Portrait of Mabel and Ruth Orrinsmith

Details

Date: c. 1878
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: O94
Artist: Hughes, Arthur, 1832, 1915
Sitter: Orrinsmith, Mabel (29.10.1871 - 1880)
Sitter: Orrinsmith, Ruth (23.02.1873 - 1954)
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs Hitch, 1954

These two children were daughters of Harvey and Lucy Orrinsmith (nee Faulkner). Before her marriage, Lucy and her sister Kate Faulkner, sisters of Charles Faulkner who was a partner in the Morris firm in its early years, worked for Morris & Co. executing embroideries and decorating ceramics. Lucy also engraved at least one block for the illustrations to a proposed edition of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. Painted circa 1878 when Mabel was eight and Ruth seven. An unpublished letter among the Leathart Papers, University of Columbia Special Collections, from Arthur Hughes to James Leathart (15 August 1878) mentions the painting being sent to Newcastle for an exhibition.

Hughes came into contact with the Pre-Raphaelites while a student at the Royal Academy Schools in the 1840s. In 1857, Hughes joined Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris in painting the Arthurian murals at the Oxford Union. Although invited to become a partner in Morris, Marshall. Faulkner & Co., he withdrew shortly before the enterprise was launched in 1861. Hughes’s later work retains the sentiment, if not the technique, of his early Pre-Raphaelite pictures.

Two pastel portrait studies for the oil painting are also in the Gallery’s collection, see D189. Both painting and pastels were donated to the Gallery by Lucy Orrinsmith’s grandaughter, Mrs L. Hitch.

Details

Date: c.1920-1930s
Dimensions: 49 x 60
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: BrO34
Artist: Henry, George, 1858, 1943
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1936

In this painting, George Henry’s typical use of lush colours is evident in the bluebells carpeting the woodland floor. Henry was one of the Glasgow Boys, a loose group of painters active in the late nineteenth century. Born in Ayrshire, Henry studied at the Glasgow School of Art. His friendship with Edward Atkinson Hornel led to some collaborative work and they were among the first British artists to visit Japan, traveling there together in 1893.

Details

Date: 1915
Dimensions: 101.2 x 106
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: BrO54
Artist: Shannon, Charles Hazelwood, 1863, 1937
Credit notes: Brangwyn Gift, 1948

Charles Shannon Hazelwood was a British artist best known for his portraiture. This painter shows the two figures of a reaper and sower walking through an agricultural landscape, the young man in red (the sower) is taking handfuls of corn from his bag, whilst the morbid figure of the reaper dressed in black, clutches his arm, his face oppressively close to the sower. Painted in 1915, the subject- a young man stalked by the figure of death, is perhaps a response to the loss of young life during World War One which had commenced the year before. A smaller half-size version of the same theme is in the Usher Gallery, Lincoln (LCNUG 1927.1930).

For a related study of two heads, initialled, titled and dated, see: ‘Charles Shannon’ (Ernest Benn; 1924), pl.33.

Details

Date: 1870
Dimensions: 78 x 55.5
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: BrO30
Artist: Crane, Walter, 1845, 1915
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1936

‘Love’s Altar’ was painted by Walter Crane in 1870. It depicts a young man kneeling before an altar surmounted by a portrait of a young woman. The portrait is of Crane’s fiancée Mary Frances Andrews, whom he later married on 6 September 1871. Crane wrote a sonnet to accompany the work, published in ‘A Book of Verse’, 1891 (see below). It was exhibited at the Old Bond Street Gallery in 1870 described as ‘Love’s Sanctuary’. Whilst on display it attracted adverse criticism, the ‘Art Journal’ describing it an ‘an irreverent parody’ and commenting on ‘the incongruity of medieval treatment coupled with classical costume and accessories’.

Love’s Sanctuary

NO more I go to worship with the crowd

In Christian temples, pagan now to me,

No dim cathedral hears me pray aloud,

I sing no credo, as it used to be:

Though kneeling not beneath the roof of Rome,

Or in protesting fanes, I have a shrine—

A holiest of holies—Love’s sweet home,

On whose white altar lies life’s bread and wine.

There oft, in saddened times and weary hours,

To secret sanctuary do I flee,

Where one sweet presence soothes, like breath of flowers,

To whom their incense rises ceaselessly;

For there, though not a Roman devotee,

Sweet virgin Mary I do worship thee.

