Nineteenth century english picture frames II: The victorian high renaissance

The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship (1986), li,273-293

Nineteenth Century English Picture Frames

II: The Victorian High Renaissance

LYNN ROBERTS

In June, 1874, Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown,

Nothing of yours among the things Leyland sold last Saturday. His big Leighton [The Syracusan Bride. . . (1866)] fetched-what do you think? E2677! and the thing is really bad even of its own kind! I believe that flash frame he put on it did the job!’

Some later owner could not have agreed with Rossetti, as the frame has since disappeared

from the picture; but, by comparison with Leighton’s other large mythological paintings, it should have been either a moulding/entablature frame, richly decorated with antique motifs, or a full-blown aedicular design, based on 15th century Florentine altarpieces but more severely neoclassical in feeling. It might not have merited the label ‘flash’, but it would most probably have epitomized both the artistic style, which Rossetti so disliked, of Lord Leighton and the other Olympians, and the idea of the classical frame which is so closely associated with these painters of the Victorian High Renaissance-Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Burne-Jones, and even Holman Hunt.

The fashion for artists in the 19th century to design their own frames, making a unified whole of painting and setting, had been fully inaugurated by the Pre-Raphaelites- especially by the experiments of Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti with elements of early Northern styles.* The 1850s and 1860s saw an enormous increase in the range of artists’ frames, as the influence of those first designs spread through the followers and associates of the Pre-Raphaelites even to those artists who might be wholly at odds with the type of painting they framed. One such artist was Leighton; by 1855 he was already designing his own frames, notably for his first major entry for the Royal Academy at the age of 25, Cimabue’s celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence.3 Other designs followed, purely decorative in tendency and looking towards those of the Aesthetes later in the century; but as Leighton turned more and more towards the Greco-Roman world for his subject matter, the abstract decoration of his frames was joined, and later all but replaced, by classical structures and ornaments.

This was very much in tune with the influences which shaped the mid-century classical revival in art. They included the example of France, where David had celebrated the virtures of the Greek and Roman republics, and whose pupil Ingres had passed on a ‘classical’ style and content to his own followers, Gleyre and Gerome, which lasted into the second half of the 19th century. The Elgin Marbles, which had arrived in England in the early 18OOs, were republicized 50 years later through their description in the Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon; and another publication of the 185Os, Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament, collected the archaeological discoveries of the previous hundred years into an accurate dictionary of design and pattern. 4 Travel increased, too; artists ventured abroad more widely, not merely in Western Europe, and examined the sources

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274 English Picture Frames: The Victorian High Renaissance

of Jones’s first five chapters for themselves. And finally the influences of classical education became more fully diffused, so that not only artists but their new patrons, the wealthy tradesmen and industrialists, could make the connection between the ideal empires of the ancient world, and that of Victorian England.

Neoclassical framing really began in earnest during the French Revolution, the severity of David’s style of painting being reflected in a use of simplified, rectilinear forms; whilst, through the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and later through Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns, palmettes, anthemia and lotus became common as ornaments. In Germany by the 1820s Friedrich Schinkel had designed a standard gallery

frame, decorated with palmettes, for the Berlin Gemaldegalerie, which emulated Napoleon’s uniform reframing in the Louvre; at the same time neoclassical mouldings with applied palmette decoration in papier mache were being turned out in quantity in England.5 By the mid-19th century, the appropriate frame for landscapes painted amid the ruins of the classical world would incorporate running designs of palmettes and anthemia, e.g. Edward Lear’s large View of the Temple ofApollo at Bassae (Figure 1).6

One of Leighton’s first uses of this motif appears on the frame of his portrait of a Latin girl, Pawona, a simple border design where the flat is decorated with alternating lotus and palmettes on scrolled stems, based on antique models which he might have seen in the Elgin Collection or in Greece itself.7 At this point, however, it takes a less purely classical form than Leighton would use later in the 1860s-there is a Renaissance elaboration of the centres and corners which matches the decorative richness of the

painting. The Star of Bethlehem (1862) (Figure 2)8 uses the same motifs, but now with the

I . ..-

authentic cleanness of a Greek vase-painting; it also employs them to suggest the Near Eastern setting of the painting itself. This is a very beautiful design; the structure is of a simple border frame, with a wide flat edged by an outer egg-and-dart moulding. The flat is gilt in a smooth blond tone, painted in black with a continuous linear decoration of palmettes and lotus-blossom, and within this is a black slip, ornamented with a band of gold triangles. These, and the lotuses, are Egyptian motifs, though Leighton did not visit Egypt until later in the 1880s. The British Museum held some Egyptian objects, but the most accessible source for such patterns was The Grammar of Ornament, published only six years earlier, but by then almost certainly indispensable as a reference book. That Leighton used it as a vocabulary for his frame designs is more likely because it not only reproduces continuous lotus motifs and borders of triangles, but notes of a lotus-and-grape-bunch pattern that:

This very constant Egyptian ornament in some of its forms so much resembles the Greek. . . egg-and-dart mouldings, that we can hardly doubt that the Greek moulding was derived from this source.’

To find the egg-and-dart moulding combined with lotus and triangle patterns on The Star of Bethlehem therefore implies that Leighton was trying to produce an authentic ‘Egyptian’ frame, as well as a decorative design, and that he was concerned with the

accuracy of its ornament as much as with the Egyptian setting of the painting. This very subtle and careful use of a motif contrasts starkly with the previous vogue for the Egyptian taste in the early 1800s.

This care in the assembly of his design meant that Leighton could develop a small range of frame mouldings appropriate both decoratively and thematically to his various subject genres; so that there are Leighton frames just as there are Rossetti or Whistler frames, not individually designed for a particular painting, yet providing a preferable alternative to

LYNN ROBERTS 275

commercial stock mouldings. One of these uses again a running pattern of palmettes and anthernia, worked in applied composition ornament;” this gives a somewhat bland uniformity to the design, but where carved frames would have been prohibitively expensive used in quantity, it did at least provide a more appropriate setting for classical subjects than the equivalent Louis XIV stucco moulding. A related version, however, deriving from this and from the design for The Star of Bethlehem, is a triumphant vindication of how composition could be constructively used. This is the wonderfully rich and elaborate frame for Elisha Raising the Son of the Shunamite (c. 1881) (Figure 3),” where the lotus-blossom Leighton appeared to think suitable for Biblical pictures alternates with lotus buds as the main decorative feature. The frame consists of three sections: an outer border frame, an inner cavetto, and a transitional round strip or dowel, used like the arrow moulding round the colonet frame of Sandys’ Medea, to give coherence and definition. l2 The lotus buds and blossom ornament the outer flat; they are bolder and simpler in form than the delicate palmette/anthemion pattern, and their higher relief picks up the contrast of light and shade more strongly, giving the impression of an almost sculptural border. This is reinforced by the central rounded moulding and by the deep, chunky fluting of the inner cavetto. The overall impression is of a restraining pattern of parallel lines, against which is set a complex play of ornament and of light and shade; it answers the sculptural forms of the painting, and the restriction to a narrow range of neutral, earthy colours within which a harmony of deep, subtle tones is obtained. This sense of richness of ornament held in check by linear form, and of form and tone emphasizing the qualities of the picture, can be compared in their effect to the very differently conceived frame and painting of Christ Washing Peter’s Feet by Ford Madox Brown. l3

