.

The Fine Arts, Crafts and Design of the Fin-de-siècle

Associate Editors: Anne Anderson, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Isa Bickmann, Tricia Cusack, Nicola Gauld, Sarah Turner.

SPRING 2009

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IN THE EYE OF THE CRITIC

Views and Reviews

Reviews Editor: Tricia Cusack @

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Antoine Capet on Caroline Arscott on Morris and Burne-Jones
Tricia Cusack on Holman Hunt
Catherine Delyfer on Jocelyne Rotily on Whistler
Nicola Gordon Bowe on Janice Helland on cottage industries
Morna O’Neill on Larry Ligo on Manet and Baudelaire
Leonée Ormond on Molly Whittington-Egan on Frank Miles
Barbara Wright on Eric Karpeles on Proust

Catherine Delyfer

WHISTLER AND NAPOLEON

  

  

  

Jocelyne Rotily : ‘Napoléon et moi!’ James McNeill Whistler en Corse 1901. 
Marseille : ACFA Editions 2008 – ISBN : 2-9524259-1-4), 127 pages, 25 euros.

Jocelyne Rotily’s book concentrates on the last years of James McNeill Whistler’s life and on his preoccupations and concerns during the time he spent in Corsica between January 1901 and May 1903, two months before his death in London. His mother’s death in 1881, followed by the deaths of his dear wife Beatrix in 1896, one of his best friends the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé in 1898, and finally his brother had plunged Whistler in deep melancholia. Furthermore, he suffered from overwork and general bad health. Following the advice of a French doctor in Marseilles, he therefore set off to Corsica in the winter of 1901, determined to nurse himself back to health. There he created a series of drawings, etchings, pastels and paintings which, Rotily argues, show that at the age of 67 Whistler’s talent was intact and even possibly more acute. Whistler’s Corsican works have been unfairly neglected, Rotily claims, partly because some of his works were destroyed by the artist and partly because those that remain are today dispersed in several public and private collections, such as the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, and the Terra Foundation. Twenty plates at the end of the volume—most of which are from the collections of the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow—bear witness to the artistic quality and emotional tenor of Whistler’s production in Corsica.

Drawing from Margaret F. MacInnes’s 1969 article on ‘Whistler’s Last Years: Spring 1901 – Algiers and Corsica’ (Gazette des beaux-arts, May 1969), Margaret F. MacDonald’s, Patricia de Montfort’s and Nigel Thorp’s The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, Georgia Toutziari’s The correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell’s The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1928), Patrick Chaleyssin’s Le Cri strident du papillon (1995) and Richard Dorment’s and Margaret MacDonald’s Whistler (Paris, Musée d’Orsay 6 février – 30 avril 1995), Jocelyne Rotily’s book, however, is no academic exercise in criticism. This slim and elegant book stems from a creative attempt at reconstituting a part of James McNeill Whistler’s life and oeuvre that is partly unknown to us. As a result, the author has chosen to adopt an imaginative style, and her book is part fiction part research. Hence the subtitle, ‘biographie romancée sous forme de journal,’ i.e. ‘an imaginary biography written in the form of a diary.’ The book’s wide margins, the use of glossy paper and the presence of Whistler’s butterfly monogram on each page contribute to making this a very aesthetically pleasing volume after the manner of the fin de siècle artistic book. The charm of this brief ‘imaginary biography in the form of a diary’ comes from the fact that it succeeds in capturing the moods of the old Whistler and in evoking both his aesthetic concerns and the particular appeal Corsica had for this artist at the time. Rotily reminds us that, just before going to Corsica, Whistler had traveled to North Africa and been immensely disappointed by Tangiers and Algiers, which he found too ‘oriental’ (p. 19), stereotypical and devoid of interest. Turning away from the source of inspiration of Eugène Delacroix and other Orientalist painters, Whistler was enchanted by the authenticity of Corsica and its unconventional beauty. There he found fresh ground to tread, focusing much of his work on humble workers and mothers with children and sensing an affinity between the Corsican predilection for the color black and his own aesthetic interests. Whistler’s quest for aesthetic truth, his soul searching and his pursuit of good health are well rendered by Rotily. This creative work is a welcome addition to the current literature on Whistler which will encourage people to look more closely at this little studied part of the painter’s trajectory.

· Catherine Delyfer is a professor of English at the University of Montpellier, France. Her areas of interest include late nineteenth-century art and art periodicals, 1890s fiction, and women studies, and she is co-organiser with Bénédicte Coste of the conference British Æstheticisms, October 2009.

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Barbara Wright

PROUST AND PAINTING

Eric Karpeles: Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’. London: Thames & Hudson 2008. 352 pp, with 206 illustrations, 196 in colour. £25.00.

