Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin at the Yale Center for British Art

Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin 

Yale Center for British Art

September 5 – December 8, 2019 

Reviewed by Ed Voves

A controversial book of the mid-1800's provides the title for a major exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art. Unto This Last was a book of four essays, published in 1862, on the nature of society, economics and human welfare. The author was a celebrated figure in the British art world, John Ruskin.

Originally appearing in a popular journal, Ruskin's essays proclaimed a message which challenged the "free market" economic system of Victorian Britain. Targeting the selfishness and hypocrisy of Britain's ruling class, Ruskin proclaimed:

"There is no wealth but life."

That is not what most of Ruskin's readers expected him to say.

Unto this Last took its title from the parable of Jesus, "The Workers in the Vineyard" (Matthew 20: 1-16). Jesus had urged that workers be treated fairly and paid an equal wage, just as the souls of all the faithful would receive the benefit of God's grace, regardless of when they professed their belief.

Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.

Ruskin applied this biblical teaching to practical economics. His essays stirred-up a hornet's nest of criticism and the book version sold dismally. Ruskin's reputation as a best-selling author suffered a resounding blow.

John Ruskin, Self-Portrait, in Blue Neckcloth, 1873

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a brilliant writer who had established his reputation as an authority on art with the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843. For readers eager to hear more from Ruskin about the palaces of the Venetian doges or "truth to nature" landscape painting, Unto This Last came as a rude shock.

Had they read Ruskin's earlier books like Modern Painters a little more intently, Victorian art lovers might have realized that Ruskin was as much a moralist and a social critic as he was an authority on art. 

No visitor to the Unto This Last exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) will make that same mistake.

Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin occupies five galleries in the YCBA. The exhibit rooms are filled almost to overflowing with ninety-plus paintings, drawings, photographs, manuscripts and minerals collected by Ruskin - he was as avid about natural history as he was about art.The leather mail bag, which brought a daily avalanche of correspondence to Ruskin's desk, is on display as well.

Ed Voves, Photo (2019)

 A manuscript notebook of John Ruskin,1842

Ed Voves, Photo (2019)

 A selection of mineral samples collected by John Ruskin,

on view in the Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin exhibition 

The YCBA galleries replicate the "over-stocked" material culture of Victorian Britain. More significantly, the exhibition testifies to the vast amount of knowledge compiled, studied and commented upon by Ruskin during his long life. But even more importantly, these exhibit objects testify to Ruskin's power of observation. No "gradgrind" collector of facts, Ruskin learned by observing.

These perceptive observations on art, nature, and ethics Ruskin presented to the British public and ultimately to people all over the world. Ruskin's writings found avid and appreciative readers. After reading the first volume of Modern Painters, Charlotte Bronte declared, "I feel now as if I had been walking blindfold - this book seems to give me eyes." 

Reginald Knowles, title page design for Unto This Last, 1907 edition

In 1904, an Indian lawyer working in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, received a copy of Unto this Last to read on a train ride from Johannesburg to Durban. The experience of reading Ruskin's book profoundly affected Gandhi, who later wrote that it "brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life,” leading to the discovery of "some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book.”

Ruskin was also a noted teacher of art, at his alma mater, Oxford University, and at the adult educational institutions known as Working Men's Colleges. He was also a proponent of education for women.

It is truly delightful to note that these Ruskinian precepts are very much in evidence in the Unto this Last exhibition. Three doctoral degree students at Yale, Tara Contractor, Judith Stapleton and Victoria Hepburn, did much of the research for the exhibit and wrote brilliant essays and explanatory text for the exhibition catalog. 

Ed Voves, Photo (2019)  

From left: Tara Contractor, Judith Stapleton and Victoria Hepburn, 

curators of Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin

Yale art professor, Dr.Tim Barringer, and YCBA curator, Courtney Skipton-Long, made vital contributions, as well.

"Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, the laws of death," Ruskin wrote in the third essay of Unto This Last. The marvelous cooperative effort of the YCBA team certainly validates the first part of Ruskin's pronouncement.  

 In terms of fine art, the opening galleries of Unto This Last provide the "show stoppers,"  a sensational oil painting of Venice by J.M.W.Turner, several of Turner's watercolors and an array of Ruskin's own outstanding drawings and watercolors. 

J. M. W. Turner, Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, ca. 1835

Turner's Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, painted around 1835, was a favorite of Ruskin, who had a print of the painting in his room at Oxford. Ruskin later collected original works by Turner, especially his watercolors. Not only did Ruskin defend the aging Turner in Modern Painters against his many detractors but he later organized Turner's donation of his vast body of work to the British nation. 