Details

Date: c.1870
Dimensions: 63 x 45
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: O127
Artist: Murray, Charles Fairfax, 1849, 1919
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs Stephanie Godwin, 1993

This portrait of William Morris, painted when he was about 36 years old, was owned by his mother, Emma. It shows a typical Victorian gentleman, sombrely dressed, regarding the viewer with thoughtful eyes. Morris had a complicated relationship with his family, whose financial interests and social conservatism were in direct opposition to his own Socialist beliefs. Emma was bitterly upset when William decided against becoming a clergyman in order to follow a career in the arts. He was aware of her feelings of disappointment, writing to her that his four brothers “shall keep up the family honour in the World and perhaps even I myself shall not utterly disgrace it”. This portrait suggests that Emma was ultimately proud of her eldest surviving son, though preferred to think of him as an educated gentleman rather than a radical artist.

Fairfax Murray was taken up by the art critic John Ruskin and age 16 was installed as Edward Burne-Jone’s first studio assistant in 1867. He quickly became acquainted with Pre-Raphaelite founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the friend of William Morris and Philip Webb. He was given work as artist and glass-painter for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., working to Burne Jones’s designs and also illuminated Morris’s manuscripts. A watercolur of Morris by Fairfax Murray from the same time is in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection (3652).

Details

Date: 1900
Dimensions: 153 x 92
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: O110
Artist: Crane, Walter, 1845, 1915
Credit notes: Transfer, 1964

The painting was done at the time of the Boer War of 1900 of which Crane was a bitter opponent, and when the Fabians failed to oppose the war, Crane along with other members including Ramsay Macdonald resigned from the Fabian Society. The alternative title, A Stranger, was intended to symbolise the estrangement of peace from the world. A similar figure, presenting olive branches to two wounded combatants, appears in Crane’s cartoon to commemorate the ending of the Boer War, published in the Daily News, 2 June 1902.

Details

Date: c. 1881
Dimensions: 49 x 39
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: O87
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1954

The image was based on a stained glass panel that Burne-Jones designed in 1878, one of a set of nine representing the Planets. Formerly depicting a full-length nude seated on a rock, in 1958 the canvas was cut down to its present size. The discarded canvas was not kept nor was a photographic record taken of the painting in its original state.

The stained glass was made by Morris & Co for the music room at ‘Woodlands’, the home of Sir Angus Holden situated on the outskirts of Bradford, Yorkshire. The stained glass no longer survives but the cartoons, including ‘The Evening Star’, are now at Torre Abbey, Torquay, Devon.

Details

Date: 1863
Dimensions: 36.2 x 51.4
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: BrO53
Artist: Scott, William Bell, 1811, 1890
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1938

This painting shows a rock-strewn beach on the north-east coast of England. The rather melancholy character of the scene is emphasised by the carcass of a dead sea bird in the foreground and the ghostly silhouettes of two sailing ships in the distance. Son of Robert Scott, an Edinburgh engraver, and brother of the historical painter David Scott, William Bell Scott studied under his father and at Trustee’ Academy before moving to London in 1837. In 1843 he was appointed master of the Government School of Design in Newcastle, where his influence did much to popularise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. The painting is one of several empty seascape scenes by Scott, dating from the 1860s including ‘The Incoming Tide’ (1861) , ‘North Sea by Moonlight’ (1863) and ‘Breakers on a Beach’ (1864). This painting, with its carefully delineated foreground detail of rocks, pebbles and seaweed, illustrates fully the impact of Pre-Raphaelitism on Scott’s work. The art historian Allen Staley however argues that the twilight, the emptiness of the composition and the overall lack of subject matter show the influence of German Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich. Scott was the author of books on Durer and on modern German painting in the 1870s. He was also a poet and his ‘Autobiographical Notes’ provide an interesting record of his friendship with Rosetti, Morris and other artists.

Details

Date: 1895
Dimensions: 188.5 x 143.5
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: BrO10
Artist: Brangwyn, Frank, Sir (1867 - 1956)
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1935

Also known as ‘The Pipes of Pan’ and ‘Orpheus and his lute’, this panel is one of only two remaining sections of a decorative scheme commissioned by Siegfried Bing in 1895 for the exterior of his Galerie L’Art Nouveau, 22 rue de Provence, Paris. The complete scheme comprised a decorative frieze on the exterior of the building showing eastern potters at work and oriental figures talking and playing pipes. ‘Music’ and its companion piece ‘Dancing’ were displayed just inside the main entrance of the building. ‘Dancing’ shows two semi-nude figures in a landscape dancing to the music of panpipes being played by a boy.

Both panels were illustrated in J. S. Little’s article in The Studio (1897), from which it would appear that ‘Music’ was originally much larger and has been cut down on all sides. It is possible that this was done when the painting was in the collection of M. Agache, who acquired both ‘Music’ and ‘Dancing’ and the decorative frieze when these were removed from Bing’s gallery around 1905. It is more likely however that Brangywn himself cut the panel down when he later re-acquired it, at which time he also added his initials.

Material: oil on canvas

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