A much smaller frame, but one in the same inventive genre, is a design of Holman Hunt’s for what appears to be his single, and unfinished, attempt at a classical subject (Figure 4). l4 Unlike Leighton’s direct use of antique ornament, Hunt’s references are transmuted and individualized by his own imaginative treatment of source material; and therefore the frame itself appears at first glance less overtly ‘classical’ in type than those of the other 19th century ‘Renaissance’ painters. It surrounds an unfinished head of Artemis, and takes the shape of a simple plate frame edged with a triangular moulding, and having as its main decoration a wide band of shallow relief scrollings. These, like a double, elongated guilloche, are each formed by a serpentine ribbon looping over a stem of acanthus leaves, producing a long chain of ellipses. It is an interesting frame, since it identifies the subject: between the two guilloche patterns are roundels on a punched ground, their faces decorated with the phases of the moon. The painted head which they enclose is crowned by a diadem ornamented with lotus and anthemia, and is therefore arguably intended for a representation of the Greek goddess of the moon.15 A sketch connected with this frame is attributed in Hunt’s hand to ‘Jerusalem’; it shows a similar moulding, together with the unrelated head of an arch, and indicates just one of the wide variety of sources from which his frame designs derive.16

However, with Leighton, the most notable frame designer amongst the Victorian Olympians was perhaps Alma-Tadema. And like Leighton, who had worked as a young man under the Austrian Nazarene Steinle, and whose incarnation as a ‘classical’ painter was only entered in his thirties, Alma-Tadema began his career under the influence of Flemish artists who had rejected the antique world in order to reproduce patriotic episodes from their own history. He became a painter of the German Dark Ages, of scenes which were also dark and often obscure, and learnt to portray them with Pre-Raphaelite fidelity. In the early 186Os, however, just as Leighton’s Hellenizing


period had begun, Alma-Tadema visited Italy, and was converted by the colour, the light and the ruins into a classical enthusiast. His subject pictures from that time are almost all given Greco-Roman settings; yet it is interesting to see that, for the frames of portraits, he reverts for his sources to Gothic and Dutch models.

It is extremely difficult to date Alma-Tadema’s frame designs; although by 1865 he had virtually abandoned in his paintings the Dark Ages for the classical past, his own earliest traceable frames do not appear until about 1869-1870, and than they are not particularly classical in style. One of the more original examples of 1871 is in fact based on the decorated frames of Van Eyck, and is Northern and Gothic in feeling rather than neoclassical (Figure 5). ” It holds a double portrait of Alma-Tadema himself and his new bride, Laura Epps-an idea similar to that of the Arnolfini Marriage Portrait, save that the figures are bust-length. The central panel which holds the portraits is inscribed around all four sides, after the style of Van Eyck, and is enclosed in a plain rectangular framework with two wings. These open into a triptych, disclosing on the left a tulip and on the right a rose, to ‘symbolize the union of a Dutch man and an English woman’,” these emblems again imitating the identifying crests and badges on the frames of portraits (and of religious paintings showing the donors) in 15th century Northern art. It is a particularly successful design because its historical prototypes have been completely remade and digested by its creator-in contrast to some of the pastiches of early framing styles perpetrated by other 19th century artists. l9 Alma-Tadema repeated the design in 1872 for a marriage portrait of Franz Hueffer and Cathy Madox Brown, the wings now being decorated with a paint-pot and brush, and with the first line and setting of Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, oh dearest sing’-a rather unpropitious choice in the context. 2o And in A Family Group, a similar, pedimented triptych can be seen from

the back, propped on an easel and showing the emblematic flowers on the outside of the open wing.*’

Equally historicizing, appropriate to the type of painting, and derived from the traditional frames of his native country, is the design for the Alma-Tadema’s 1876

portrait of his wife (Figure 6). ** This is a reverse rebate frame of two levels, patterned with the various ripple-mouldings of 17th century Dutch ebonized frames-an early mechanized form of frame decoration. It had fallen out of favour during the 18th century, to be rediscovered by the technologically minded Victorians who immediately ‘improved’ the original primitive milling machines to a degree of faultless and charmless

precision. It is used lavishly by Alma-Tadema, who takes an eared or Oxford frame shape and covers it with every imaginable permutation of combed, ripple, flame and wave pattern, the eared corners and the smooth mouldings which edge the two levels giving an even greater complexity to the surface elaboration. The frame is now gilded all over, creating a wide and rather exotic setting for its very Victorian occupant. But the intended effect must originally have been even more bizarre-for on close examination it can be seen that the gilding is flaking off the tooled surfaces, revealing the ebonized or japanned wood underneath, the two smooth moulding edges having been properly gilded

over white gesso. This indicates that the frame as designed by Alma-Tadema was partly gilded against

black wood, a combination of two 17th century Netherlandish styles, the ripple frame and the parcel-gilt oak moulding frame. The idea of the former was to provide a foil for the colours and light scale of the painting, to give a wide transitional margin to the background against which it hung, and to create, in the alignment of the various patterns parallel to the sight edge, a device for increasing the focal intensity of the image. The introduction of two gilded mouldings would have interfered with none of these

LYNN ROBERTS 277

effects-although the fantastic twist given to the Puritan black body of the frame may have been too much for later tastes. Paradoxically, however, the gilding-over was a mistake; the foil for the colour and luminosity has been lost, whilst each tiny milled facet has multiplied its reflecting powers many times. A more exotic subject-an Eastern sitter by Holman Hunt-might have held its own against the change; the very English Mrs

Alma-Tadema merely looks uncomfortable. Both this example, and those of his marriage portraits, show Alma-Tadema’s interest

in past frame design and its application to the painted subject. It is therefore not

surprising that, from about 1871, the frames of his Greco-Roman pictures begin to exhibit at first antique motifs and later a classical, architectural structure. One of the first is probably that for Etruscan Vase-Painters (Figure 7),23 which has the conventional structure of a neoclassical moulding frame with a high profile edge, but on which bands of Greek fret replace the more traditional types of inner and outer ornamental mouldings. The flat is decorated with a continuous shallow relief run of repeated lotus-buds. These, together with a leaf edging inside the forward edge of the frame, were all at that time sufficiently associated with Etruscan ornament to form an appropriate setting. The complete frame is highly decorative, reminiscent of Leighton’s use of dense pattern within restraining parallel lines, and, before it was washed with a toning lacquer to a later more sober taste, must have given a rich as well as a novel effect.

