Russell James - The Pocket Guide to Victorian Artists and Their Models

The ideal student, from a male point of view

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

REMEMBER WHEN

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Copyright Russell James 2011

ISBN 978 1 84468 095 5

eISBN 9781844687305

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Contents

Introduction

Long before Victoria died the nations top artists, like modern pop stars, were fabulously rich, lived in mansions, and surrounded themselves with luxury. They were household names. Outside the top bracket, artists struggled or starved; some drank themselves to death, some overdosed on drugs, others died lonely and disillusioned. The pop world again. Some had tangled love affairs, a few of which were played out and lapped up by the public. And most artists, for all their dilettante lifestyle, worked far harder at their craft than they let on; many were more commercial than they let on; they had managers, agents, supporters and promoters, and they displayed their talents in prestigious venues. They were in the entertainment business.

In this guide we look at some 400 artists, from the famous to the long forgotten, from the classical to the advanced and we look as much at the artists lives as at their canvases. Who were they? How did they live? Why do so many of us today warm to nineteenth-century art, liking it more than we like art from any other century, including our own? Is it just nostalgia or is it that the pictures Victorians produced were, to put it simply, very, very good?

Art books tend to ignore artists models, despite their being close, often intimately close, to the artists who painted them. But in this book models are brought into the light and have a chapter to themselves. They and all the artists, famous and obscure, are listed in the index, though in the book I have arranged artists by the type of work they produced. Many indeed, most artists cannot be classified into one single category; artists experiment, they change. Though most, at some time, painted portraits, I have put into the Portraits section only those best known for portraiture. Similarly with the other sections. Was Landseer a Landscape or an Animal Life painter? Though Holman Hunt was a Pre-Raphaelite, shouldnt he be seen also under Religion and Foreign Climes? Several artists Ive called Fairy Painters might be surprised, even disappointed, to see themselves listed in that chapter; wasnt Fairy painting an incidental part of their art? Not, I suggest, if it is for Fairy painting that they are best known today. Though every one is in the index, I hope youll turn to certain chapters first: the chapters that interest you, and where youll discover, perhaps, that if you like the works of Alma-Tadema, you might want to look for Ernest Normand. And have you met Normands wife?