September 2022 – my daily art display

ArtCatto Gallery

Often when you visit small galleries which are staging a joint exhibition of paintings done by a small number of artists, you like some and are disappointed with others. I was in Portugal last week and my visit coincided with an opening of a joint exhibition at a local gallery and I was fortunate to have received an invite which coincided with my short break away.

The exhibition was at the ArtCatto gallery in the heart of the Algarve town of Loulé. ArtCatto was the brainchild of Gillian Catto, who after 30 years as the owner of an internationally recognised and respected gallery in London, decided to settle in the Algarve and she opened ArtCatto in 2011. Gillian Catto developed a reputation, which is second to none. She was responsible for launching the careers of artists who have subsequently become household names, such as Jack Vettriano. His solo exhibition at her Gallery helped to create a global demand for his work, which skyrocketed in value virtually overnight.

The gallery is divided into a number of small rooms, each featuring the work of one artist. In one of these rooms there were six exquisite works of portraiture by the Chinese artist, Shen Ming Cun. Shen was born in 1956 and graduated from the University Art College of Guangxi in China, where he is now a professor of European Art. He is highly respected as an official artist for the Chinese Government, and has exhibited in Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, New Zealand, and Britain.

Shen Ming draws his inspiration from the ancient traditions, crafts and culture of the tribes of the Miao, Yao and Dong of the remote GuangXi region of China. There are large changes in China which is causing a massive strain on the ancient way of life in these small village communities and as the young people leave the villages to seek work in the large cities one has to wonder how long these cultures can survive.

Each tribe has a quite unique tradition in dress and adornment from the other. The young girls sew everything entirely by hand and their jewellery is crafted in the village.

Shen’s paintings have come to focus on capturing, distilling and representing the inimitable customs, dress and heritage of these minority tribes of Southern China. His empathy and admiration of these tribal people is well-defined in his paintings, which possess a lyrical beauty, dignity and grace. In fact, his paintings have been likened to a kind of visual poetry in their way they communicate to the viewer a variety of emotions and to entice the spectator into their worlds.

Shen’s paintings capture the chromatic vibrancy of the costumes and ornate silver jewellery with a lightness and confidence that has undoubtedly led to his success. Their adornments are genuine symbols of the wealth, religion, ritual and national consciousness that shape their lives. It is truly remarkable to witness the intimate moments that he often portrays which provide an atmosphere of invitation and intrigue for the viewer. Shen explains his inspirational art:

“…I have spent a long time researching the richly colourful cultural heritage of the Yao and Miao nationalities and the Dong minority of Southern China. Over the years I have lived amongst them and become friends with these beautiful people who radiate pure goodness and a simple love of life. Cultivating their ancestor’s achievements, they turn life into immortal art…”

On entering another room I came across some fascinating works of art by Pedro Guimares. Pedro Guimarães, born 1974 in Guimarães, Portugal. From an early age, Pedro was fascinated by art and design, resulting in an exhibition at the age of sixteen at the Youth Centre in Braga. The success and impact of that show confirmed his career as a professional artist and as a result he set up his studio in Guimarães to continue his practice.

In 2011 he moved to Cantabria, Spain, having the opportunity to exhibit his work there. Back in Portugal it was in Guimarães that he set up his atelier. There he devoted an increasingly greater amount of time to plastic arts until it finnaly became his exclusive activity. Since then, Pedro Guimarães participated in several individual and collective exhibitions in Portugal and abroad with an intense and always innovative artistic production.

Pedro Guimarães’s work is based on a conceptual language created by him, which he defines as:

“…the true transparent reaction of our consciousness with the synapses that make us unique and influence the direction of our concepts, associating colours and shapes…”

*Untouchable. In loving memory of* *Queen Elizabeth II by Pedro Guimares*

Enjoying a wide creative freedom, Pedro Guimarães uses various resources and materials. One of the strangest and probably the most time-consuming work was a portrait entitled Untouchable. In loving memory of Queen Elizabeth II. For this work, Guimares used a technique which he terms “Untouchable” which gives the work a unique content, curious, and some might say disarming. Standing before the portrait you see nothing unusual but……….

*Side-on view of Queen Elizabeth II portrait*

………..stand to the side of the portrait and when you look again you realise the artwork comprises of numerous pins (180,000 pins) that forms the figure into a three-dimensional shape. You only notice the pins when you view the work side-on.

The painting of his, maybe I should say the three paintings of his, which fascinated me was entitled The Three of Us. I suppose the portrait(s) fall into the category of being a Trompe L’oeil depiction. As I stood in front of this strange slatted painting I saw a depiction of Princess Diana. At first I could not fathom out the reason for the vertical slats.

However when I moved to the left and viewed the painting at a 45 degree angle the image of Diane disappeared and as if by magic, the depiction of her son Harry came clearly into view………

……and when I moved to the right of the painting an image of William gradually appeared. Yes, I know it was just a work of trickery but it was very cleverly done.