Of the Turner watercolors on view in the exhibition, another depiction of the Grand Canal of Venice shows why the Italian city appealed to and challenged Ruskin's own power of observation.

J. M. W. Turner, Venice, The Mouth of the Grand Canal, ca.1840

Ruskin described Venice as a "ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak, so quiet, berefit of of all but her loveliness."

The sense of Venice's fading grandeur, indeed its very transience as a place slowly sinking back into the sea, stimulated Ruskin to capture the fabled city in sketches and watercolors of his own. Ruskin's skill as an artist and draftsman, often commented upon by his biographers, still produces astonishment when seeing his actual works. Whether masterfully recording the details of Venetian architecture or simply depicting an oak leaf, as in the introductory illustration to this essay, Ruskin proved himself one of the greatest draftsmen of the nineteenth century.

John Ruskin,

The South Side of the Basilica of St. Mark’s,

 from the Loggia of the Doge’s Palace, Venice, ca. 1850–52

Ruskin wrote in Modern Painters, "If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world." 

Judging from the examples of Ruskin's work on view in the YCBA exhibition, one gets the impression that he could well have done so himself. That Ruskin did not do so directly relates to the higher purpose to which he set himself, namely to reform society and redeem the world through the power of art.

This brings us to one of the key works of art on view in Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. Ironically, it is not a painting by Turner or a sketch by Ruskin. Rather it is a print made by a self-taught artist who was also a master-ironmaker from Sheffield in northern England. His name was James Sharples.

Ed Voves, Photo (2019) Dr. Tim Barringer with James Sharples' The Forge, 1859

Dr. Tim Barringer related the fascinating story of how Sharples taught himself to draw and paint and then, incredibly, to engrave his own pictures. Sharples (1825-1893) was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers which tried - and failed - to resist the use of unskilled labor in iron and steel making. His major work, The Forge, is an accurate, yet idealized depiction of the iron-making process. It shows skilled workers, like Sharples himself, heating a main shaft for a stationary steam engine. It is an exacting, dangerous process - and managed without supervision by factory bureaucrats.

Sharples spent five years engraving The Forge which was finally printed in 1859. Ruskin lavished praise on the self-taught artist and bought ten copies of the print. But the amazing story does not end there. A century later, Barringer focused his research on this little-known Victorian masterpiece and made a tremendous discovery of his own.

With evident excitement still in his voice, Barringer related how he tracked-down Sharples's granddaughter, Marian, then an elderly woman living in a retirement home in England. When Barringer asked her about her grandfather, she reached under her bed and pulled-out the print which we see displayed in the Unto This Last exhibition. Then, from under the bed, came the actual printing plate of The Forge, which she had carefully preserved! 

Dr. Barringer's story shows the living-link between the actual lives of workers like Sharples and Ruskin's ideas and theories in Unto This Last. Ruskin devoted much of his own wealth to funding decent, affordable housing for industrial workers. Ruskin was a man of deeds as well as words, but it is important to include a sample of his writing to show the power of his prose - and of his thought.

Here is a brief excerpt from Unto This Last, in which Ruskin reflects on the work of goldsmiths as symbolical of his ideals for art and industry:

Goldsmith's work is made to last, and made with the man's whole heart and soul in it; true goldsmith's work, when it exists, is generally the means of education of the greatest painters and sculptors of the day... Ghirlandajo was a goldsmith, and was the master of Michael Angelo; Verrocchio was a goldsmith, and was the master of Leonardo da Vinci. Ghiberti was a goldsmith, and beatout the bronze gates which Michael Angelo said might serve for gates of Paradise  But if ever you want work like theirs again, you must keep it, though it should have the misfortune to become old fashioned.

Ruskin's acknowledgment that it might be a "misfortune to become old fashioned" indicates that he was aware of the risks of choosing a tradition-based economic order rather than one based on rapid change. He was no defender of time-honored ways just because this had always been the way. Rather, Ruskin based his approach to "Goldsmith's work" on sincere philosophical principles. He continues:

You must not break it up, nor melt it any more. There is no economy in that; you could not easily waste intellect more grievously. Nature may melt her goldsmith's work at every sunset if she chooses; and beat it out into chased bars again at every sunrise; but you must not. The way to have a truly noble service of plate, is to keep adding to it, not melting it...

Finally, Ruskin concludes:

Gold has been given us, among other things, that we might put beautiful work into its imperishable splendour...

