Morris, after Watts

You'd be hard pushed to spend two hours getting from The National Gallery to Liverpool Street, even if you walked there with my Grandma and had given her a smartphone as only means of directing. That's exactly why I didn't do that, and opted instead for National Portrait Gallery Thursday lates in between work at the National Gallery and my netball match.

There's a lovely atmosphere in the NPG of a Thursday night. Dimmed lights, live DJ and, if you don't have to play sport in an hours time, drinks.

Instead, I pottered around the Victorian galleries and (badly) sketched G.F. Watts portrait of his friend and colleague, William Morris.

We lost at netball even though the other team were a man down. May as well have had a cocktail. Next time, I will.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

The exhibition 'A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale' is being shown at the Lady Lever Art Gallery from 1 June - 4 November 2012

Now at the Watts Gallery, Compton, until 9th June 2013

What a fabulous exhibition! I had the privilege of having a preview of this exhibition and a guided tour from the curator, Pamela Gerrish Nunn, a few weeks ago. Now in full swing and open to the public, this fabulous show is well worth a visit. It is the fist time Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's work has been exhibited in over 40 years and Pamela's astounding research has pulled some brilliant and little-known examples of her work from private collections certainly into the catalogue if not the exhibition itself.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945) was a celebrated artist in her own time, working not only as a traditional painter working with oils, but as a designer of stained glass and as an illustrator. Rejected thrice by the Academy following her art education at the Crystal Palace School of Art, she was finally accepted in 1897; quite an achievement at the time. She was also a highly accomplished watercolourist and worked on many commissions for flower books. What is most charming about her work however, is that much of it celebrates nature and is very accurately captued. Fortescue-Brickdale focussed not on the standard Pre-Raphaelite way of doing this through moralising or history genre painting, but by inviting fairy folk into her canvases, The Little Foot (above) is a fine example of a painting of a shy nymph.

Fortescue-Brickdale painted many marvellous watercolour portraits, such as this fine example below. It is a portrait of fellow artist Winifred Nicholson (nee Roberts), wife of artist Ben Nicholson. Testimony to the hard times of women artists being recognised for their work in the early 20th century, Nicholson is pictured gazing absently from the painting and from her occupation of reading out of the picture space, away from the viewer and out of the gallery. Her mind is very well occupied simply with her imagination alone. Around her of symbols of femininity in the blush-pink roses and the domestic setting. The couch is covered in William Morris fabric; a nod to the trends and fashions of interior décor gone by.

 Portrait of Winifred Roberts (1913)

 It is the vibrant luminosity of Fortesque-Brickdale's work however, that makes it really appealing. in June is Dead (1915), the dying cherub shrouded in the heavy foliage of late June, marks the end of midsummer and the onset of late summer and autumn. The radiant colour and effective use of light give the piece an odd melancholy.

The summer is over and the rains will come; something we can very much empathise with in the 'summer' of 2012! 

Nice stuff at the John Rylands Library

King Florus and the Fair Jehane is a medieval French Romance telling the take of a woman's virtue and marriage. It was translated from old French to English by William Morris and printed at his Kelmscott Press in 1893. James and Mary Lee Tregaskis, noteworthy London booksellers, bought 75 unbound sets of the work out of the 350 printed. They sent then to 26 countries to be bound in traditional style for a 1894 exhibition of bookbinding from craftsmen all over the world. Being a big fan of William Morris, in addition to her full set of Kelmscott Press publications, Enriqueta Rylands bought the exhibition in its entirety, for the library on Deansgate she built in memory of her late husband. These books signify the Victorian rebellion against the machine made, the fin de siècle notions of Imperialism and Colonialism; the need to define and appropriate a cultural reaction to Empire. More over, they are quite simply exquisite books. Just need to turn that into 12000 words and I'll have a dissertation!