On entering the gallery, you were greeted by a wash of bright colours which extended along the walls of the passageways. The paintings reminded me of some of the colourful seascapes I saw at the Joaquín Sorolla Museum in Madrid. These artworks at the ArtCatto gallery were by the English artist Richard Gower.

*Finding the Perfect Spot by Richard Gower*

Richard Gower was born in West Yorkshire in 1962 and is a fine artist who is known for his contemporary oil paintings rendered in his characteristic impressionistic style. At the age of seventeen, he studied at Batley College of Art and specialised in fine art and sculpture. He is influenced by the great artists of the nineteenth and twentieth century such as Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Sickert, Francis Bacon. Richard’s determination to paint and learn everything he needed to learn motivated him to study the great impressionists. Richard’s fascination with the great painters pushed his own creativity and observations to develop and fine-tune his personal ‘Reflections’ style over the years. As a young man he travelled throughout Europe on his motorbike stopping of at various cities and towns always visiting galleries and exhibitions, whilst all the time honing his artistic skills and developing his passion for painting.

The semi-abstracted, figurative compositions we see in his beach scenes have both a real sense of joie de vie but also intrigue. As observers, we are asked to conjure up narratives about these anonymous characters who are enjoying a day at the seaside and who are immortalised on his canvases.

These seaside scenes by Gower would light up any room and bring with them the hankering to leave rainy and windswept climates and visit beautiful beaches and soak up the sun.

*Mario Henrique with his portrait of Marilyn Munroe*

Another room at the ArtCatto exhibition was dedicated to the artwork of Mario Henrique. Mario Henrique is an artist based in Cascais, Portugal, who graduated in Design from Lisbon’s University of Fine Arts and started his career in online marketing and web development agencies. Later on, as a creative director he recruited and led teams in Portugal, Spain and Brazil.

*Somnium No. 1, Series X by Mario Henrique*

Of his painting style Mario explains:

“…I try to be fast and spontaneous when I’m painting – that process should be reflected in the final piece. The observer should be able to infer the physicality of the painting process, when looking at the brush strokes and paint drippings…”

“…When I throw paint, I can do it with some premeditation – but I can never really predict where the paint will actually fall on the canvas. So, my approach to painting is – in part – based on chance, on small random accidents – it doesn’t rely exclusively on my persistence or my technique.

That’s why I don’t feel completely responsible for my paintings – in the sense that, although I can answer for my initial intentions, the final…”

Mario Henrique is passionate about his work and has exhibited his work in Portugal, Brazil, Germany and the US. He says that he is forever intrigued by the subtleties and double meanings of people’s body language, expressions and looks, and he composes works centred around people. Mario uses his portraits to represent the impermanence of facial expressions and unpredictability of human movements, and paints abruptly and spontaneously in drippings and splashings.

*Nebula No. 5, Series IV by Mario Henrique*

Listed in various private collections across Europe, America and Asia, he has exhibited in galleries both locally and abroad, and was awarded an Honourable Mention for his participation in the Brasília Biennial of Contemporary Arts 2016. He was also featured in Saatchi Art’s Inside The Studio.

At the ArtCatto’s exhibition, there was also a selection of sculptures both with a modern style and a classical one.

Sculpture Flow by Paul Sibuet

Paul Sibuet, a French visual artist, was born in 1986. He was trained in Design and Art and his work has been submitted at numerous competitions, in Tokyo and Paris. He has now broken free from the techniques he was taught by exploring his own perceptions of the object and volumes, and in so doing so he has created his own signature. He lives today in Lyon and exhibits in particular in Geneva, New York and Venice.

At the rear of the gallery there is a narrow outdoor passage way which was lined by statuettes by Anneke Bester. Anneke Bester is a South African born artist who now considers New Zealand her home country. She not only exhibits in New Zealand but also regularly in Portugal and Dubai. Her body of work is a combination of one-off, delicately cast, bronze sculptures as well as editioned works. Anneke’s work focuses on celebrating Femininity in all its aspects. She sculpts gorgeous female forms in sensual poses. She develops the female energy of nature and depicts the female forms as daughters of mother earth in her most recent work.poses. She sees the female in its internal beauty and its core driving force that only a female sculptor can explore to its full extent.

If you are ever in the Algarve you should try and visit the ArtCatto gallery which lies on the town’s main street, across from the large Municipal Market Hall,

Dutch and Flemish Golden Age painters.

Like many others, I am a lover of the artwork of the Dutch Golden Age painters. The Dutch Golden Age was a period in the history of the Netherlands, which spanned the era from 1588 and the birth of the Dutch Republic to 1672, Rampjaar (Disaster Year) which was the year of the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War. During this period, it was considered that Dutch trade, science, and art and the Dutch military were among the most acclaimed in Europe. We all know about the lives and works of the famous artists of that era, such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Jan Steen, Frans Hals and Judith Leyster to name but a few. In my blog today I want to look at the lives and works of the lesser-known painters of that era.