This frame is attributive, as well as classicizing-i.e. it echoes or is peculiarly appropriate to the painting it houses-yet Alma-Tadema did not seem to want to re-create would-be authentic antique designs, such as he painted into the backgrounds of two of his pictures. 24 The later version, A Picture Gallery in Rome at the Time of Augustus, where the dealer Gambart plays the role of the gallery-owner,25 shows ‘representations of a number of well-documented Roman paintings, including the figure of Medea by Timomachus, which was bought by Julius Caesar for 20 talents’26 The latter has a black frame painted with faces and flowers; other frames in the two pictures include heavy aedicular shapes, one painted with Pompeiian arabesques, borders of a Greek fret, and a painted tondo. Their collective appearance is more alien than either Alma-Tadema’s moulding frames or his tabernacle designs, both of which needed to be-however different from traditional types-sufficiently acceptable to the Victorian art-buyer and within the Victorian interior. The tabernacle designs, especially, show the same influences and approach as does 19th century neoclassical architecture.

Even the moulding frame most often associated with Alma-Tadema, and comparable with Leighton’s own ‘stock’ palmette design, derives from early, accepted forms; although its treatment shows a new geometrical simplicity which may possibly relate to the designs of Ford Madox Brown, and its decoration is, as well as similarly austere, archaeologically appropriate. It was developed probably in the early 187Os, and a typical example appears on The Favourite Poet (Figure 8). *’ It consists of a deep reverse rebate frame, with a smooth inclined chamfer or bevel in two stages forming the outer moulding. Inside is a series of stepped and channelled mouldings which create a vista of parallel lines, emphasizing the forward projection of the picture by the reverse rebate, and drawing the spectator into the painted interior. The idea is that of the 17th century frames of Alma-Tadema’s native Holland, although it may possibly have been influenced by the deep chamfers used by Brown on his frames, and by the triangular section of Rossetti’s ‘thumb-mark’ mouldings.28 It is extremely plain, save for an inlaid band of black and gold triangles such as Leighton used on The Star of Bethlehem; and was employed by Alma-Tadema until his death in 1912, and after that by his daughter Anna as late as 1935. It also seems to have influenced the type of frame used by the artists of the


Newlyn School, which have a very similar triangular profile.

The use of severe neoclassical or geometrical mouldings like these, and of ornaments appropriate to mythological subjects and antique genre paintings, was supported by an increasing use of full-blown aedicular frames during the last quarter of the 19th century. Inevitably these were to become as debased as the composition imitations of Louis frames they had originally been designed to better; some of the more cheaply made Renaissance styles used by Burne-Jones and his followers are quite deplorable, and are probably responsible for many of the-repellent plaster tabernacle frames in which the Victorians (like the present-day National Gallery) corseted the early Italian altarpieces they were acquiring. However, where the designs are purest and most inventive, the results are as strikingly splendid as, again, some of the great Victorian neoclassical buildings to which they are related.

One of the earliest of the 19th century artists to employ an aedicular or tabernacle form of framing appears to have been Holman Hunt; for instance, the 1860 frame of The Finding of Our Saviour in the Temple-appropriately-hints at a temple-like structure in its pedimented silhouette.29 And in 1866 he designed for his painting of London Bridge (Figure 9)30 an imaginative blend of the Renaissance border or entablature frame with a sort of semi-aedicule: two stylized pilasters support, instead of the traditional 15th century architectural plinth and cornice, an upper and lower member of plain flats and mouldings, the two elements being married by the cassettes in the four corners. It is an attractive and unusual frame, and shows Hunt’s ability to weave a stylized and decorative pattern from features with their own inherent meaning. So the pilaster panels are reeded with suitably lance-like shapes, and the diapering of ‘frieze’ and ‘pedestal’ is made up of tiny Tudor roses between hearts (above) and diamonds (below). Almost more than with Hunt’s Scapegoat,3’ the directly observed scene derives symbolic significance only in its union with the frame-although the symbolism is not overweighted, and picture and frame remain one unified decorative object. As with Alma-Tadema’s marriage portraits in their triptych structures, Hunt gives to a similar subject added resonance in the form of the frame he employs, as well as by its decorative detail.

The use of a fully architectural style of framing probably comes with Alma-Tadema’s own designs of the late 1860s. Again, it is difficult to pinpoint a particular date, and reframing obscures the question, but examples with horizontal entablatures (rather than pediments) seem to be early and original. Tibullus at Delia’s (Figure 1O),32 for example, of 1866, uses the imitation beam-and-lintel construction of classical architecture, with full entablature, supporting orders and small pedestal. The various elements are emphasized with moulding trims of suitably classical ornament-egg-and-dart,

tongue-and-dart, leaf-and-dart-but otherwise, apart from the stylized Corinthian capitals, the structure is quite plainly treated, avoiding the elaboration of Renaissance scrolls and arabesques on the frieze and pilaster panels. The result is quite different from the neoclassical frames which had previously been used for this type of subject; it is also flattering to the picture itself, the smooth expanse of blond gilding on frieze, pedestal and pilasters harmonizing with the mellow, dark tones of the painting, and the greater depth of the entablature acting as a counterbalance for the composition.

Alma-Tadema was obviously aiming for a purer, more truly ‘classical’ look for pictnre and setting as a whole; this approach was refined in his later work, when he adopted further architectural elements. Typical of this is Silver Favourites (Figure 11),33 of 1903, where a triangular pediment lined with dentil mouldings is added to the entablature, and the outer angles of the gable are surmounted by acroteria, or raised sculptured discs. These are balanced at the bottom by inclining the pedestal back to the wall and

LYNN ROBERTS 279

supporting it at each side by swelling ornamental brackets or consoles; the plinth panel is then used for an appropriate quotation-in this case, from Wordsworth. The capitals have been reduced to vestigial mouldings, and thus all decoration unrelated to the fundamental structure has been moved back either below or above the level of the painting, allowing it to be seen without any distraction.