When André Malraux, in 1947, sketched out his concept of an ‘imaginary museum’, he had in mind, not merely each person’s reference points, as in their favourite works of art, but also the network of images which modern technology has made available, through mass reproduction, to humanity at large. It is this hinterland which the painter Eric Karpeles, seeks to open up, in offering a Visual Companion to the reader of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

In this, he has rendered an invaluable service. The sheer range of Proust’s pictorial references is astonishing, encompassing paintings from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, not merely in terms of works studied in museums, churches and private collections, but also as reproduced in books on art. In seeking to form a picture of one of the major characters in Proust’s work, Charles Swann, it is fascinating to spot the link between his principal model in real life, Charles Haas (the standing figure on the far right of James Tissot’s painting, The Circle of the Rue Royale (p. 237)) and the ‘striking resemblance’ of Swann to the Magus with an ‘arched nose and fair hair’, in the fresco of The Adoration of the Magi by Bernardino Luini (p. 99). Again, to see Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat (p. 103) jolts the reader into a new awareness of the ‘uncontrolled, almost distraught movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot’, to which an involuntary gesture by Swann’s lover, Odette, is compared. Thus, as Karpeles observes, paintings penetrate into the very life of Proust’s story (p. 21). They are indeed, for Swann, as dear as friends. The old man with polyps on his nose, in Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of an Old Man and a Young Boy (p. 55), resembled the Marquis du Lau, a distinguished aristocrat whom Swann cultivated in the years before his marriage. Madame Blatin is said to be ‘the very image of that portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommeo’ (p. 93). This lavishly illustrated Visual Companion gives a new dimension to Swann’s tendency ‘to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries’ (p. 64).

The analogies go much further, however. If a bleak Parisian sky conjures up the menacing backdrop of Veronese’s Crucifixion (p. 104), the link between the sky of Padua outdoors and the sky of Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel interacts in such a way that ‘it seems as though the radiant daylight has crossed the threshold with the human visitor in order to give its pure sky a momentary breather in the coolness and shade, a sky merely of a deeper blue now that it is rid of the glitter of the sunlight’ (p. 278). Sometimes the references are more general and allow for speculation — always well informed, under the expert tutelage of Karpeles — in relation to a billowing cloud over a Poussin landscape (p. 79) or the loop of a ribbon, in a portrait by Chardin (p. 106). Particularly interesting, among these suggested visual parallels, are Portrait of a Woman in a Hat, by Gustave Jacquet (p. 203) and Portrait of a Lady, by Pierre-Auguste Cot (p. 294), both little-known works of the 1870s.

At a broader level, this is the art of transformation, the art which enables us to see worlds other than our own. Françoise, in her self-appointed role as moral chaperone, watches the Narrator’s every move with Albertine, like the figure of Justice in Prud’hon’s Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime (p. 165). And Vermeer’s celebrated View of Delft (p. 235) constitutes a moment of epiphany, when Bergotte, the elderly writer, falls ill and dies at an exhibition, while examining a detail of the painting. There is no consensus as to the precise identification of the detail — ‘a little patch of yellow wall’ — but Lorenzo Renzi, in his Proust and Vermeer: An Apologia of Imprecision (1999), argues convincingly that it is a blend of past literary experience and direct observation of the painting. Art and life are so inextricably interwoven in the world of Proust that it is not always clear which imitates the other. It is for each reader-spectator to participate in the interplay between the two.

While welcoming this Visual Companion as an outstanding resource, it is important to set it in its own clearly defined context. It is improbable that Proust expected his readers to visualise all the references in his work, many of which are so general as to invite a host of exemplars. More importantly, In Search of Past Time is essentially a visual novel, in which the author moves like a somnambulist, writing with his eyes closed and drawing on his fabulously rich ocular memory. Flaubert resisted all overtures by publishers to bring out an illustrated edition of his Madame Bovary. He wanted each reader to visualise the work in his or her own mind’s eye. Similarly, for Proust, what mattered was not so much the iconic sign, in terms of the mimetic representation of the external world, but rather the plastic sign, in terms of colour, form and material support. In this way, a painting could, at times, replace the eye of a spectator.

This gradual evolution towards the autonomy of the image is deeply rooted in the nineteenth century and in Mallarmé’s call to order, in relation to the materiality of painting, ‘this art made of unguents and colours’. Whereas synaesthesia drew its strength from the ‘fraternity of the arts’, so vigorously proclaimed in the 1830s, in the period following the death of Delacroix in 1863 the specificity of the different arts was what was emphasised in the reaching across generic boundaries. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as Karpeles states, there was a ‘subtle shift in the balance of artistic power’: ‘visual artists began to emerge from the tyranny of literary and historical narrative’ (p. 13). What resulted, however, was nothing less than a new world-view, in which the image received pride of place, where what one appeared to see was as important as what one saw, where impressions could be transformed in time and place, and where a succession of fragments afforded a new sense of relative continuity. On the threshold of our present world, in which the image is dominant, this excellent Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time stands as a potential key to aspects of the past, while fundamentally running counter to the primacy of subjectivity in the aesthetic universe of Proust’s masterpiece.

· Barbara Wright is Professor of French Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.

· Editor’s Note: The book is supported by an impressive website. Other articles on Proust at www.oscholars.com are by Robert Fraser, Emily Eells, and Mireille Naturel. Link to the American Proust Society.

