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拍品专文
Jonathan and Eleanor Tonge were clients of the most prominent picture dealer of the day, Ernest Gambart. After Tonge’s death in 1881 Eleanor married William Coltart of Woodleigh, Birkenhead. Coltart and Sons were ropemakers of Liverpool. They supplied the vast fleet of commercial shipping that made Liverpool the engine for global trade in the 19th century. The Coltart collection grew exponentially, and numbered such masterpieces of the period as Burne-Jones’ The Annunciation (1863, Private Collection) and Green Summer (1864, Private Collection), Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Ford Madox Brown’s The Coat of Many Colours (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and King Rene’s Honeymoon (Tate, London), and Albert Moore’s The Music Party (1868, Private Collection) and The Bath of Venus.
Unlike the majority of the other artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Stanhope came from an aristocratic background and as a man of private means did not have to paint for his living. He initially trained through an informal apprenticeship of seven years with George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) and accompanied him to Italy in 1853. This visit had a profound effect on Stanhope, who apparently decided that ‘all the great painters lived before Raphael’s time’ (A.M.W. Stirling, A painter of dreams and other biographical studies, 1916, p. 325). Watts was not a charismatic teacher and Stanhope soon felt the sway of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898). In 1857, he was invited by Rossetti to work on the Oxford Union murals alongside both Rossetti and Burne-Jones, both of whom deeply influenced his early style.
In 1860, Stanhope married and initially settled in Surrey, in a house designed for him by Philip Webb (1831-1915), who had previously built the Red House for William Morris. However, his chronic ill health (he suffered from severe asthma), meant that he moved several times and began to spend his winters in Italy. In 1873, he bought Villa Nuti, just outside Florence and from 1880, he settled there permanently, remaining there until his death twenty-eight years later.
Burne-Jones lamented the implications of this self-imposed exile: 'His absence from London', he told his assistant T.M. Rooke in 1896, 'has removed him...from his contemporaries and their criticism, and he's got to think more and more exclusively of old pictures to the extent that he'll almost found his own pictures on them and give up his own individuality' (Mary Lago (ed.), Burne-Jones Talking, London, 1981, p. 78). Yet Stanhope remains a fascinating phenomenon, a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite whose long residence in Florence and day-to-day exposure to the old masters profoundly influenced his later style and helped to give it its characteristic flavour.
Unlike the majority of the other artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Stanhope came from an aristocratic background and as a man of private means did not have to paint for his living. He initially trained through an informal apprenticeship of seven years with George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) and accompanied him to Italy in 1853. This visit had a profound effect on Stanhope, who apparently decided that ‘all the great painters lived before Raphael’s time’ (A.M.W. Stirling, A painter of dreams and other biographical studies, 1916, p. 325). Watts was not a charismatic teacher and Stanhope soon felt the sway of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898). In 1857, he was invited by Rossetti to work on the Oxford Union murals alongside both Rossetti and Burne-Jones, both of whom deeply influenced his early style.
In 1860, Stanhope married and initially settled in Surrey, in a house designed for him by Philip Webb (1831-1915), who had previously built the Red House for William Morris. However, his chronic ill health (he suffered from severe asthma), meant that he moved several times and began to spend his winters in Italy. In 1873, he bought Villa Nuti, just outside Florence and from 1880, he settled there permanently, remaining there until his death twenty-eight years later.
Burne-Jones lamented the implications of this self-imposed exile: 'His absence from London', he told his assistant T.M. Rooke in 1896, 'has removed him...from his contemporaries and their criticism, and he's got to think more and more exclusively of old pictures to the extent that he'll almost found his own pictures on them and give up his own individuality' (Mary Lago (ed.), Burne-Jones Talking, London, 1981, p. 78). Yet Stanhope remains a fascinating phenomenon, a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite whose long residence in Florence and day-to-day exposure to the old masters profoundly influenced his later style and helped to give it its characteristic flavour.