Leighton’s aedicular frames are equally striking. Like Alma-Tadema, he took a little time to get his hand in, and the frame of his vast Daphnephoria (Figure 12)34 would no doubt also have been described as ‘flash’ by Rossetti. But it also contrives to appear flimsy; as a moulding frame it might adequately have supported the great length of the picture, but the use of an aedicular structure, with pilasters, entablature and small shaped plinth, implies an architectural strength and solidity which it does not possess. The emphasis it requires in volume is put into elaboration of detail: the fluted pilasters, rather than conventional capitals, are crowned by elongated brackets springing from grotesque Bacchic masks, and rise at the base from carved, cloven hooves with stylized fleecing. The result is rich, splendid and allusive; but a proportionately larger and plainer structure, similar to Alma-Tadema’s later designs, would have been more effective.

His frames of the 188Os, however, demonstrate that Leighton, always inventive in his designs, had 1 earnt-either from practice, or perhaps even from Alma-Tadema’s example. The large Captive Andromache, framed in the same style as the slightly later Last Watch of Hero (Figure 13),35 shows him adap ’ g tm the proportions of the setting from those of a conventional moulding frame to a true aedicular structure in order to balance the scale of the painting-more than 13 feet across. Pedestal and entablature are deeper and more important, the frieze being decorated with runs of the plaster lotus and anthemia from his neoclassical frames, and the pilasters are severer and more solid. This design was successful enough to be repeated for large mythological subject paintings for the remaining ten or twelve years of Leighton’s life. He uses it in both a horizontal and a vertical format, as with Captive Andromache and The Last Watch of Hero, respectively; the latter also adapts the same design to a classical version of the true tabernacle frame, incorporating a painted predella panel at the bottom.

In both frames, however, one of the most striking features is Leighton’s introduction of the large, rounded version of the Ionic capital. Its genesis is interesting: it derives from the temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae (shown in Lear’s picture of 1855), which was discovered in 1811 by an expedition which included the young C. R. Cockerell. Cockerell brought back the only surviving capital of this ‘unique Ionic order’, presented it to the British Museum, and used it as a model in many of the designs for his neoclassical buildings throughout England. He used it most notably on the faGades of the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institute, Oxford, in 1839-1840 (Figure 14); also inside the Sun Fire Office, London (1841)-in connection with which David Watkin notes that:

[Cockerell] also represented an ideal for the popular classical painter, Sir Frederic Leighton. In 1890 Phene Spiers and the Baron de Geymiiller came across Leighton gazing in rapt admiration at Cockerell’s Sun Fire Office, whereupon he explained to his surprised observers that, ‘whenever he wanted to revivify himself with the sense of the beauty of Greek work he used to come down and look at Cockerell’s works’. The words sound somehow like those of a poseur or charlatan, but nevertheless have a peculiar historical interest.36

That they had a more practical basis as well is evident from Leighton’s frames; although he continued to employ conventional Ionic capitals as well, his use of this ‘remarkable


3a

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

IO.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

Edward Lear, detail of View of the Temple ofApollo at Bassae (Fitzwilliam) Lord Leighton, detail of The StarofBetblehem (Fine Art Society) a, Lord Leighton, Hisha Raising fhe Son of the Shunamite (Leighton House) b, detail Holman Hunt, Pon’raitofMiss Waugh(courtesy of Christie’s) Alma-Tadema, Double Portrait of Laurens Alma-Tadema and Laura Epps (Fries Museum) a, Alma-Tadema, PortraitofMy Wife (Williamson Art Gallery) b, detail Alma-Tadema, detail of Etruscan Vase-Painters (CAG, Manchester) a, Alma-Tadema, detail of The Favourite Poet(Lady Lever Gallery) b, cross-section Holman Hunt, London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales (Ashmolean Museum) a, Alma-Tadema, Tibullus at Delia’s (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) b, detail Alma-Tadema, Silver Favourites (CAG, Manchester) Lord Leighton, detail of Daphnephoria (Lady Lever Gallery) Lord Leighton, The Last Watch ofHero (CAG, Manchester) Frontage detail of the Taylorian Institute, Oxford Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel (Lady Lever Gallery) Burne-Jones, detail of The Merciful Knight (CMAG, Birmingham) J.M. Strudwick, The Gentle Music ofa Bygone Day (Julian Hartnoll) J.R. Spencer Stanhope, detail of The Washing P/ace (Forbes Magazine Collection)

3b

19. Burner-Jones. detail of The Beguiling of Merlin (Lady Lever Gallery)

20. Burne-Jones, detail of Venus Discordia (NMW, Cardiff) 21. Burne-Jones, The FeastofPeleus (CAG. Birmingham) 22. Lord Leighton, The Garden of the Hesperides (Lady Lever

Gallery) 23. Holman Hunt, CyrilBenone Hunt(Fitzwilliam Museum) 24. Holman Hunt, The LadyofSha/ott(Wadsworth Atheneum) 25. Arthur Drummond, An Eastern Beauty(courlesy of

Phillips)

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6a

6b 8a

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284 English Pictlere Frames: The Victoriun High Renaissance

LYNN ROBERTS 285

24

25


Ionic order. . . with its beautiful curvaceous volutes’ became almost a signature on his later classical subject pictures.

The Last Watch of Hero is a good example of this; it is notable as well for its unity of painting and frame in function, style and appropriateness, making it perhaps the perfect example of all Victorian aedicular framing. The subject agrees completely, in its theme of death and grief, with the use of a full monumental tabernacle structure as it was used for funerary sculpture; the addition of the grisaille predella panel between its austerely simplified volutes also balances the vertical format of the painting. The effect of an illusionistic window is reinforced by the way in which picture and frame echo each other-a Bassae capital appears at the top right corner of the painting, and the panel which the eye expects in the pedestal of the frame is actually replaced by the painted marble sill. Hero is framed, both literally and by the composition as a whole; and much of the artist’s intention is lost by reproducing the picture without the frame.