Adriano Cecioni, John Ruskin (Men of the Day, No. 40), Vanity Fair, 1872

Ruskin's comments sounded a much-needed alarm regarding the lives of squalor endured by Britain's working class. Many of the readers of the Unto this Last essays, however, were indignant at his negative comments on the current creed of "Progress" and commercial enterprise. Ruskin challenged the precepts and principles of Liberalism in its nineteenth century form. Later critics have also argued that his controversial views also served to undermine Britain's position as the leading nation of the Western world.

As a counterpoint to the Yale exhibit's celebration of Ruskin as a visionary thinker, a brief reflection is in order to see why Ruskin has been targeted in this countervailing criticism.

For nearly 150 years, Britain led the world in scientific innovation. From 1709, when Abraham Darby perfected the process for smelting iron, to Sir Henry Bessemer's 1856 patent for the Bessemer converter, which refined iron into steel, British technological ingenuity triumphed again and again. Then, beginning in the 1860's, as Ruskin was publishing his Unto This Last essays, Britain's dominant position as an industrial superpower began to be undermined.

The 1860's witnessed the start of the Second Industrial Revolution. Where individual inspiration, "perspiration" and enterprise had been key to Britain's astonishing run of success, corporate organization was the decisive factor in the new phase of industrialism. 

Germany, with its superb education system based on the ideals of Alexander von Humboldt, soon gained the edge in science and industry. Manufacturing firms in the United States pioneered research and development, R&D, as an integral, systematic part of the factory work process.

During the late nineteenth century, British technology began to languish. By World War I, despite the vast expanse of its empire, Britain's industrial power was already in serious decline. 

It would be ludicrous - and manifestly unfair - to blame Ruskin for this reversal of fortune. Ruskin, was greatly concerned about the woeful lack of education among the great mass of Britain's working class, at a time when most of the British ruling elite ignored the problem. A number of Ruskin's concepts on education shared humane and holistic sentiments with Humboldt's influential system.

James Sharples, The Forge, 1859 

As we saw, Ruskin supported master artisans like James Sharples, in opposition to advanced methods of steel-making - and the ruthless management practices of the foundry owners. There are times, however, for innovation, when "breaking", melting, refining and - occasionally - discarding time-honored ideas and techniques are necessary. Ruskin, alas, was not a man for "letting go."

Although I have commented (perhaps overmuch) on the traditionalism of Ruskin's theories, the greater truth about him is that he was an "anti-Victorian." Perhaps this is the reason that Lytton Strachey did not select Ruskin for the cast of characters of Eminent Victorians, the 1918 book which demolished the "all that is noble and good" rhetoric of the Victorian era.

Frederick Hollyer, Portrait of John Ruskin (Datur Hora Quieti), ca. 1894. 

Ruskin was a prophet who pressed his thought close to the limits of human conceptualization. By criticizing the "accepted" in society, by raging against veiling lust for wealth in the garb of pseudo-scientific jargon, Ruskin drove himself to the point of emotional collapse.

The Yale Center for British Art has done a magnificent job in charting Ruskin's innovative contributions to the art and culture of his era. In masterful fashion, the team of curators has seamlessly united the chapters of his wide-ranging life and career into a fascinating tour de force. Young Ruskin of Modern Painters shares the stage with the venerable philosopher who warned of "the storm cloud of the nineteenth century."

Unto this Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin, it should be emphasized, is in no way a "retrospective." The Yale Center for British Art exhibit leaves us with plenty to think about, when we leave the museum and confront the critical issues of the contemporary world. The "storm cloud of the twenty-first century" is there waiting for us, making John Ruskin's life and thoughts very timely indeed.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves. All rights reserved                                                                                           
Images courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery

Introductory Image: 
John Ruskin (British, 1819-1901) Study of an Oak Leaf, undated. Pen and brown ink with watercolor over graphite, heightened with gouache and gum on paper: 7 9/16 × 6 7/8 inches (19.2 × 17.5 cm) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. B2014.5.78

John Ruskin (British, 1819-1901) Self-Portrait, in Blue Neckcloth, 1873.  Watercolor and gouache: 13 7/8 x 9 15/16 in. (353 x 253 mm) Watercolor and gouache: 13 7/8 x 9 15/16 in. (353 x 253 mm). Morgan Library and Museum, purchased as gift of the Fellows. #1959.23

Ed Voves, Photo (2019 Gallery view of the Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin exhibition at the Yale Center of British Art. Photo shows John Ruskin’s notebook

Ed Voves, Photo (2019 Gallery view of the Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin exhibition at the Yale Center of British Art. Photo shows a selection of mineral samples collected by John Ruskin.

Reginald Knowles, title page design for Unto This Last and Other Essays on Art and Political Economy, by John Ruskin (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Ed Voves, Photo (2019) From left: Tara Contractor, Judith Stapleton and Victoria Hepburn, curators of the Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin exhibition at the Yale Center of British Art's preview of the exhibition, September 4, 2019

J. M. W. Turner, Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, ca. 1835. Oil on canvas: 36 x 48 1/8 in. (91.4 x 122.2 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Cornelius Vanderbilt. #99.31

J. M. W. Turner (British, 1775–1851) Venice, The Mouth of the Grand Canal, ca. 1840. Watercolor on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper: Sheet: 8 3/4 x 12 1/2 inches (22.2 x 31.8 cm).  Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection,  B1977.14.4652

John Ruskin (British, 1819-1901) The South Side of the Basilica of St. Mark’s, From the Loggia of the Doge’s Palace, Venice, ca. 1850–52. Watercolor over pencil, heightened with bodycolor. Private Collection

Ed Voves, Photo (2019) Dr. Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art, Yale University, at the Yale Center of British Art's preview of the Unto This Last exhibition, September 4, 2019

Adriano Cecioni  (Italian, 1836-1886) John Ruskin (Men of the Day, No. 40). Caricature published in Vanity Fair, 17 February 1872. Chromolithograph: 14 1/8 in. x 9 1/2 in. (359 mm x 242 mm). National Portrait Gallery, London.  # D43523

James Sharples (British, 1825-1893) The Forge, 1859. Steel engraving on India laid paper: 17.91 inches x 20.86 inches (455 mm x Width: 530 mm. 'Printed by H. Wilkinson, 93 Charrington Street, London. British Museum collection, 1865,0610.25

Frederick Hollyer (British,1838-1933), Portrait of John Ruskin (Datur Hora Quieti), ca. 1894. Platinum print photograph, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal

Philadelphia Museum of Art

 November 11, 2018 - March 3, 2019

Reviewed by Ed Voves
Original Photography by Anne Lloyd

The March girls, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, are celebrating their 150th birthday this year.  That's a lot of candles to put on a cake. But a celebration of the "sesquicentennial" of the publication of Little Women, the much-loved novel by Louisa May Alcott, is definitely in order. 

How to wish happy birthday to the heroines of Little Women, without triggering the fire alarm? A visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition, Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal, is just the ticket.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2017)  Gallery view of 

 Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal

Little Ladies is based on what for decades was a hidden treasure of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Three Victorian-era dolls and their wardrobes had been donated to the museum over the years and - incredibly - never displayed until the 1990's. The first collection had been bequeathed in memory of Mrs. Gardner H. Nicholas in 1922 before the present-day museum building was even completed.

For decade upon decade, these remarkable Victorian dolls and clothing languished in the storage vaults of the Philadelphia Museum of Art until an assistant curator of textiles and costume, Kristina Haugland rediscovered them in 1990.

Haugland organized a highly successful exhibit in 1991 entitled Perfect Little Ladies: the Art of Dress in the 1870s. Now Haughland is back with two major fashion-related exhibitions: Fabulous Fashion: From Dior's New Look to Now and Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal.

As the subtitle of the exhibit affirms, Victorian dolls were designed with an educational purpose in mind - one could define it as "social conditioning" - to guide young girls along the path to the womanhood as virtuous and stylish wives and mothers.

Before we examine these "Little Ladies" as role models, let's look at the dolls!

Approximately two feet tall, the dolls were often called Parisiennes, as most were made in France. The toy manufacturing firm, Bru of Paris, was the leader in doll-making during the Victorian heyday covered by the exhibition, from 1867 to 1885.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) "Miss Fanchon" Fashion Doll, c.1870

In an early example of product "branding," each of the dolls had a signature name: Miss Fanchon, Miss G. Townsend and Miss French Mary. Miss Fanchon, the most famous, strikes a rather matronly pose, clad in a fur-trimmed green and gold jacket and skirt, dating to the early 1870's. In her hand is a calling card, an absolute essential for every woman - and doll - to carry as she made the circuit of shopping and social visits.

