Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
UP to the middle of this century, a walk through the rooms of the National Portrait Gallery was a diverting way to shelter from the rain and bask, for a while, in the security of famous faces. They formed an illustrious family tree of the nation's history and culture, each branch having its individual fascination. The tiring business of aesthetic appraisal could be held in suspense; here was pure illustration and the experience was only slightly more invigorating than passing along a gallery of portraits in a country house. Today, though a strong element of national pride still pervades the rooms, the tone of the Gallery has changed. For one, we are as likely to see a face already known to us from the television or newspapers as we are to see some long familiar, long dead figure from the past. For another, a visit is more informative now, gently underlining for us the interrelation of groups of people and of each subject's emergence from a particular social back-ground or cultural milieu. And third, there is a higher proportion than before of portraits which pass muster as works of art or at least which were conceived with purposes beyond that of simply achieving a factual likeness.
THE two hundredth anniversary of the death of Alexander Cozens will fall on 23rd April 1986. Rumour and confusion have often obscured the few known details of his life, but in recent years a substantial amount of new material has emerged which sheds light, not only on his early years in Russia and England before the visit to Italy of 1746, but also on his later work as a mature artist. By presenting this new material as briefly as possible in this article and its sequel, I hope to establish a new chronological framework, which should provide a sound basis for future research.
AMONG Turner's later exhibited works are four whaling subjects: the Whalers (Fig.9) and The whale ship (Fig. 10) were shown at the Royal Academy in 1845; they were followed in 1846 by Hurrah! for the whaler Erebus! another fish! and Whalers (boiling blubber), entangled in flaw ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves (Figs.1 and 12). They have received surprisingly little attention, an oversight for which the painter himself is partly responsible: when he appended references to Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale to the catalogue entries for three of the pictures, he fostered the illusion that the book by itself would explain the images. As a result their historical context has been overlooked.
IN spite of Samuel Cooper's great renown as a miniaturist, he has always been remarkably elusive as a man. A few years ago, I established a connexion between his uncle and cousin, John Hoskins senior and junior, and the Hoskins family who were lords of the manor of Oxted in Surrey for two hundred years from 1587; and I suggested that the Coopers, too, had come originally from that county. The Oxted-Hoskins connexion is as yet unchallenged, but a discovery made at the Public Record Office recently by Mr Irvine Gray, among uncalendared depositions in seventeenth-century probate cases, proves conclusively that the Coopers were from Yorkshire.
AT Christie's sale on 26th March 1976 lot 82, offered as 'the property of a deceased estate', was a small portrait in oval form of a middle-aged man wearing a buff coat, painted bust-length so as to show what appears as his left arm. It was consigned as the property of the Executors of the late Alan Evans, a collector of eighteenth-century English painting, chiefly portraits and conversation pieces. It was catalogued as by George Stubbs A.R.A.: 'this may be a self portrait dating from circa 1770'. It was knocked down to Spink and Son Ltd, and included by them, after it was cleaned, in their end of year exhibition of 'English Oil Paintings', confidently as a Self Portrait by Stubbs: but it was sold privately to the present owner and removed before the exhibition opened. It has not otherwise attracted attention (Fig.l).
by Stubbs: but it was sold privately to the present owner and removed before the exhibition opened. It has not otherwise attracted attention (Fig.l).WRITINGS by William Holman Hunt on Pre-Raphaelitism and on Victorian art are well known to students of this period. Surprisingly, however, Hunt's first independent essays, 'Notes of the Life of Augustus L. Egg', have eluded Pre-Raphaelite bibliographers. They are not mentioned in Fredeman's source-book, nor are they included in the literature about Hunt. Moreover, when citations to the articles have appeared, the references have been incomplete, and Hunt's name as originator only suggested, but never proven. Greater recognition is long overdue for the seven-part series, published anonymously in 1863 and 1864 in the short-lived periodical The Reader: A Review of Literature, Science, and Art; for Egg had been one of Hunt's staunchest advocates and patrons during the formative years of the Brotherhood, and had remained, until his death in 1863, a trusted advisor to the Pre-Raphaelite painter.
THE Hogarth Press, founded in 1917, gained a reputation between the wars for publishing major literary, social and political voices of the day, and for introducing new writers and fresh ideas. It also frequently commissioned interesting artists to design and illustrate some of its books. But this aspect of the Press's patronage is difficult to assess, as many of the distinctive book jackets have either disappeared from the files or faded beyond recognition, a problem noted by J. Howard Woolmer in his attempt to compile a comprehensive checklist of the Press. The existence in the Tate Gallery Archive of a complete set of bookjackets executed by John Banting for The Hogarth Press between 1931 and 1939 is therefore especially fortunate and provokes questions about the proprietors' attitude to young artists, and the status of Banting himself.
