Painted Impressions of British Private Spaces (Interiors) - III

Leo Whelan
Interior of a Kitchen
ca. 1934
oil on canvas
Ulster Museum, Belfast

Leonard Campbell Taylor
Mafalda
1934
oil on canvas
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, Yorkshire

Fred Whicker
Gwen in the Studio
ca. 1935
oil on board
Falmouth Art Gallery, Cornwall

Thérèse Lessore
The Islington Twins
ca. 1935
oil on canvas
Lotherton Hall, Leeds, Yorkshire

Frederick William Elwell
Winter Sunshine
ca. 1935
oil on canvas
Cooper Gallery, Barnsley, Yorkshire

Simon Elwes
Sir Richard Sykes, 7th Baronet of Sledmere
1936
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Mary Dawson Elwell
Bedroom, Bar House, Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire
1935
oil on canvas
Beverley Art Gallery, Yorkshire

Mary Dawson Elwell
Interior - Study
ca. 1937
oil on canvas
Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull

Mary Dawson Elwell
The Front Door
1940
oil on canvas
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, Yorkshire

Robert John Swan
Irene Rook at Home
1938
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

from Confessions of a Recycled Shopping Bag

I used to be a purple polyethylene pony

I used to be a phony upload project

I used to be a stony blue inhalant

I used to be a family-size turquoise bottle

I used to be a domesticated pink bubble

I used to be a pleasant red colleague

I used to be a beaming cobalt emollient

I used to be a convenient chartreuse antidepressant

– John Yau (2012)

James Purdy
The Studio
ca. 1940
oil on canvas
Gallery Oldham, Manchester

Michael Rothenstein
The White Dresser
1943-44
watercolour on paper
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Wiltshire

Steven Spurrier
The Card Game
ca. 1948
oil on canvas
The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

Ceri Richards
Blue Interior with Dice
1950
oil on canvas
Southbank Centre, London

Geoffrey Tibble
Pietà
1950
oil on canvas
Ulster Museum, Belfast

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

Painted Impressions of British Private Spaces (Interiors) - I

Arthur Devis
The Reverend Streynsham Master and his wife Margaret
1743-44
oil on canvas
Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Lancashire

William Hogarth
Francis Matthew Schutz in his Bed
ca. 1755-60
oil on canvas
Norfolk Museums

David Wilkie
Reading the News
ca. 1820
oil on panel
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

John Partridge
The Artist and his Family in their House at 21 Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, London
ca. 1828-35
oil on canvas
Museum of London

James Digman Wingfield
Picture Gallery at Stafford House (now Lancaster House)
1848
oil on canvas
Government Art Collection, London

Edward Matthew Ward
John Forster in his Library
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Edward Matthew Ward
Hogarth's Studio in 1739
1863
oil on canvas
York City Art Gallery

James McNeill Whistler
Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks
1864
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Chinoiserie

My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol
on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold-
throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket,
held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slot.
Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed
by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr,
that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns.
Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where
our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed,
where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter
of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast
grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones
and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said,
to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein:
the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk
of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily.
Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic
rinse over us – impractical and non-negotiable.

– Lynn Emanuel (1992)

John Callcott Horsley
A Pleasant Corner
1865
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

William David
Interior, Speke Hall
ca. 1854-70
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Albert Letchford
Interior of Sir Richard Burton's Bedroom
ca. 1880
oil on panel
Orleans House Gallery, London

Henry Stacy Marks
A Treatise on Parrots
1885
oil on canvas
Sudley House, Liverpool

John Haynes-Williams
The Miniature
ca. 1885
oil on canvas
Darlington Library, County Durham

William Rothenstein
The Browning Readers
1900
oil on canvas
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, Yorkshire

James Dickson Innes
The Corner of a Room
1908
oil on canvas
University College London Art Museum

Painted Impressions of British Public Spaces (Interiors)

Peter Tillemans
Queen Anne in the House of Commons
ca. 1709-1714
oil on canvas
Parliamentary Art Collection, London

William Hodges and William Pars
Interior of the Pantheon, London
ca. 1770-80
oil on canvas
Temple Newsam House, Leeds, Yorkshire

William Frederick Witherington
A Modern Picture Gallery
1824
oil on canvas
National Trust, Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire

James Digman Wingfield
The Bank Parlour
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Bank of England Museum, London

John Fulleylove
All Souls College Library
ca. 1880
oil on canvas
All Souls College, University of Oxford

Anonymous British Artist
Interior of the Aquarium, Scarborough
late 19th century
oil on canvas
Scarborough Art Gallery, Yorkshire

The Realists

Hope that you may understand.
What can books, of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land;
Paintings, of the dolphin-drawn
Sea nymphs in their pearly waggons,
Do but wake the hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons.

– William Butler Yeats (1912)

Steven Spurrier
Little Restaurant
ca. 1905
oil on canvas
Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, Scotland

Cyrus Cuneo
The Diners
1913
oil on panel
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Frank O. Salisbury
The Entrance Hall of the Victoria & Albert Museum
1915
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

William Bruce Ellis Ranken
Interior of the Great Hall, Greenwich
1919
oil on canvas
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

George Percy Jacomb-Hood
Guest Night, Merchant Taylors' Hall
1922
oil on canvas
Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull

Malcolm Drummond
The Stag Tavern
1929
oil on canvas
Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries

Thomas Cantrell Dugdale
Underground
1932
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Gretta Bowen
Library
ca. 1953
oil on paper
Ulster Museum, Belfast

Bernard Dunstan
Sale at Christie's
ca. 1960
oil on board
Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Wales