The "Little Ladies" were made of leather bodies and bisque-fired ceramic heads. Bisque is the first firing in the ceramic process, which removes all water from the clay. For plates, tea cups and other dinnerware, a second firing is need to make a hardened, durable surface. By stopping at the bisque-firing stage, the surface has a skin-like feel to it, imparting a rather uncanny realism to the dolls. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of a Bisque-fired Ceramic Head of a Victorian Doll.

Bisque-fired ceramic dolls, however, were delicate in consequence of only one kiln-firing, another reason for encouraging lady-like decorum in the way they were handled. The dolls faces were painted to a light pallor with just a hint of rosy cheek, very much the desired skin tone of gentile ladies during the 1870's. No tanning salon for Miss Fanchon!

The greatest joy of dolls is, of course, dressing them up. For that, the Victorian girl lucky enough to own a Miss Fanchon doll had an incredible range of dresses, undergarments  and every conceivable accoutrement from which to select. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Miniature Lady's Fan on view in the Little Ladies exhibition.

Every major type of garment from dressing gown to fancy ball dresses, from bridal attire to "widow's weeds" was made - and made with such artistry and painstaking skill that it is difficult to tell from a photo whether the dress is doll size or human scale.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Doll’s Dress and Sash, c.1870

In a master stroke of planning, several full-size dresses are on display in the Philadelphia Museum  exhibit which permit detailed comparison with the apparel of the Little Ladies.

The human-size clothing includes a woman's day dress, made from striped silk satin and silk taffeta, dating to 1870, and a child's dress, made around 1867. Big or small, these dresses are masterpieces of Victorian-era couture.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) 

Woman's Day Dress: Bodice, Skirt, and Bustle Drape, c. 1870

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Girl's Dress, c. 1867-1868

Lurking underneath the flowing silk skirts of both Victorian ladies and "little" ladies was the elaborate set of undergarments which are displayed in miniature in the exhibition. The ritual of covering the female body with layer upon layer of "unmentionables" beggars description. But we'll give it a try!

The first garment to go on was a knee-length chemise, covered by a pair of drawers. A  horsehair bustle provided padding for her "bottom". Over this went a hoop-skirt and petticoats. A bone corset was placed on her torso and laced-up tightly to insure that her waste-line met the proper feminine proportions. Cardboard dress shields were inserted under the lady's armpits to keep sweat from soiling the silk dress that somehow had to be placed over this mass of material.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) 

Doll underwear in the "Foundations of Fashion" display at the Little Ladies exhibit.

I think it fair to say that not even a Japanese samurai of the 1500's ever had to face such a complicated and suffocating regimen in donning his armor as a young lady during the Victorian era had to deal with just to get dressed!

Th nineteenth century dolls and their garments (and undergarments) make the Little Ladies exhibition hugely enjoyable, as well as informative. Combined with the Dior to Now exhibit in the adjacent gallery, this Victorian fashion show will make a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art a real delight.

There are some sobering points to be considered while viewing the Little Ladies exhibition. As previously noted, one of the salient points of these dolls was to prepare young ladies for their role as wives and mothers. Just as the cost of a Harvard degree for the "son of the house" was an investment in the young man's future, so too were these dolls for his sisters as they were guided along their life path to marriage and motherhood.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018), “Miss French Mary” Fashion Doll, c.1875

Miss Fanchon was as much an instructional tool as a toy and she didn't come cheap. Bisque-headed dolls were priced around $10 during the 1870's. A full ensemble of silk evening dresses, polonais walking suits, corsets and hoop-skirts, hair brushes and parasols might cost more than $300. That might not sound extravagant given the price of today's toys. Comparison with the wages and the cost of living during the mid-Victorian "mauve" decades is another matter.

A skilled worker in the United States, an iron molder, earned $3.06 per day in 1870. Unskilled laborers or factory workers were often paid half of that wage. Women and children's salaries were subject to further disparities. Teachers were paid abysmally, an average salary for a male teacher during the 1880's was $72 a year, woman teachers receiving a third less.

Food during the post-Civil War decades was plentiful and relatively inexpensive. This was also the "age of shoddy" and cheap factory products made it possible for the working class to "get-by" during periods of high employment. But quality items were often beyond the reach even of skilled workers. A pair of men's heavy-duty work boots cost $3.94 in 1872, more than a day's wage for an iron molder.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) 

A Victorian doll's dressing room, with wire clothes hangers, invented in 1869.

Such was the disparity between the the cost of high price fashion dolls like Miss Fanchon and the economics of sheer survival for many Americans during the post-Civil War era. However, a more positive interpretation can be drawn from of these comparisons.