Izaak van Oosten was a Flemish Baroque landscape and cabinet painter who worked out of Antwerp. Izaak was born in Antwerp in December 1613 and was the son of an art dealer with the same name. His father had become a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1617. Very little is known about his upbringing or his early artistic training as there is no record of which master or masters he studied under. Izaak became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1652.

*Landscape with a Wagon and Travellers passing through a Village by Izaak van Oosten*

There is something joyful about paintings depicting skaters on frozen rivers and lakes. It is all before global warming and I am sure that now, many of the rivers and lakes retain their fluidity even in the depths of winter. The painting I am showcasing is entitled Skaters on a Frozen Lake at the Edge of Town and it was painted by the Dutch Golden Age landscape painter Cornelis Beelt. Cornelis Beelt was a Dutch Golden Age landscape painter who was one of the chief figures in the Haarlem school of landscape painting, but was also well-known for his genre paintings of towns, markets and villages. Beelt was born in Haarlem during the first decade of the seventeenth century.

*Skaters on a Frozen Lake at the Edge of Town by Cornelis Beelt (c.1652)*

The setting is a clear winter’s day and crowds of locals gather besides a country inn keen to enjoy the sport on the ice. Young and old, rich and poor are attracted to this pastime. In the foreground a group of well-dressed men and women stands on the ice and chat. An old lady with her hands in a fur muff sits in a splendid arreslee (sleigh which is drawn by a horse and which is decorated with a fine plumed harness. Close by young children propel themselves across the ice on small prikslees (sledges).

There is a strange thing about this painting which unfortunately is not visible from the attached picture. Beelt signed his painting in an unusual manner, one which he had also done on his painting Beach of Shevingen. He signed his name on the plank of wood in the foreground. However , at a later time, his signature was scrubbed out and replaced by the inscription J.V.Ostade f.1653 and this was judged to be an attempt by a less than honest art dealer to ascribe the work to a more famous name, Isaac van Ostade, so as to have a better chance of selling the painting, even though Ostade had died in 1649 !

The phrase ‘cabinet d’amateur’, in French, is an ancient term which referred to a room or part of a room in an art collector’s house where he or she displayed the paintings they had purchased. These display areas were before the rise of public galleries. Some where simple cabinets which contained their owner’s beloved works and some where floor to ceiling displays of their paintings. The phrase cabinet d’amateur should not be viewed as that of an “amateur collector” but that of an “art lover”. A German term for such a place is often referred to as a kunstkammer. In Italian it might be called a Gabinetto, Studiolo or Camerino.

*Two collectors dining in a gallery surrounded by paintings and works of art, with two parrots in the foreground*. by Frans Fancken the Younger

The painting connected with this term is one by the Flemish painter, Frans Francken the Younger and described as Two collectors dining in a gallery surrounded by paintings and works of art, with two parrots in the foreground. Frans Francken the Younger was the most famous of an Antwerp dynasty of painters; he trained with his father, Frans the Elder, and joined the Antwerp guild in 1605. He was a painter of religious and historical subjects as well as being the inventor of the genre – the cabinet painting.

On the right-hand side of the painting we see two men deep in discussion about a painting one of them is holding up but we do not know who is the owner of this kunstkammer. The presence of a kunstkammer in one’s house was a sign of wealth, intelligence and social status. In the main part of the painting, we see an ornate sideboard supported by classical caryatids. A caryatid is the name given to a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head. A light-pink fringed cloth covers the top shelf of the sideboard on which two large shells are placed either side of the painting, The Adoration of the Magi. Richly decorated goblets and covered urns are displayed on two of the sideboard shelves. On the floor we see two parrots depicted sitting on a perch. The import of exotic foreign birds testified to the owner’s wealth. We see a large red velvet curtain falls from the ceiling which when released would act as a separator of the two rooms. Everything in the room exudes the wealth of the owner which would have been the raison d’être for the owner of the cabinet d’amateur commissioning the work.

*The Cabinet of the Collector* by Frans Francken the Younger (c.1617)

A similar painting by Frans Francken the Younger is in the Royal Collection entitled The Cabinet of the Collector which he completed around 1617. Amongst the paintings on view in the kunstkammer is a landscape by Joos de Momper, a still life of an everyday table set for a meal; and a small, nocturnal Flight into Egypt. Other religious painting depicted are one featuring St Augustine who is trying to comprehend the idea of the Trinity and sees a baby struggling to pour the entire sea into a pool in the sand with a shell – both tasks being equally beyond the scope of man. The drawings, one framed and one in an open book are two studies for Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling and a preparatory drawing for Raphael’s Madonna della Perla which emphasise the intellectual side of painting.. There are also letters on the table, no doubt signifying an intelligent characteristic of the painting’s owner. Also displayed are exotic weaponry which is a reminder of the importance of travel and trade and a handful of Roman coins and a bowl of modern ones, which were not anything to do with wealth but more likely a celebration of the achievements of great men.