The predella panel itself was not especially innovatory; Rossetti seems to have been the first to reintroduce it in the 19th century, and the 1872 version of Beata Beatrix for his patron, Graham, is his earliest use of it.37 But it also appears in his only version of an aedicular frame: that of the replica Blessed Damozel (Figure 15),38 painted between 1875-1879 and bought eventually by Leyland. Compared with the classical restraint of most of Leighton’s frames, and the geometrical simplicity of Rossetti’s other designs, this is almost a parody of the aedicular style, and may have been Rossetti’s way of getting at the 19th century Olympians, whose paintings he despised. It has free-standing columns, supported on bulging, acanthus-decorated consoles, a broken pediment holding a shell, and festoons of vines and figs and cherubs’ heads and grotesques. It could only have been this that Rossetti meant when he wrote to Watts-Dunton: ‘Oh Leyland’s frame! My stars, satyrs, cherubim, cauliflowers and all other decorative constellations! I dropped awfully hard on him, but he took it well and only called for whisky and water. . .‘.39

The taste for aedicular frames became widespread from the 1870s onwards; and if Rossetti were parodying it, it was perhaps not so much the severely classical style he had in mind as that which imitated the Cinquecento altarpiece. This is epitomized in the work of Spencer Stanhope, Strudwick, Evelyn De Morgan, and Burne-Jones-perhaps especially the latter-and is related to the mock Renaissance types of moulding frame which these and other artists adopted.

In this they were more in line with contemporary taste than any of the artists producing their own individualistic designs, or even other historicizing styles of frame. Reviewing the different types of exhibit in the Great Exhibition of 1851, R. Wornum had estimated that, whilst the greatest quantity were in the style of Louis XIV, followed by Louis XV and the Rococo, the most popular style was that of the 16th century Renaissance.40 It was an eclectic form containing both classical and Gothic features: Wornum categorized its general elements as classical orders and ornaments, Byzantine scroll-work, Moorish tracery, scrolled shields, fiddle-shapes, strap-work, natural animal or vegetable forms and grotesque arabesques. And the Renaissance chapter in Jones’s Grammar of Ornament includes revivals of an ancient fish-scale or feather pattern,

Cinquecento arabesques, and traditional carved wood ornaments (ribbon-and-stick, bead-and-bobbin, gadrooning) which were already the ordinary stock-in-trade of the frame-maker. This eclecticism made it a natural successor, along with the classicizing and

historical styles, to the ‘Gothic’ influence of the early period of 19th century artist-designed frames in the later 1840s and early 1850s. It was also congenial to the ‘second phase’ Pre-Raphaelites, who did not disdain all artistic styles after and including

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Raphael’s, and to whom (to Burne-Jones, especially) the leavening of classical forms became very important.

The various forms of 19th century Renaissance frame include revivals and adaptations of 16th and 17th century mouldings (often in composition), frames hand-carved in Florence to traditional patterns, tondos, and imitations of 15th century altarpieces. An early example of a Renaissance moulding frames Burne-Jones’s Merciful Knight of 1863 (Figure 16). 4’ This has a high-profile edge enriched with egg-and-dart moulding, and an inner ribbon spiral trim. Between these two, the four flats are ornamented with finely detailed Renaissance arabesques, in relief, ending at each corner in recessed cassettes containing acanthus paterae. Within this is a separate gilded wood cuff of Pre-Raphaelite pattern, inset with composition buttons which echo the marigolds in the picture, and decorated with an inscription. The frame may possibly be of slightly later date than this cuff; however, it is in the style favoured by Burne-Jones throughout the rest of his life, and the two fit together surprisingly well. The combination shows him to be breaking away from the new geometric designs of Brown and Rossetti, and adopting more ornate ornaments from the fashionable Cinquecento.

This frame is, for Burne-Jones, an early and more faithful imitation of Renaissance decorative work. As his output increased, he tended to rely on cheap machine-pressed ornament, especially for the arabesque patterns, thereby rather debasing the style. J. M. Strudwick, however, who was for a time studio assistant to Burne-Jones and emulated his work as well as his choice in frames, frequently outdid him in the latter. For instance, the frame of Strudwick’s The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day (Figure 17)42 is close, for a 19th century reproduction, to the idea of its 16th century prototype. With its two lateral runs and independently modelled upper and lower flats, it appears to be following conscientiously the summary of Italian arabesques in The Grammur of Ornament: ‘in no style has ornament ever been better spaced out, or arranged to contrast more agreeably with the direction of the adjacent architectural lines. . .Rarely. . .is an ornament suitable for a horizontal position placed in a vertical one, or vice wersa’.43 The rich detailing includes a bird with outspread wings at the top, and two sirens supporting a cartouche at the bottom. It is bold, complex and individual-perhaps too much so for the painting, which is already full of a similarly busy, though less strongly marked, patterning.

Strudwick’s use of Renaissance ornament may have influenced his decision to have his frames carved in Italy to the 16th and 17th century patterns still in use there; this became the custom for a small group of artists in the last 35 years or so of the centruy, and resulted in some distinctive types. The pioneer in this seems to have been Spencer Stanhope; from 1863 he was spending his summers at Cobham in Surrey (where Burne-Jones painted The Merciful Knight) and wintering in Florence, whilst in 1880 he moved permanently to Italy. Many of his frames are therefore 19th century native adaptations of Renaissance and Baroque designs, the commonest being an enriched torus moulding supported on either side by several close-set runs of different traditional ornaments. An example is The Washing Place (Figure 18),45 which has a basketwork torus, perhaps used as appropriate to the peasant scene in the painting.

Nearly all Evelyn De Morgan’s frames are of a similar type. Much of her immense body of work, rarely dated, exhibited or sold, was painted and framed in Florence and shipped home at the outbreak of the 1914 war. Spencer Stanhope being her uncle, she often stayed with him in Florence even before she too settled there in 1893 with her husband William De Morgan. The Italian frames made for her there are mainly of the

same torus moulding, but she also used other late Renaissance and 17th century styles-a leaf frame, or a layered moulding with pierced giltwork over a coloured ground.46


These Italian patterns were also noticed by Burne-Jones; in an undated letter from around 1890, he asks William De Morgan:

. . . do you rem member [sic] a frame i likt at your house it was a frame from florrence and was a nice one and i likt it may Mr Vacani make one lik it. . .47

The torus design may have influenced his own frame design for Sponsa di Libano; Strudwick too tried to get English frame-makers to copy these Italian patterns. Burne-Jones had already, however, used a related version of a 17th century moulding; it appears on several of his larger works of the 187Os, including The Beguiling of Me&z (Figure 19).48 Like Stanhope’s Florentine frames it comprises several dense inner and outer bands of classical enrichment around a central convex moulding; the latter is more complex, however, than a carved torus: it is hollowed, pierced, and carved with scrolling foliage from which swans’ heads peer. The flat ground beneath is gilded and burnished, reflecting light through the pierced work and causing an effect of shimmering movement around the painting. This is a Victorian development of a Baroque undercut moulding, but the swans’ heads appear to be Burne-Jones’s invention. This is an ornate and highly decorative design, and a good illustration of the 19th century attitude to Renaissance and Baroque art, shown in an 1871 letter of Burne-Jones on his putative Giorgione: ‘0, such a picture! It is to have a glorious curly-wurly frame, a piece of wholesale upholstery round it to make it shine like a jewel as it is. . .‘,49