If girls from "good families" were schooled in the code of "proper" womanhood by playing with dolls like Miss Fanchon, many went far beyond that accepted role later in life. Many young women, reared in comfort and plenty during the Gilded Age, displayed social consciences of the most enlightened kind. 

Eleanor Roosevelt in Long Island, NY, 1887.

Jane Addams (1860-1935), Lillian Wald (1867-1940) and Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) were just a few of the daughters of the Victorian aristocracy who devoted themselves to the welfare of Americans of all classes.

A short-distance from the site of the Little Ladies exhibition, one of the treasures of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is on view. It is the marble monument sculpted by August Saint-Gaudens in honor of Maria Gouverneur Mitchell.

The daughter of one of the most prestigious doctors of Philadelphia, S. Weir Mitchell, Maria Mitchell contracted diphtheria in 1898 and died, aged twenty-two. She taught in the school at Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. She is likely to have to have been exposed to diphtheria while teaching. Diphtheria was one of the deadliest infectious diseases among children during the Victorian era until a vaccine was introduced in the 1920's.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2017) 

Detail of August Saint-Gaudens' Angel of Purity, 1902

The Saint-Gaudens sculpture, commissioned by Maria's grieving parents, is entitled The Angel of Purity. It is on display at the entrance of the American galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For over a century, this moving work of art was placed near the family pew in Saint Stephen's. It is worth taking a few moments after enjoying the Little Ladies exhibition to pay a visit to Maria Mitchell's angel.

Maria Gouverneur Mitchell (1876-1898) would have played with dolls like Miss Fanchon or Miss French Mary and have read Little Women. But her moral education did not stop with role-playing and identifying with the protagonists of Little Women. A daughter of privilege, Maria Mitchell also learned the lesson that the social "niceties" include living according to the Golden Rule.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                                           
Images courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Archives and Anne Lloyd 

Introductory Image
“Miss G. Townsend” Fashion Doll, 1870s. Made in France. Philadelphia Museum of Art (Gift of Edward Starr, Jr., 1976-58-9) © Philadelphia Museum of Art

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2017)  Gallery view of the Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) "Miss Fanchon" Fashion Doll, c.1870. Bisque head with powdered hair, kid body stuffed with sawdust: 20 1/2 × 8 11/16 inches (52 × 22 cm) #1922-58-1a

Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Gardner H. Nicholas in memory of Mrs. Gardner H. Nicholas, 1922.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of a Bisque-fired Ceramic Head of a Victorian Doll.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Miniature Lady's Fan on view in the Little Ladies exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Doll’s Dress and Sash, c. 1870. Gifts of Edward Starr, Jr., 1976-58-9; and Gardner H. Nicholas in memory of Mrs. Gardner H. Nicholas, 1922-58-1. Philadelphia Museum of Art.                                                                                                                       

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Woman's Day Dress: Bodice, Skirt, and Bustle Drape, c. 1870. Made in United States: Striped silk satin, silk taffeta. waist: 24 inches (61 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art # 1948-61-3a--c. Gift of Mrs. George Farnum Brown, 1948

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Girl's Dress, 1867-68. Made in United States: Ivory cotton/wool plain weave, red silk/cotton velvet ribbon, cotton lace. Center Back Length (Dress): 30 1/2 inches (77.5 cm) Waist: 22 inches (55.9 cm)  Worn by Mrs. J. Bertram Lippincott (Joanna Wharton), American, 1858 - 1938. Philadelphia Museum of Art. # 1952-23-1  Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bertram Lippincott, 1952.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Doll underwear in the "Foundations of Fashion" display at the Little Ladies exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) “Miss  French Mary”  Fashion Doll, around 1875, France. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. James Wilson Wister, née Elizabeth Bayard Dunn, 1970-215-1a

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018), Victorian doll's dressing room, with wire clothes hangers, invented in 1869.

Artist Unknown. Eleanor Roosevelt in Long Island, NY, 1887. National Archives. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2017) Detail of August Saint-Gaudens' Angel of Purity (Maria Mitchell Memorial), 1902. Marble: 8 feet × 48 inches × 12 inches (243.8 × 121.9 × 30.5 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art # 2005-2-1

Painting with Light at Tate Britain Museum, London

Painting with Light

 Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age

Tate Britain Museum, London 

May 11 – September 25, 2016 

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Pictures, rather than religion, were the true opiates of the "masses" during the nineteenth century. 