For me, the most interesting part of the work is seen beneath the arch to the right. In the background a church is demolished and nearby donkey-headed men with cudgels destroy a pile of objects associated with learning, science, the arts and sport. According to Karel van Mander, the sixteenth century Flemish poet, painter and art historian, a man with a donkey head is a symbol of Ignorance. The episodes depicted here recall two historical events: the Beeldenstorm, an outbreak of iconoclasm carried out by Protestants in 1566; and the ‘Spanish Fury’, the sack of Antwerp in 1576.

*A Rhineland Landscape with a Hermit and Soldiers* by Jan Griffier the Elder

Jan Griffier the Elder, who was born in Amsterdam around 1645, was a painter and printmaker, who produced views of Rhineland landscapes as well as spending time, around 1660, in England where he produced many landscape works featuring the English countryside. One of his most beautiful landscapes is referred to as A Rhineland Landscape with a Hermit and Soldiers. The painting dramatically depicts a steep mountain landscape with a meandering river below which slowly flows through wooded crags which are surmounted by castles. If we look to the left foreground, we can see a men loading barrels of wine onto a small boat. The main figures in this painting are on the right-hand side. We see a group of soldiers lying down, concealed among the ferns and flowers. One of the group points down to the boat which is being loaded. Are they planning to raid the operation? Above them, sitting on a rock by a large oak tree in peaceful isolation, is a hermit, who is meditating. It is an interesting painting with plenty to focus on, but what is it all about ?

*Floral Still life Floral by Gaspar van den Hoecke*

There is something that fascinates me about floral still life paintings. I think it is just the effort and patience the artists must have put in to produce such beautiful works. My next featured painting is a small (70 x 50cms) floral still life attributed to the Flemish Baroque painter, Gaspar van Hoecke, who was born in Antwerp around 1580.

Gaspar van den Hoecke was best known for his small religious cabinet pieces but during his early period around 1610 his work focused on still life floral paintings. The vase of flowers sits on a wooden tabletop. This dense grouping of flowers fills almost two thirds of the painting. The profusion of flowers doesn’t allow the artist to depict twigs and leaves between individual flowers. On the table we see a caterpillar of the swallow-tailed butterfly which is next to it. Also on the table there is a silver medal with the head of Pope Pius V which had been created in 1571. Just above it is a gold coin which is a rare example of a byzantine solidus made during the era of Anastasius, the Eastern Roman Emperor.

*Winter Landscape with a peasant walking through snow by Gysbrecht Leytens*

The Flemish painter Gijsbrecht Leytens was born in Antwerp in 1586. As a teenager, he began his apprenticeship with Jacob Vrolijck. In 1611 he joinied the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a master. In 1615 he became a member of the Olijftak, a chamber of rhetoric that dates back to the early 16th century in Antwerp, when it was a social drama society which drew its membership primarily from merchants and tradesmen and provided public entertainment at prestigious events. Gijsbrecht was a captain in Antwerp’s Civic Guard between 1624 and 1628. His work followed the style of 16th and 17th century Flemish and Dutch great landscape paintings, which had brought recognition to such masters as Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hendrick Avercamp, Gillis Van Coninxloo, Joost de Momper and Denijs Van Alsloot.

*Winter landscape with a woodsman and travelers* by Gysbrecht Leytens

However, it was Gijsbrecht Leytens’ determined personal style that brought him to the public’s attention. Many of his paintings were simply attributed to “The Master of the Winter Landscape” and only in the 1940’s attributed to him. Leytens has an easily recognisable style not just because he focuses on snowy winter scenes but because of the way he depicts intricate and curious intertwining designs created by the bare branches and twigs which form a large part of his depictions. He was described as a poet of the frost in the way he conveys the cold nakedness of the sun on a countryside caught in the ice. No-one before him, nor after him, either in Flanders or elsewhere, expressed this with such intensity. The fundamental and unique quality of his art also resides in the extreme refinement of the subtle colour harmonies apparent in his paintings at all times.

*Old Man Reading a Letter by Willem van Mieris* (1729)

The depiction of the reading of a letter has featured in many paintings over the years. Such attention to what is written in the letter adds to the back-story of the artwork and often our imagination runs riot as we try to fathom out the sentiment expressed in the pages of the letter. My next painting is one by the Dutch artist Willem van Mieris who was born in Leiden in the Northern Netherlands in June 1662. His artistic tuition came from his father Frans van Mieris who was a genre painter. Throughout his career Willem was successful and had the support of a number of patrons who constantly supplied him with commissions. He was equally at home painting genre scenes and portraiture as well as being a skilled landscape painter, etcher, and draughtsman. He was the active leader of, and once became dean of, the Leiden Guild of St. Luke in 1693. A year later, in 1694, he established a drawing academy in Leiden along with the painter Jacob Toorenvliet.

In this work we see an elderly gentleman seated at a table in a darkened interior deep in concentration as he reads a handwritten document. He wears an opulent-looking gown which is made of richly embroidered material and which is evocative of the fashion for Japanese dress at the time. Upon his head is a hat made of rich blue velvet and lined with a extravagant swathe of fur. In the dark background we can just make out shelves filled with books. Couple that with the paraphernalia on the table, such as an inkwell, sealing wax and quill pen tells us that this a gentleman of great learning, maybe a lawyer. Lawyers were often depicted in paintings reading documents and letters.