This fondness for elaboration of detail characterizes most of the aedicular frames designed and used by the same group of artists, especially by Burne-Jones himself. Unlike the refined ‘classical’ forms of the type preferred by Leighton, Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter, these retain not only the architectural structure, but the complex foliate capitals, arabesqued pilaster panels and densely ornamented friezes of a 15th century altarpiece. There was a flourish of them at the first exhibition in 1877 at the Grosvenor Gallery (which was itself ‘flagrantly Renaissance and notably pagan in inspirationy5’). Burne-Jones showed his Days of Creation, ‘housed in an elaborately carved and lettered Renaissance frame’; Strudwick, a similar series in one frame, Love’s Music; Spencer Stanhope, Eve Tempted; whilst a further aedicular frame can be seen in a contemporary engraving of the exhibition. The similarity of their style of painting as well as the frames, and the reference to 15th century Florence, was noted by the reviewer of the Athenaeum; he labelled them ‘neo-Italian’.51

In fact, the nearer a painting came to a Renaissance manner, the better it seemed to support a lavish frame. Burne-Jones’s works, such as Venus Discovdia (Figure 20), The Feast of Peleus (Figure 21) and King Cophetua5’-and Spencer Stanhope’s Eve Tempted-are more successful than some of Evelyn De Morgan’s. Burne-Jones especially seems to have painted with an aedicular framework in mind, whether in the architectonic composition of Cophetua, the frieze-like arrangement of Peleus, or the strongly Michelangelesque style of Venus Discovdia. The other-worldliness of his pictures also has much to do with his choice of frame: when Stanhope paints Eve Tempted, in tempera, in the style of Botticelli, and frames her like a Florentine altarpiece, his is deliberately archaizing in the manner of the early Pre-Raphaelite Gothic period. When Burne-Jones paints Cophetua, the influence of Mantegna upon the design is absorbed into his own vision of ‘a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be-in a light better than any light that ever shone-in a land no one can

define or remember’,53 and the frame becomes, not merely the historically correct setting, but the index and entry to that ideal world.

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Other forms of framing which follow Renaissance prototypes often display a similar 19th century elaboration to the moulding and aedicular frames. The tondo frame, for instance, which developed from the simpler fruit and floral bands of della Robbia medallions to the carved and gilded wreaths of the 16th century, went through further variations in the hands of Victorian artists. Leighton’s Garden of the Hesperides (Figure 22)54 combines a conventional tondo moulding with a square plate frame: the circular painting is enclosed in a garland of three-dimensional apples and leaves, interspersed with tiny narcissi, which echo the golden apples in the picture. This is itself set into an outer square structure, the corner spandrels containing decorative panels of high-relief shells on a stylized wavy ground. The whole frame is richly gilded, and reflects the grandly conceived scale and composition of the painting. The earlier Acme and Septimus has a similar form, but moves its wreath of oranges, leaves and orange-blossom outward from the circular sight-edge to enclose the square plate and its ornamented spandrels.

Holman Hunt’s small version of his May Morning on Magdafen Tower is yet another variation on this opposition of square and circle, having an oblong painting within a circular frame.55 Made of beaten copper, like the frame of the large version in the Lady Lever Art Gallery (probably also produced by C.R. Ashbee’s Guild56), it retains the basic floral wreath of the tondo-here reduced to the stylization of Art Nouveau-and the traditional small classical outer moulding. The space between picture and wreath is then filled with a sunburst in relief, and with four inscribed scrolls. It is strikingly different, both from the large version and from Leighton’s tondo frames, and once more shows Hunt adapting and building upon his many sources. A further instance of his inventiveness in connection with tondo form is the frame on the portrait of his son, Cyril Benone Hunt (Figure 23),57 where he has returned to the original conception of the della Robbia wreath in coloured terracotta. Hunt’s frame is this time conventionally oblong in shape, but the basic structure of four plain flats between two simple fillet edgings has been decorated with a design of apples and sprays of apple-blossom, modelled by hand in high relief and then naturalistically coloured, the background being tooled and gilded. Like the work of the della Robbias from which it directly derives, this may be not only designed but actually produced by the artist, since a few years later Hunt made a similar coloured plaster plaque of Hercules for a background prop in his The Lady of Shalott.58

The frame for this last picture (Figure 24)59 is itself a splendid design: it is one of the latest, and better, examples of aedicular frame as it lingered into the 20th century. Even more than in the case of Burne-Jones, however, and consistently with Hunt’s magpie use of disparate sources, the Renaissance style is not so much intended to complement a related style of painting, but to function as an entrance to an ideal world. Here it is that of 19th century literary mediaevalism-the Arthurian legends beloved of the Pre-Raphaelites since their formation 50 years earlier. Again, like Burne-Jones’s pictures, the painting itself works on deeper levels than first appear: like them it explores universal issues through myth-here, the relationship of life to art. Unlike Burne-Jones’s frames (which became increasingly cursory as to finish), Hunt’s is individually designed and beautifully carved. The form is basically classical, but the symbolical details-the columns twined with briars, and Pandora’s Box at the top-are Hunt’s own. He noted of the latter in the catalogue to his 1905 Manchester exhibition: ‘It was suggested to me that the fate of the Lady was too pitiful: I had Pandora’s Box with Hope lying hid carved upon the frame ‘.60 Thus once more, as with The Scapegoat and London Bridge, aspects of the subject not present in the painting itself are conveyed by symbols on the frame; exactly as in The Scapegoat, these symbols represent Hope. The frame is used actively to support and intensify the theme of the painting, and in this it is like Direr’s frame (which


it very slightly resembles) for his Adoration of the Holy Trinity; it demonstrates the highest level of interaction of picture and frame.61

It is simultaneously, however, anachronistic in its style; it belongs properly to the era of Leighton’s late classical pictures and frames, 20 years earlier, when the painting was begun. During those 20 years the Art Nouveau movement had risen and grown to maturity; Burne-Jones’s paintings had travelled to Europe, where they were to influence the Symbolists; and, simultaneously, the now-established custom for English artists to design their own picture-frames was having equal influence on the tendency of the Art Nouveau movement to dignify and encourage the crafts. Many continental painters- particularly the Jugendstil artists-designed frames to complement their pictures (e.g. Klimt, Franz von Stuck, Toorop); and their English counterparts, while still deriving much of their painting style from Burne-Jones and his associates, began to produce frames which were different from his, partaking far more of the international style of Art Nouveau. A true Art Nouveau frame is unmistakable in its very plain structure-usually a simple plate frame-and its chunky, assertively hand-made look. Where traditional ornaments are used, they are large and blocky; gold is laid thickly and brightly burnished; and punching, tooling and outline designs are added, the latter carved by hand in the wood. If aedicular designs are used, the classical and architectural features are refined in line with these developments, so that their decorative and hand-crafted aspects become more important than faithfulness to their sources.