Images proliferated at an awesome rate during the 1800's. So too did opportunities to see and enjoy them. From the new public art museums to chromolithograph prints on the bedroom wall, from engravings in the morning newspaper to the family photographs on the mantle - there was so much to see. So little time to riot and revolt as had occurred in 1789.

Yet, a provocative exhibition currently at the Tate Britain in London makes a strong case that an upheaval did take place during the Victorian era - a cultural one. New ways of visual representation and a new image-making technology - photography - led this revolution.

Painting with Light, Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age is a vast exhibit with nearly two hundred works of art on view.  

Arthur Hacker, A Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus, 1910

Often seen as being in conflict during the 1800's, painting and photography were paired in a collaborative synergy. Painting with Light methodically - and often brilliantly - shows how these rival art forms joined forces during the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Great Britain. 

It is best to see this relationship as a "dialog." Photography and painting  certainly influenced each other but it is not always clear which was leading the way. Two signature works in Painting with Light illustrate this problematic partnership. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, c.1864–70.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti began work on Beata Beatrix in 1864. The painting honored the memory of Elizabeth "Lizzie" Siddal, Rossetti's wife, muse and gifted artist in her own right. "Lizzie" Siddal had died in 1862. Rossetti, whose emotions were notoriously brittle, struggled with this work and was unable to complete it until 1870.

During the interim, Rossetti's interest in photography waxed and waned. So too did his friendship with the great photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. 

Rossetti had met Cameron in 1857. During the early years of the 1860's, Rossetti lauded Cameron's photos. By the end of the decade, however, his views had changed. In 1869, Rossetti wrote Cameron an accusatory letter stating that "photography is not always a trustworthy reporter even in your hands as regards facts."        

In 1867, while still on good terms with Rossetti, Cameron created a stunning photograph, Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die.The ostensible theme, like Beata Beatrix, was Medieval culture. Cameron adopted a line from Tennyson's Idylls of the King as her title and posed her maid, Mary Hillier, as Sir Lancelot's lover, Elaine.    

Julia Margaret Cameron, Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die, 1867

There are few traces of Camelot in this revolutionary photo. Tightly cropped and brilliantly composed, it presented Hillier in dramatic profile. Narrative details are nowhere in evidence, unlike Beata Beatrix. The pose aside, the two works are quite dissimilar. Cameron's photo gestures toward the future, while Rossetti's painting is rooted in the past. 

Was Rossetti annoyed that Cameron had borrowed the pose of Beata Beatrix to create such a strikingly modern work? Did the effect of seeing Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die rouse Rossetti to finish Beata Beatrix, thus reclaiming the image that he had struggled so long to complete?  

We are unlikely to know the answers to these questions with any degree of certainty. We do know that Rossetti never left his allegorical inner world to embrace modernism. 

In 1865, Rossetti commissioned a series of photos of Jane Morris, who had replaced Lizzie Siddal as his muse. Rossetti chose John Robert Parsons, a competent photographer but lacking the inspired vision of Cameron. Parson's photos provided Rossetti with striking views of Jane Morris which informed his unforgettable - but also unchanging - images of "Janey" in such paintings as Proserpine, painted in 1874. 

According to mythology, Proserpine or Persephone was doomed to remain Queen of the Underworld because she ate from a pomegranate while in Hades.This fatal fruit was the erotic focus point of Rossetti's painting and also of two later works in Painting with Light. 

Minna Keene, Decorative Study No.1, Pomegranates, c.1906

Zaida Ben-Yusuf"s 1899 photo, The Odor of Pomegranates, and Decorative Study No.1, Pomegranates, by Minna Keene, created around 1906, are rooted in the Pre-Raphaelite taste for rich detail. These works evoke the pictorial story-telling tradition which Rossetti's Proserpine exemplified. 

The 1874 date of Proserpine, however, reminds us that the First Impressionist Salon occurred that same year. The 1906 date of Mina Keene's Decorative Study No.1 is even more disconcerting. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted the following year.

It is hard to escape the feeling that eminent Victorians like Rossetti had tasted a few pomegranates too many.

Photography was invented in 1839 by Louis Jacques Daguerre (if you are French) or by William Fox Talbot (if you are English). It is clear from Painting with Light that British technical ingenuity never slackened from Fox Talbot's calotype process to the first experiments with color photos, based on theories by the scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, in 1861.

This spirit of British innovation did not transfer to artistic inspiration. During much of the 1800's, Great Britain was the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation. But the price of pioneering the Industrial Revolution was staggering. British painters and photographers generally looked away from social issues, ignoring the child prostitutes, the open sewers and the cholera victims who died by the tens of thousands. 