I hope this blog will encourage you to delve into the world of Dutch and Flemish painters where you will find so many talented artists.

John Downton

My featured artist today is the lesser-known British painter John Downton who was born on March 27^th, 1906 in the Kent town of Erith, some twenty kilometres south-east of London. He was the youngest of three children of Albert Victor and Flora Edith Downton (née Mitchell). John had two older sisters, Hilda and Mary both of whom had intended to study medicine but their plans were thwarted by family circumstances and health reasons.

At the age of four John attended the Erith Convent where he was a pupil for the next four years. In 1914 he transferred to the Erith Grammar School. It was around this time that John developed a love for music. His father played the flute and the piano and was a prominent member of the local church choir. John’s uncle, Hedley, gave John a violin and during the following years John became an important member of the school orchestra. The other great love of the teenager was his desire to read, particularly books by ancient philosophers and other “serious” works of English literature.

*Portrait of a Young Woman by John Downton (1929)*

Apart from his music and books, John had an overriding passion for art and even built a summer house/studio in the family garden where he did his painting. When he was seventeen the school entered his pencil sketch, Biplanes: A Study, into the Royal Drawing Society at the Guildhall, London and he was awarded a Silver Medal. As a teenager he was fascinated by all things military and penned many sketches of war machines and yet, later in life he became a pacifist.

Woman at the Window by John Downton (1934)

In 1922, when he was sixteen years old, his mother noticed an advert in The Times which stated that a Professor Gaugot, who was a lecturer at the Sorbonne, was willing to teach an English boy to speak French and so young John Downton headed to Paris where he stayed with the Gaugot family.

*Child with Roses by John Downton (1936)*

A year later in 1923 John accompanied his two sisters to Italy where they visited Venice and the Northern Italian Lakes as well as the Swiss towns of Lucerne and Lugano. This was the start of John’s love affair with travel. His favourite destinations were Northern Italy and Switzerland.

Having completed his schooling John was accepted into Queen’s College, Cambridge. Initially he took Part 1 of the English Tripos and in 1927 was placed into the Second Class but the following year he decided to abandon English and instead enrolled in the History of Art course and once completed, he received a First Class degree. During his three years at the university John immersed himself in their musical activities.

In the Autumn of 1928, having completed his three-year degree course, John Downton enrolled at the Slade School of Art which at the time was presided over by Henry Tonks, a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist who was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1918 to 1930. John, like many of the Old Masters of the past, preferred the medium of tempera but the Slade tutors wanted him to change his favoured painting medium and embrace a more modern style of painting. There was to be no common ground and so on May 21^st 1929, John resigned. In a forward to John Downton’s 1937 book, The Death of Art, an art critic and author wrote about Downton’s falling out of love with the Slade and the Academy’s thoughts on art. He wrote:

“…A certain kind of rather drably coloured, sober urban realism was the style in favour. Not for Downton though: he had pretty certainly made up his mind what he wanted to do and what sort of painter he wanted to be well before he arrived at the Slade and it has much more to do with the legacy of Piero della Francesca than that of Sickert and Cezanne…”

Downton’s art was a return to the art of the early Renaissance.

In 1930 John Downton and his sister set off on an European trip. They based themselves in the Côte d’Azur town of Menton and from there they took day trips out to the Italian Riviera towns of Ventimiglia and Genoa. Much longer trips were taken by the pair when they visited Milan and Lugano as well as his beloved Italian Lakes.

*Portrait of a Young Lady by John Downton (1929)*

Around 1930, John bought Park Cottage in the Kent village of Sundridge, some twenty miles, south-east of London. He spent much of his time renovating the property and buying antique furniture at auction to furnish the rooms. After two years living there, he realised it was too small for him and his artwork and so he moved out and rented the cottage to a fellow artist, Vincent New.

In April 1932 John Downton was awarded his M.A. and, as if to celebrate the successful completion of his studies, he took a trip to Tunis and returned via Naples, where he remained for a few months. On arriving back to England John searched for a new home and eventually purchased a property with a north-facing conservatory in which he could paint. The property was in Observatory Gardens, in the London borough of Kensington.

Around 1935, John Downton completed a poignant in memoriam portrait of his cousin Frances Witts. She had died of pneumonia aged just twenty-six. He used a family photograph for this work.

*Portrait of a Lady in Yellow by Alesso Baldovinetti (1465)*

Downton was influenced by profile portraits executed by Florentine painters such as Baldovinetti’s 1465 work entitled Portrait of a Lady in Yellow but art historians believe this portrait of his cousin was influenced by the Milanese painter, Ambrogio’ de Predis and his c.1490 work, Beatrice d’Este, which was once attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

Portrait of a Lady (Beatrice d’Este) by Ambrogio’ de Predis

Downton’s memorial portrait has a dark and rich tonal quality and he has based it on a conservative portrait of the past and has accomplished an image that is both solemn and inspiring. The woman in Downton’s portrait, like the Italian females in the portraits mentioned earlier, includes a necklace with diminishing size of beads whilst her hair is similarly geometric but in Frances Witts’ case it is gathered at the sides rather than at the back of the head.

