Thursday, July 30, 2020

Painted Impressions of British Private Spaces (Interiors) - II

Roderic O'Conor
Interior
ca. 1909-1910
oil on canvas
The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

Walter Russell
The Morning Room
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Lotherton Hall, Leeds, Yorkshire

Stanhope Alexander Forbes
The Harbour Window
1910
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

William Banks Fortescue
Watering the Garden Room
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Garden Museum, London

Spencer Gore
The Blue Petticoat
ca. 1912
oil on canvas
Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland

William Rothenstein
Eric Gill with Alice Mary née Knewstub, Lady Rothenstein
1914
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

"Since Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Gill in 1989, the artist's polymorphous sexual life had come to be a matter of public consciousness.  The list of Gill's crimes and misdemeanours included a long-term incestuous relationship with his sister, Gladys, and a variety of obsessive sexual experiments, many of them recorded meticulously in his diaries.  Not even the dog, it seems, was safe from Gill's curiosity.  The most powerful scandal, however, was the revelation that Gill had engaged in sexual behaviour with his pubescent daughters, behaviour which Gill seems to have viewed in the same spirit of fearless experiment, but which by anyone else's definition would count as sexual abuse." 

"The problem of how to rescue the artworks from that knowledge will not go away easily.  But what is most challenging about Gill's fall from grace is that it is not the scandal of an artist whose sexual convictions were at odds with the doctrines of his faith, but an artist who pursued consequences of those doctrines in his life and art with a zeal which was intuitively orthodox, responding to ancient theological questions, and at the same time sometimes disproportionate to the point of derangement, and damaging to those around him."

– James Williams, writing in Apollo (April, 2017)

John William Waterhouse
Fair Rosamund
(Rosamund Clifford, mistress of Henry II of England, 12th century)
1916
oil on canvas
private collection

Harold Gilman
Interior
ca. 1917
oil on canvas
British Council Collection, London

Walter Sickert
Ethel Sands descending the Staircase at Newington
ca. 1920
oil on canvas
The Hepworth, Wakefield, Yorkshire

Solomon Joseph Solomon
The Breakfast Table
1921
oil on canvas
Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London

William Bruce Ellis Ranken
Mary of Teck, Consort of King George V
1923
oil on canvas
Government Art Collection, London

Frederick Hawkesworth Sinclair Shepherd
The Music Room
ca. 1925
oil on canvas
Kirklees Museums and Galleries, Yorkshire

Frederick Hawkesworth Sinclair Shepherd
Drawing Room Interior
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
Museums Sheffield, Yorkshire

Mabel Frances Layng
Girls Dressing
ca. 1920-30
oil on canvas
Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull

Leonard Campbell Taylor
Memories
before 1934
oil on canvas
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery