelite, female half-length portraits which Spartali is perhaps best known for, exists charming landscapes from her travels in Italy with the great Italian painter Costa, church interiors and scenes from Greek mythology, such as her stunning study of Antigone.
Marsh said that Spartali's work was often rejected in her own time for being unfinished or overworked. Following up her ideas and notes in her diaries and letters however, shows that she was nothing short of a perfectionist and would always strive for a high level of finish and that it was this rather than any lack of ability which drove her to rework paintings.
An investigation of her account books with the art supplier Roberson's - now held in the National Portrait Gallery Archive - show that Spartali preferred to use a dense watercolour on panels and boards wrapped in paper, giving her work a unique luminosity, but also sadly responsible for the delicate condition of many of her works today.
Despite her extensive career in the USA, working in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, she was friendly with and aware of the work of the British Pre-Raphaelite circle, becoming grate friends with Janey Morris and drawing and painting Kelmscott Manor in the 1870s.
This fabulous exhibition, the cumulation of about five years' research, will be on show in Delaware until January 2016, when it will travel to the UK and go on show at the Watts Gallery in Surrey.