Between 1936 and 1940 John Downton exhibited work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. His two submissions in 1936, which were considered to be his masterpieces, were The Battle and and Nora Russell. The latter painting was executed in egg tempera and, despite it being a simple depiction of a young schoolgirl, it is evocative in the way it reminds us of the spirit of Quattrocento female portraiture, that is to say, female portraiture in fifteenth-century Italy, which portrayed womanly perfection as established in Catholic doctrine, illustrating the special social roles that upper-class women fulfilled at the time.

The title, The Battle, the second of his submitted painting to the 1936 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, is to do with conflict but not a battlefield scene, as you may have expected. It is all about the battle between modern industrialisation and the ideal of Renaissance humanism, which was a revival in the study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, a cultural legacy, literary legacy, and moral philosophy of classical antiquity.

*Erasmus of Rotterdam by Hans Holbein the Younger (1523)*

The figure and its stance in the painting is based upon Holbein’s 1523 work, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus was the leading humanist at the time. Both works accentuate the hands of the sitter. In the Louvre collection there are studies of hands made by Holbein as preliminaries for his painting. In Downton’s painting we see through the window an abstract depiction of a modern factory.

John Downton was always on the move and made many more house relocations and in August 1937 he took up residence in Cambridge. That year he submitted his work entitled Joan Harris to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition where it was subsequently chosen to be shown in The Prominent Living Artists Exhibition which was staged at the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth. Joan Harris was the daughter of John Downton’s Cambridge neighbour. From a letter she wrote him during the sittings for the portrait we can gather that Downton completed more than just this one portrait of her. She wrote:

“…I hope you will finish the picture soon; but if you ever want me to come and sit for you again, just let me know and I will come any time that I am able.

When you have finished the picture I hope I will be able to see it and if you get the first picture back in Cambridge I would like to see it, and I know Mummy and Daddy would love to see it as they never saw it when it was completed…”

*Portrait of a Girl by John Downton (1938)*

Downton’s 1938 submission to the RA Summer Show was Portrait of a Girl which unusually for Downton depicted the model against a landscape background giving the impression that it was a plein air portrait. There is a definite resemblance to the style of one of my favourite portrait artists, Gerald Brockhurst.

*Portrait of a Woman by John Downton (1955)*

A strange looking portrait going under the title Portrait of a Woman was completed by John Downton in 1955.

*Edith Sitwell by Pavel Tchelitchew (1935)*

It is thought that the depiction was loosely based on the Polish painter, Pavel Tchelitchew’s portrait of his good friend Edith Sitwell in 1935.

*Girl Conducting by John Downton (1940)*

In 1938, now living in Cambridge, Downton was having to cope with the rejection by Faber & Faber of his manuscript, The Death of Art, but which was published years later. In 1940 Downton submitted three paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Eve, A Girl Conducting, and A Child. His painting entitled Girl Conducting is all about his depiction of the girl’s hands and it is such a facet in many of his works. The finished product did not come easily for Downton, who made numerous sketches of hands until he had perfected them. Many of the depictions were influenced by Renaissance paintings. The three paintings Downton submitted to the RA that year were to be the last of his offerings to that establishment.

*Woman in Flemish Head Dress by John Downton*

So why did Downton stop exhibiting his work at the RA ? In the foreword to Downton’s book The Death of Art, which his sister, Hilda, finally had published in 1995, the writer and critic John Russell Taylor explained:

“…He seems to have felt himself marginalised in a world increasingly unsympathetic to everything he stood for. In 1939 he moved to Florence in an attempt to escape the materialist twentieth century, but then almost immediately had to return to Britain at the outbreak of war. The war itself was even more of an alienating factor, a total outrage to his dearly held pacifist principles. And a general feeling that the mainstream of British Art was moving further and further away from his own ideals, first into luxuriant Romanticism and then into freeform abstraction, caused him to withdraw altogether from exhibiting his own art after 1940…”

Now back home in England with the war waging in Europe, John Downton received his conscript papers. Downton had always been a pacifist and went before the Review Board to argue his case for not fighting. The Board accepted that he was a genuine conscientious objector and so, in September 1940, he was put to work on a farm near Ludlow. That same year his two sisters moved north to Pitlochry in Scotland and later Downton moved north to be with them and work on the land of the local farmer.

*Portrait of a Woman by John Downton (1940)*

When the war ended Downton moved south and took up residence in the Kent town of Sevenoaks. He remained there for two years but then returned to Cambridge where he stayed until 1964 but when his lease ran out on the property he was renting in 1971 he moved back to Sevenoaks and rented a large ground floor flat with a cellar, close to where his sisters, Hilda and Mary were then living. Mary became very ill with asthma in 1986 and died. In December 1990 a water pipe burst in the cellar and caused a flood which partly destroyed some of his books and manuscripts he had stored in the room. He struggled to save and move the heavy boxes of books and this exertion damaged his heart. He was confined to hospital for two weeks and on discharge went to live with his sister, Hilda, who looked after him during his final days. John Downton died on July 31^st 1991, aged 85.

