Nigel Daly - The Lost Pre-Raphaelite: The Secret Life and Loves of Robert Bateman

WILMINGTON SQUARE BOOKS

An imprint of Bitter Lemon Press

First published in 2014 by

Wilmington Square Books

47 Wilmington Square

London WC1X 0ET

www.bitterlemonpress.com

Copyright 2014 Nigel Daly

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher

The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-908524-393

Edited, designed and typeset by Jane Havell Associates

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

Endpapers: Robert Bateman, The Four Seasons, watercolour on gold medium, private collection.

Frontispiece: Robert Bateman, Rose 1877 (detail), 19068, oil on canvas, private collection.

Sculptures by Robert Bateman on pages 1, above and 323 at Biddulph Old Hall, 18745, on page 6 at St Bartholemews Church, Benthall, 1893, and on page 336 at Rockfield House, Nunney (Nunney Delamere), after 1906.

CONTENTS

B eyond the safe confines of popular fiction, being drawn into a mystery is one of the most disturbing and disorientating experiences that can befall anyone. One hopes that acquiring more information will dispel uncertainty, but if new facts simply aggravate disquiet by adding further contradictions and non-sequential data, it can trigger a dangerous addiction.

My partner Brian Vowles and I discovered this when the first flush of our innocuous dalliance with the double mystery of Biddulph Old Hall and Robert Bateman ought to have been fading away. The fact that the two narratives were woven together was an integral part of their compulsive allure. Cryptic evidence of the artists story had literally been carved into the fabric of the ancient building, intensifying the sensation of decoding arcane symbols recording a lost civilisation.

The Old Halls story, with the emergence of its single-cell structure and massive crude fire-openings, gradually undermined the previously accepted chronology of its age and construction. Of course, none of these archaelogical revelations, in themselves, compared with the academic information preserved within the fabric of the great contemporary treasure houses such as Haddon and Little Moreton halls, but Biddulphs uncossetted recent history enabled it to illuminate the past with its own unique candour. The grubby struggle of life sustained by its soot-grimed working hearth and the raw hatred that informed a civil war waged against neighbours and family within the sanctity of their own homes is here brutally laid bare. These blackened, cratered walls insisted we take the past seriously, both in its crudity and its slow abiding contentment that mocked our own hectic neuroses. In doing so it allowed us to feel the rythm the pulse of the forgotten people who had inadvertently determined its present form.

Nowhere was this disconcerting ability more hypnotically deployed than in the silent emergence, from tiny clues left on its surface, of a forgotten man of genius Robert Bateman, the lost Pre-Raephaelite.

Batemans response to the ruined building was captured in his portrayal of it in several of his most personal and deeply felt paintings. Its melancholic atmosphere allowed him to express the isolation he experienced after his brutal separation from the love of his life, Caroline Howard. Under the influence of these fragmented remains he was able to sublimate his desolation at her marriage to an elderly clergyman into the spectral stillness of his masterpiece, The Pool of Bethesda. This was the work which rescued him from oblivion in the 1960s, when its originality, technical prowess and emotional intensity led to its being acquired and put on display at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. It was also the haunting vision that inspired our quest to discover every retrievable drawing, painting and sketch, every discarded fragment of evidence that would illuminate his life and personality.

We little knew, when we set ourselves that task, that it would take us from Biddulph into the glories of Castle Howard, the glamour of the Grosvenor Gallery, and to the heart of Queen Victorias Imperial Court and Benjamin Disraelis political machine. Nor did we expect to encounter the furtive despair, cruelty and abject poverty that accompanied social rejection from Victorian society. We could not have guessed that we would be taken into the sweltering heat of the Punjab, amid itinerant missionaries and religious rivalries, nor experience the frozen starvation of the pioneering settlers in Canada. We did not expect to meet real, unglamorised cowboys and certainly not the great Buffalo Bill.

We set out to try to understand what had caused Bateman to leave London suddenly in the mid 1870s to live a reclusive life at Biddulph Old Hall for the next sixteen years. On our journey we found cruelty, rejection, fear and subterfuge but, perhaps more surprisingly, loyalty, integrity and pure, unselfish love. The purpose of our search for answers to the conundrums surrounding Robert Batemans life has been to bring this consummately gifted artist and his wise, beautiful wife out of the obscurity that has enveloped them and their world, so that they may take their rightful place as inspirational romantic figures of the late Victorian age.

I have more reason than most writers to be grateful to the many people who have generously given their time, expertise and enthusiasm to the creation of this book. This is because it did not begin life as an investigation of a Pre-Raphaelite artist, nor an account of a compulsive love story, nor indeed as the proposal for a book of any kind.

It began as no more than a simple enquiry into the building history of a minor historic house, with the purpose of informing its restoration. In these circumstances, there was little incentive for anyone to become entangled in the confusion thrown up by our first faltering discoveries. Even after Robert Bateman had emerged to enrich the narrative, the project revolved only around a maltreated house, an obscure artist and an unknown, aspiring author scarcely an enthralling prospect for a potential contributor to engage in.