The Return of the Prodigal Son

Details

Date: 09.06.1857
Dimensions: 24.8 x 17.5
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on wood
Catalogue number: O96
Artist: Solomon, Simeon, 1840, 1905
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1960

This small picture was painted by Solomon when he was only sixteen years old, and thus is his earliest known oil painting. The subject relates to the parable of the prodigal son from the Gospel of Luke. A young man recognizes his errant ways and returns with humility to seek repentance from his father, who welcomes and forgives him. Considering the preponderance of Old Testament subjects in Solomon’s early oeuvre, The Return of the Prodigal Son suggests the young artist’s familiarity with New Testament subjects. Further, one might also conclude that, even as an adolescent, Solomon was aware that he might have to incorporate New Testament subjects into his repertoire to appeal to mainstream Victorian audiences. The recurring motif of the father-son relationship connects this painting to Solomon’s contemporaneous interest in the figures of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis.

The apinting is initialed and dated lower right corner.

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 An unpublished letter among the Leathart Papers, University of Columbia Special Collections, from Arthur Hughes to James Leathart (15 August 1878) mentions the painting being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: c.1860s
Dimensions: 60 x 44
Object Type: oil
Catalogue number: BrO47
Artist: Paton, Joseph Noel, Sir, 1821, 1901
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1935

Paton was a Scottish painter, illustrator and sculptor. Highly successful he specialised in painting detailed compositions illustrating biblical episodes and imaginative stories based on romantic myths and legends. His interest in achieving convincing naturalistic detail was inspired by his friend John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, whom he met while both were students at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Millais invited Paton to become a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but he turned it down. Although not an official member of the Brotherhood his paintings of historical, fairy, allegorical and religious subjects were painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style.

The subject-matter of this painting depicts the Renaissance artist Michelangelo, and reveals how Paton’s interests extended beyond his expertise in Scottish and Celtic folklore. Michelangelo is shown seated in a loggia, enveloped in a red cloak and asleep, behind him extends a detailed Italianate landscape with evening sky and setting sun. The title ‘Michelangelo’s Dream’ alludes to his slumbering state but is also a reference to Michelangelo’s masterpiece ‘The Dream’ (Courtauld Institute, London) a drawing depicting a nude youth being roused by a winged spirit from the vices that surround him. ‘The Dream’ was probably part of the celebrated group of drawings which Michelangelo made as gifts for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman with whom he had fallen passionately in love.

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: c.1830-56
Dimensions: 18.6 x 12.5
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on card
Catalogue number: BrO81
Artist: Chasseriau, Theodore, 1819, 1856
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1948

Small oil sketch on board of two young women dressed in Empire-line dresses. It was painted by the Dominican-born French Romantic painter Theodore Chasseriau.

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: c. 1912
Dimensions: 23.5 x 18
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on wood
Catalogue number: BrO38
Artist: Jamieson, Alexander, 1873, 1937
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1940

Alexander Jamieson (1873-1937) was born in Glasgow, and trained at the Haldane Academy, now part of the Glasgow School of Art. In 1898 Jamieson won a scholarship to spend a year in Paris. Here Jamieson was exposed to the work of the Impressionists, many of whom he met. The young artist adopted their techniques which he was to employ throughout his career. Jamieson preferred to paint en plein air, working wet-into-wet with bold brushstrokes. This small oil sketch depicts a statue of the Roman goddess Flora in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, France.

Details

Date: 1873
Dimensions: 16 x 58.3
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on wood
Catalogue number: O93
Artist: Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, Sir, 1836, 1912
Credit notes: Cecil French bequest, 1954

‘The Dinner’, also known as ‘A Roman Banquet’ was commissioned from the artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema by the art dealer Ernest Gambart. The painting is one of a set of three, the other two being ‘Greek Wine’ (1872) and ‘The Siesta’ (1873). Originally the pictures were planned to be of a much larger size, but as no client was interested, they were executed in a smaller format.
Alma-Tadema frequently painted the theme of Romans dining, including four paintings using the same figure of the elderly man which date from 1872-1880, and a watercolour, ‘The Batchelor’ (1879). A later revised version of this painting, ‘The First Course: The Dinner’, was painted in 1880 (location unknown). A similar subject also appears in ‘Between Hope and Fear’ (1876), private collection.

Details

Date: c.1820-1830
Object Type: oil
Catalogue number: BrO31
Artist: Etty, William, Sir, 1787, 1849
Credit notes: Gift of Frank Brangwyn, 1938

William Etty was the first significant British painter of nudes and still lifes. As a consequence he acquired a reputation for indecency. Despite this, he became commercially successful and critically acclaimed. In 1828 he was elected a Royal Academician, at the time the highest honour available to an artist. Throughout his life he continued to study the human form at life drawing classes, a practice considered inappropriate by established artists of the day.
This painting was acquired for the Gallery by the artist Frank Brangwyn.

Object Type: oil

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