John never married but was in no way a recluse as his time was taken up with his painting and his love of music. He had many friends who valued his company. His sister, Hilda died in 2006, aged 104.

British Victorian Art and the Maas Gallery, London. Part 2.

My second blog continues to look at some of the Victorian paintings which were on show at the Maas Gallery in London.

*The Last Song of the Girondins by Claude Andrew Calthrop (1868)*

The first painting I am displaying in Part 2 is one by the English artist Claude Andrew Calthrop. Calthrop was born in Deeping St Nicholas, near Spalding, Lincolnshire, on December 20th 1844, the youngest son of James Thompson Calthrop, a farmer and grazier, and his wife, Edna (née Knowles). Calthrop attended the Merchant Taylors’ School, in the City of London, but, by 1861, had transferred to King’s College School. From there, he then studied art at Lambeth School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, where in December 1864, he was awarded a silver medal for the best drawing from life and a gold medal and a scholarship for £50 for the best historical painting, a biblical one, depicting a subject from the Book of Job. He went on to exhibit at the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy. At first, Claude Calthrop concentrated on history paintings depicting episodes of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Later he changed to depictions of contemporary life, portraiture and genre scenes.

Today’s painting, Last Song of the Girondins, was completed and submitted by Calthrop to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1868. It depicts a scene from the French Revolution and the Jacobins, an anti-Royalist grouping formed mainly of two prominent parliamentary factions, the Montagnards, lead by Robespierre and the Girondins lead by Jacques-Pierre Brissot. The Montagnards referred to those who occupied the higher benches in both the Jacobin club and the national legislature. Those who sat on these high benches were generally more radical in their ideology and their policies, while those who sat further down were usually more moderate. The conflict between the Girondins and Montagnards came to a head in the spring of 1793. The catalyst for this was the trial of Louis XVI

*Detail from* *The Last Song of the Girondins by Claude Andrew Calthrop*

The two factions fell out and in 1793, the Girondins were charged with conspiring against the Republic by the Montagnards. They were all immediately found guilty in a show trial, and just before midnight on the October 30th 1793, they were sentenced to death. The following morning, the twenty-one convicted men were taken by cart from the dungeons of the Conciergerie to the guillotine. Defiant to the end, the prisoners, led by Brissot, started to sing the Marseillaise and as each was beheaded, the sound of the song dwindled to silence, until the very last Girondin was executed. The twenty-one died in a space of thirty-six minutes and this heralded in the Reign of Terror.

Of Calthrop’s painting, the art critic for Bell’s Weekly Messenger, described it as:

“…a more difficult scene to portray could scarcely have been chosen; but he has given individuality to each character, whilst he has managed the processional grouping with an ease which says much for his appropriate idea of detail. The manner, too, in which the general scheme is worked out by means of a happy blending of colour, is also appropriate. The handling is minute, without being laboured; and the tone, kept down, to represent the vault from which the prisoners are about to emerge, is as sober as the scene is sad. We shall expect, after such a specimen as this, to note Mr C Calthrop’s rise in his profession…”

*Ruskin in his Turret Brantwood* *by William Collingwood*

William Gershom Collingwood, a writer and artist, was born in Liverpool in 1854. He had always liked the Lake District and had accompanied his father there on sketching tours. He received his early education at Liverpool College and at the age of eighteen went to University College, Oxford, where he first met John Ruskin. During the summer of 1873 Collingwood visited Ruskin at his Lake District house, Brantwood. Ruskin had bought the somewhat dilapidated house in Coniston in August 1871. Brantwood was Ruskin’s main home from 1872 until his death in 1900. Ruskin oversaw many renovations to Brantwood including adding a turret to his bedroom which gave him a panoramic view of the lake

Later Collingwood was working at Brantwood with Ruskin and his associates. Ruskin was impressed with Collingwood’s draughtsmanship, and so he influenced Collingwood to study at the Slade School of Art between 1876 and 1878. Collingwood exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1880. For many years Collingwood dedicated his life to helping Ruskin and lived at Branston, taking on the role as Ruskin’s personal assistant. In 1883 Collingwood married Edith Mary Isaac and the couple lived close to Ruskin in the Lake District. Collingwood went on to edit many of Ruskin’s texts and published a biography of Ruskin in 1893.

*Michelangelo Nursing his Dying Servant by Frederic, Lord Leighton* *(c.1862)*

In this 1857 watercolour painting by Frederic, Lord Leighton, we have a depiction a young man supporting and comforting an older man. It is a tender and compassionate scene. The old man, a servant, is Urbino and the benevolent person with his arm around the old man’s shoulder is his master, Michelangelo. Leighton has fashioned the depiction similar to many religious depictions of The Deposition, the cradling of the dead Christ after being brought down from the cross. A number of years later Leighton completed a copy of the work in oils.