John Everett Millais, The Woodman’s Daughter, 1850-5

Instead, British painters like John Everett Millais (1829-1896) chose safe, moralistic themes like The Woodman’s Daughter.  

Many photographers likewise averted their eyes from urban and industrial realities. Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1933), to his credit, used advanced photographic techniques to record the lives of rural folk living in the marshes of eastern England.These brilliant images, which record quietly heroic lives little changed from the Middle Ages, were collected and published in a major book, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads.

Ten years before Claude Monet created his lily pond at Giverny, Emerson and his painter colleague, Thomas Frederick Goodall (1856-1944) documented country people gathering water lilies for use in fish traps. Emerson initially believed that photography was a great art form and urged photographers to "first see the picture in nature and be struck by its beauty....”

Peter Henry Emerson,Setting the Bow-Net,1885

In a stunning "about face" in 1890, Emerson declared "Photography not Art." Emerson's reversal, like Rossetti's harsh criticism of Julia Margaret Cameron, shows how difficult was the process of moving a very traditional society like Great Britain into the modern world.

"Festina lente," Caesar Augustus proclaimed in antiquity. "Make haste slowly."  

Thomas Frederick Goodall,The Bow Net, 1886

The British during the last decades of the nineteenth century faced the future with an apprehension of radical change. Responding to the Industrial Revolution, the British opted for unifying art forms based on the narrative traditions of English literature and reverence for the natural world.  

We have only to study John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose to see this single-minded devotion in action. Sargent painted Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in 1885-86 after he fled to England to escape the Madame X scandal at the l884 Paris Salon. 

Staying with friends at an artist's colony in the Cotswolds, Sargent almost literally "painted with light." He took the en plein air technique of the Impressionists to an unimaginable level of dedication. He painted for less than fifteen minutes each evening to capture the exact light conditions at dusk, when Japanese lanterns would be lit.

John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,1885-86

Sargent worked in this fashion for two summers in order to complete Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. In essence, Sargent focused with his brush and palette in a way that photographers manipulate their camera lens. 

In 1909, the pioneer of color photography in Britain, John Cimon Warburg (1867–1931) paid a tribute to Sargent's masterful painting. Warburg's autochrome portrait of his daughter, Peggy in the Garden, is so evocative of Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose that one would be pardoned for mistaking it as a work by Sargent himself.

In a world beset by bewildering change, British art during the late nineteenth century focused on themes readily appreciated by people across a broad social spectrum. As a result, British art failed to score the breakthrough triumphs that are now associated with Monet, Cezanne and Matisse. France, not Britain, was the high road to Modern Art.

Yet, Painting with Light at Tate Britain shows that quiet revolutions can succeed in making an enduring, effectual mark. In the house of art, as in heaven, there are many mansions.

 ***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved. 
Images Courtesy of the Tate Britain Museum, London, UK

Introductory Image:                                                                                                         Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British,1828–1882) Proserpine, 1874. Oil paint on canvas, 1251 x 610 mm. Tate. Presented by W. Graham Robertson, 1940.

Arthur Hacker (British,1858-1919) A Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus, 1910. Oil on canvas
710 x 915 mm. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828–1882) Beata Beatrix, c.1864–70. Oil paint on canvas, 864 x 660 mm. Tate Acquisition Presented by Georgiana, Baroness Mount-Temple, in memory of her husband, Francis, Baron Mount-Temple, 1889.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die, 1867. Photograph, carbon print on paper, 372 x 266 mm. © Royal Photographic Society/National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library 

Minna Keene (British, 1861-1943) Decorative Study No.1, Pomegranates, c.1906. Carbon Print, 470 x 328 mm. © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum/ Science & Society Picture Library

John Everett Millais (British,1829-1896) The Woodman’s Daughter, 1850-51. Oil paint on canvas, 889 x 648 mm. Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London.

Thomas Frederick Goodall (British, 1856-1944) and Peter Henry Emerson (British,1856-1936) Setting the Bow-Net, in Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads,1885, published 1887. Book – open at ‘The Bow Net’. Photograph, platinum print on paper 300 x 420 mm (book closed) Private collection.

Thomas Frederick Goodall (British,1856-1944) The Bow Net, 1886. Oil paint on canvas,
838 x 1270 mm. National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

John Singer Sargent (American,1856-1925) Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,1885-86. Oil paint on canvas, 1740 x 1537 mm. Tate. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, 1887.