A last small gesture of the Victorian High Renaissance, therefore, and one at the same time more true to its period than Hunt’s Lady of Shalott, can be seen in Arthur Drummond’s An Eastern Beauty of 1898 (Figure 25). ‘* The painting is negligible-one

of the static female figures in Greco-Roman or Egyptian dress which derive, like those of John William Godward, from the models of Leighton and Albert Moore; but the frame is more interesting. Carved lavishly with Egyptian motifs, vestigially aedicular in structure, it has been designed to suit the Eastern ‘antique’ cast of the picture, and so can be bracketed with the classical subjects and frames of the earlier Olympian painters. Yet it is also distinctly Art Nouveau in style: the extremely simple plate frame, the stained, hand-made look of the bare wood, and the chipped outline carving are all ‘modern’ in comparison with the finely finished, classically pure designs of the latter. The flutes of rudimentary pilasters may be there, but they are formed from the stems of naturalistic papyrus and lotus flowers; and there is an altogether greater emphasis on natural forms and their use in a far less rigidly geometric style than before. Two cartouches to left and right of the bottom member have been signed by the artist, announcing that Drummond designed, drew and carved the whole work. This, again, is in line with the philosophy of the Art Nouveau movement, rather than, as with Holman Hunt, an eccentric practice.

Almost half a century, therefore, after the first true popularization of neoclassical frames, and 36 years after Leighton’s ‘Egyptian’ design for The Star of Bethlehem, the influences of the Victorian High Renaissance were still at work, even as it merged gradually into the succeeding style of Art Nouveau.

Acknowledgements

For their help in the research for my dissertion, on which this and the previous article (1985) are based, I would like to thank Mary Bennett (for her generous sharing of information), Paul Mitchell (for much-needed help with photographs), John House, John Newman, Julian Treuherz, Paul Levi, Richard Jefferies, Betty Elzea, Julian Hartnoll, Robin Hamlyn, and all the people who, with unfailing patience and kindness,

LYNN ROBERTS 291

have allowed me to photograph their exhibitions, crawl about their stockrooms, rifle

their archives and pick their brains.

Picture Credits: Nos. 1,2,6,7,8,10,11,12,13,14,16,17,18,19,20,21, the author; No. 3, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Libraries and Arts Service; No. 4, courtesy of Christie’s; No. 5, Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; No. 9, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Nos. 15, 22, John Mills, Liverpool; No. 23, Fitzwihiam Museum, Cambridge; No. 24, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.; No. 25, Phillips, London.

Notes

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

0. Doughty and J. R. Wahl, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Oxford, 1965), no. 1501. See Roberts, 1985, Nineteenth Century English Picture Frames: I. The Pre-Raphaelites’, The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 4, pp. 155-172. Mrs Russell Barrington, Life and Letters of Frederic Leighton (London, 1906), Vol. I, p. 179. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856). Chapter I-V (the longest) deal with Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Pompeiian and Roman motifs. Claus Grimm, The Book of Picture Frames (New York, 1981), p. 261, no. 370, and p. 269, no. 386. Edward Lear, View of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia (1854-1855), oil on canvas, 57% X

903/a inches, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. Leighton, Pavona (1859), oil on canvas, 23% x 20 inches, Leighton House, London. Leighton, The Star of Bethlehem (RA 1862), oil on canvas, frame size 76% x 40 inches, Fine Art Society, London, 1982. Jones, op. cit. Note 4, chapter II. For example: Leighton, Psamathe (RA 1880), oil on canvas, Lady Lever Gallery, Port Sunlight; A Bacchante (RA 1892) oil on canvas, 493/4 X 38 inches, Forbes Magazine Collection. Leighton, Elisa Raising the Son of the Shunamite (RA 1881), oil on canvas, 32 x 54 inches, Leighton House, London. Roberts, op. cit. Note 2, Figure 20. Ibid., Figure 12 (1865). Holman Hunt, Portrait ofMiss Waugh (c. 1866), oil on canvas, 22 x 14 inches, Sotheby’s, London,

. Sale, 15 June 1982. The sitter is merely identified as Eve Waugh by Judith Bronkhurst in the catalogue of the sale- op. cit. Note 14. Collection of Mrs Burt. Alma-Tadema, Double Portrait of Laurence Alma-Tadema and Laura Epps (1871, no OP no.), oil, Fries Museum, Leeuwarden. Vern G. Swanson, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (London, 1977), p. 18. For example, by Frederic Shields, friend and associate of Rossetti, Sandys and Ford Madox Brown from 1864, and later of Holman Hunt. Historicizing elements used separately in their own frames by all three former artists can be found together in a single design by Shields, the result being neither happy nor successful. Alma-Tadema, Double Portrait of DY Franz Heuff er and Cathy Madox Brown (1872, OP CIV), oil on panel, frame size: (shut) 14 x 19% inches; (open) 14 x 38 inches; private collection (information from owner). Alma-Tadema, A Family Group (1896, OP CCCXXXVII), oil on panel, 12 X 11 inches, Royal Academy, London. Alma-Tadema, Portrait of My Wife (1876, OP CLXII), oil on canvas, 19% x 16 inches, Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead. The painting apparently passed to the gallery from the artist’s daughters, who were possibly therefore responsible for the regilding. Alma-Tadema, Etruscun Vase-Painters (1871, OP XCIV), oil on panel, frame size 243/4 X 1!?%6

inches, City Art Gallery, Manchester. Alma-Tadema, A Collector of Pictures at the Time of Augustus (1867, OP L), oil on panel, 28 X 1811’4 inches, private collection; A Picture Gallery in Rome at the Time of Augustus (1874, OP CXXVI), oil on canvas, 86% x 651% inches, Towneley Hall Art Gallery, Burnley. Alma-Tadema


has, however, apparently been credited with greater archaeological knowledge than he possessed (Ian Jenkins, British Museum).