This is an unfinished watercolour portrait of Kathleen Newton by the French painter James Tissot. She was his favourite model who also became his lover. The story of artist and model is fascinating and I covered it in my blog, James Tissot and Kathleen Newton ten years ago.

This watercolour is thought to be a preliminary sketch which Tissot used when he worked on his painting entitled Quiet. This was one of Tissot’s most famous pictures of Kathleen and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881. Kathleen is depicted sitting on a bench in the garden at Tissot’s house in Grove End Road with one of her children and a pet dog. The depiction of Kathleen in Quiet shows her in a similar pose as in the unfinished watercolour sketch.

My next offerings were paintings by the prolific English Victorian painter William Lionel Wylie, an artist of maritime themes which he painted in both oils and watercolours.

William Lionel Wyllie, better known as W.L.Wylie, who was born on July 5th 1851 at 67 Albany Street, Camden Town, London. He was the elder of two sons of a prosperous minor-genre painter, French-born English William Morrison Wyllie, who at the time of the birth of his son, was living in London. His younger brother Charles William Wylie was also a talented painter. William Jnr. received a first-class artistic education, studying firstly at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, and then in 1866, when he was aged fifteen, at the Royal Academy Schools, where he studied under some of the great artists of the time like Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais and Frederic Leighton.

*Dawn After a Storm by W.L.Wylie (1869)*

His artistic talent showed through with his 1869 painting entitled Dawn After a Storm which won him the Turner Gold Medal. He was just eighteen years old.

*Landing the Catch, Portel Sands by W.L. Wylie (1875)*

William Wylie submitted his painting Landing the Catch, Portel Sands, in 1875. Wylie who had success at submitting his work to the Royal Academy’s Exhibitions the previous years was horrified and disillusioned to have his work rejected by the Exhibition jurists. It was the first time this had happened to him in seven years. He swore that he would give up painting and go off to sea.

His parents once had a summer home at Wimereux, a coastal town just north of Boulogne and just to the south was Portel Sands which is depicted in his painting. This painting depicts fishermen landing their catch on the beach at low tide. The scene is lit up by the blazing sun overhead.

*Shrimpers Hauling to Windward* *by W.L. Wylie*

Wylie’s painting entitled Shrimpers Hauling to Windward is a small work (58 x 71 cms) and is looked upon as one of Wylie’s masterpieces of maritime art. It appeared at the Royal Academy in 1905. It is a work full of movement, air, and light. It depicts a sea reach, which is the last bit of river before it meets the sea. To the right we see the submerged mud bank. The last of the shrimper fleet heads towards land, hard on the starboard tack in the channel, battling against both wind and the current, whilst the leading boats have already made it to the inner harbour and protection against the elements.

*The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 by W.L. Wylie*

Wylie’s small painting featuring the Shrimpers which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1905, was overshadowed by another of Wyllie’s works, the monumental (148 x 272 cms) painting of Trafalgar on the centenary of the battle. The art press and critics alike stated that this large maritime depiction ‘stole the show’.

*A Walk in the Country by John Ritchie (1863)*

Little is known about the artist who created the painting above, simply entitled A Day in the Country. The artist is John Ritchie and we know he is Scottish and was born around 1821. The difficulty in unearthing facts about his life is strange as he did exhibit his work at such hallowed establishments as the Scottish Academy, Liverpool Academy and the Royal Academy in London. He began to exhibit his work in 1840 when he was nineteen years old. One of the artists who influenced Ritchie was John Brett (see earlier painting in Part 1). His painting, A Day in the Country, was exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1863 and depicts a farmer taking a stroll on his land and checking on the forestry management with, in the middle-ground, some of his workers hauling away a felled tree. In the foreground we see the exposed roots of a large old oak tree. Rabbits have nibbled at the roots and the bark and have burrowed under the sandy bank beneath the tree. Besides checking on the tree-felling he is carrying a shotgun and is also hunting the rabbits that are damaging his trees. To the left we see one of his men collecting the body of a rabbit his boss has killed.

The painting above is by George Clausen, an artist I have dedicated two blogs to back in 2015. This work is his beautiful and sensitive portrait of a young woman which he completed in 1895 and originally it was entitled Pensive but later was given the name Cinderella on the behest of David Croal Thomson, an Edinburgh-born art dealer and critic, who was based mainly in London, managing the London branch of the prestigious Goupil Gallery. Thomson advised Clausen that such a change of name would add a touch of romanticism to the work. The painting was shown at the New Gallery in 1896 and the critic for the Pall Mall Gazette praised the work saying that Clausen had captured a creature exquisitely tender in nature. The girl who modelled for the painting was Lizzie Deller a girl from Widdington, Essex.

Although the exhibition at the Maas Gallery has finished by the time you read these two blogs, I just wanted to remind you of the benefits one gets when you call in and look around these private “selling” galleries.