25. Jeremy Maas, Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World (London, 1975), p.242. 26. Swanson, op. cit. Note 18, Pl. 7. 27. Alma-Tadema, The Fawourite Poet (1888, OP CCXC), oil on panel, 14% x 19% inches, Lady

Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. 28. See Roberts, op. cit. Note 2. The earliest version of Alma-Tadema’s design seems to date from

1869, or 1874 when the painting inside (The Wine-Shop, Guildhall Art Gallery, London) was retouched; and by I871 at least he was in contact with the circle around Rossetti and Brown, dining with them in February of that year (Doughty and Wahl, op.cit. Note 1, no. 1147,note).

29. Ibid. 30. Holman Hunt, London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales

(1863-1866), oil on canvas, 255/s x 38% inches, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The corner cassettes also display (bottom) the badges, now lost, and (top) the arms, of the bride and groom.

31. Ibid. 32. Alma-Tadema, Tibullus at Delia’s (1866, OP XXXVIII), oil on panel, 17’/4 X 26 inches, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts. 33. Alma-Tadema, Silver Favourites (1903, OP CCCLXXIII), oil on panel, 27% X 165/s inches, City

Art Gallery, Manchester. 34. Leighton, Daphnephoria (RA 1876), oil on canvas, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. 35. Leighton, Captive Andromache (1883-1885), oil on canvas, frame size 99 x 186 x 8 inches; The

Last Watch of Hero (RA 1887), oil on canvas, frame size 100 x 57 x 5 inches; both City Art Gallery, Manchester.

36. This, the preceding and succeeding quotations from David Watkins, The Life and Work of C. R. Cockeye11 (London, 1974), pp. 18, 229 and 160.

37. Presumably the predella was Rossetti’s idea, although he writes that Graham ‘expressed a great wish for a ‘predella’ to the picture’ (Doughty and Wahl, op. cit. Note 1, no. 1224, 12 September 1872); and William Michael Rossetti adds: ‘I hardly know whether the idea. . .came from Rossetti himself, or from Mr Graham; perhaps rather from the latter’ (Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Designer and Writer, London, 1889, p. 104).

38. Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel(1875-1879), oil on canvas, 59% x 31% inches, including predella, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.

39. Doughty and Wahl, op. cit. Note 1, no. 2502, 26 J une 1881. The editors refer this letter to La Pia de’ Tolomei, but it clearly implies a very expensive frame, and La Pia has one of Rossetti’s late medallion designs (see Roberts, op. cit. Note 2), which would have been much cheaper than that on The Blessed Damozel, and this frame really has satyrs and cherubim, and to all intents cauliflowers as well. Leyland bought the picture for E500 in 1881 in lieu of an unexecuted, prepaid commission of 800 guineas; but it is more than likely that Rossetti manoeuvred him into extra payment for the frame (and such an elaborate one), and consequently this is the meaning of the letter.

40. Edward T. Joy, English Furniture 1800-1851 (London, 1977), p. 153. 41. Burne-Jones, The Merciful Knight (1863), gouache, 39% x 27 inches, City Museums and Art

Gallery, Birmingham. 42. J. M. Strudwick, The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day (n.d.), oil on canvas, 31 x 24 inches, Julian

Hartnoll, London. 43. Jones, op. cit. Note 4, Ch. XVII, p. 7. 44. G. F. Watts also bought Florentine frames: see the photograph of the Gallery, New Little Holland

House (Art Annual, Easter 1896, p. l), showing the original ‘Baroque’ frame of Paolo and Francesca. Watts’ paintings in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and Watts Gallery, Compton, have similar frames.

45. J. R. Spencer Stanhope, The Washing-Place (188Os), watercolour, Forbes Magazine Collection. 46. For example, works by Evelyn De Morgan in the Forbes Magazine Collection; Medea (1889),

Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead, etc. 47. A. M. W. Stirling, William De Morgan and His Wife (London, 1922), p. 71. 48. Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin (1870-1874), oil on canvas, 72 X 43 inches, Lady Lever Art

Gallery, Port Sunlight. 49. G. Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London, 1906), Vol. II, p. 20. 50. Frances Spalding, Magnificent Dreams: Burne-Jones and the Late Victorians (Oxford, 1978), p. 7. 51. Quotation and reproduction of engraving, ibid. Burne-Jones, The Days of Creation (1872-1876)

Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass., has been separated, each panel being housed in one of six

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modern border frames which carefully preserve the backboard inscription, stating that the panels were ‘placed in a frame designed by the Painter, from which he desires they may not be removed’. Love’s Music has been lost; only Eve Tempted, by Spencer Stanhope (1877, tempera on panel, frame size 87 X 55 inches, City Art Gallery, Manchester) can still be seen in its original frame.

52. Burne-Jones, Venus Discordia (begun 1872), oil, 50 x 82 inches, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; The Feast of Peleus (1872-1881), oil on panel, 14% x 43 inches, City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham; King Cophetua (1884), oil on canvas, 115% x 53% inches, Tate Gallery, London.

53. Burne-Jones, quoted in Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones (London, 1979), p. 157. 54. Leighton, The Garden of the Hesperides (RA 1892), oil on canvas, 66 inches diameter, Lady Lever

Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. 55. Holman Hunt, May Morning on Magdalen Tower (1888%1891), oil on canvas, 155/6 X 19% inches,

City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham. 56. See Roberts, op. cit. Note 2. 57. Holman Hunt, Cyril Benone Hunt (1880-1891), oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches, Fitzwilliam

Museum, Cambridge. The design for this frame is reproduced by Mary Bennett, ‘Footnotes to the Holman Hunt Exhibition-Appendix II’ Livelpool Bulletin, 13, 1968-1970.

58. Holman Hunt, Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides (1887), painted plaster, oval, 27l/4 X 20% inches, City Art Gallery, Manchester.

59. Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott (1886-1905), oil on canvas, 74 x 57% inches, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.

60. Udo Kultermann, ‘William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott’, Pantheon, 4, Oct.-Dec. 1980, p. 386. The diary of Frederic Shields for 3 March 1904 [quoted by Ernestine Mills, The Life and Letters of Frederic Shields (London, 1912), p. 3371 notes, ‘To Holman Hunt’s to design smoke for his frame for “Lady of Shalott”‘- the ‘smoke’ revealing Hope’s presence in the box.

61. See Henry Heydenryk, The Art and History of Frames (London, 1964), pp. 44-45. 62. Arthur Drummond, An Eastern Beauty (1898), oil, 37% x 28 inches, Phillips, London, Sale,

2 November 1983.

Nineteenth century english picture frames II: The victorian high renaissance

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