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Nicola Gordon Bowe

BRITISH AND IRISH HOME ARTS AND INDUSTRIES

Janice Helland: British and Irish Home Arts and Industries 1880 – 1914: Marketing Craft, Making Fashion (Dublin and Portland, Oregon: Irish Academic Press 2007); 232 pages; 40 black and white illustrations. ISBN 978 0 7165 2890 6 (cloth euro 60, £45); ISBN 978 0 7165 2891 3 (paper euro 24.95, £19.95)

Despite the modest appearance of this book with its inexplicably pink blancmange-coloured cover and its often inadequately sharply reproduced or reduced images, it is full of rich material. Its author, who has written on the Macdonald sisters, 19th century women painters in Scotland and gendered decorative arts, has constructed a fascinating account of the story behind the marketing of the glamour and appeal of the homespun cloths, embroideries, tweeds and lace which became de rigeur to the fashionably wealthy in the rarified world of aristocratic pre-War society.

Professor Helland has based her study on three indefatigable, exceptionally motivated women whose resourceful commitment to encouraging, supporting, commissioning and displaying the handmade textiles of impoverished Irish and Scottish countrywomen warrants the detailed attention she devotes to it. She shows how the enterprising businesswoman Mrs. Alice Hart, the charismatic and relentlessly energetic Ishbel, Lady Aberdeen, and the high-minded, aesthetic aristocrat Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland pursued their philanthropic goals, the latter two using their own bodies as theatrical models for a succession of sumptuous outfits made out of fabrics like silk poplin and Harris tweed whose survival depended on the support they ensured for their rural makers.

Mrs. Hart was the pioneer, with her Ruskinian Donegal Industrial Fund whose high-quality hand-spun and woven wools and linens were distinguished by natural dyes and distinctive ‘Kells’ Art Embroidery. She encouraged consumers by offering a wide range of goods for sale at Donegal House in Wigmore Street, and offered makers technical training and embroidery classes, the latter taught by May Morris’s friend, the well-born Irish nationalist Una Taylor. Both she and Lady Aberdeen, twice Vicereine in Dublin, concocted rival ‘faux villages’ at the 1893 Chicago World Fair using ‘live models’ to sell Irish goods, followed by a series of exhibitions in London. Hart favoured public exhibition venues, while the regular private sales organized by Lady Aberdeen’s influential umbrella Irish Industries Association in London and beyond acted as models for those inaugurated by her fellow Scot, Millicent Sutherland in the Highlands. Using their rank and frequently royal connections, and a range of ploys such as lavish selling receptions, garden parties and balls for invited audiences in the plush London mansions of fellow home industries supporters like the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Londonderry, they paid lip service to their political affiliations under the guise of sympathetic patronage. The author stresses the huge divergence between the luxurious leisure garments that enterprising dressmakers and shops like Fenwicks concocted for them, and the humble sources of the skilfully made, yet poorly paid textiles they were made from in crofters’ cottages, convents, congested districts’ workshops, and concerted home industries, even if they were sometimes worked by distressed gentlewomen.

Although her research is extensive, taking in a wide range of well-cited sources, and her grasp of the complex inter-relationships of the British aristocracy concerned impressive, the main strength of Helland’s commendably readable account is her extensive reference to specific primary manuscript and printed sources, which demonstrate clearly what a crucial role certain ladies’ magazines, journals and newspapers played in preserving notions of exclusivity in the handcrafted textiles these women were determined to champion.

Nicola Gordon Bowe© 2008

· Nicola Gordon Bowe is a lecturer and art and design historian.  Associate Fellow, Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wales. She is currently preparing a monograph on W.M. Geddes (1887-1955), Irish stained glass and graphic artist.

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Leonée Ormond

FRANK MILES AND OSCAR WILDE

Molly Whittington-Egan: Frank Miles and Oscar Wilde: “such white lilies”. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press 2008 ISBN I 904201 09 I price £12.50 or $25

Molly Whittington-Egan’s life of Frank Miles sets out to reclaim her subject from his insubstantial supporting rôle in the story of Oscar Wilde. Her title, however, specifically relates Miles to Wilde, making this, to some extent, an account of their relationship. Miles emerges as an artist with a considerable talent. Not a financial hanger-on of Wilde, quite the reverse in fact, he is also revealed as a man of means. The author does not make out a strong case for Miles as an artist, although she is careful to show that he had a considerable success and made a comfortable living.

Frank Miles made his reputation in the 1870s with his drawings of women. These were actresses, fashionable figures in high life or models who posed with names like Laura and Lucy. The titles often refer to literary figures, Tennyson’s poetry being a particular favourite. Through his son, the poet acknowledged the gift of a print of The Gardener’s Daughter, a poem popular with artists of the 1860s. Miles’ best-known sitter was Lily Langtry whom he met in 1876 and who became a friend. Among the others were Virginia Woolf’s beautiful mother, Julia Stephen, the photographer, Eveleen Myers, and the actress, Connie Gilchrist, one of Frederic Leighton’s favourite models. Prints of these circulated widely. The sitters are often posed with leaves and flowers, or, in one of the most popular, Ruth, with wheat ears wound round a headscarf. In the aesthetic mode, they caught the imagination of a generation seeking the beautiful and, occasionally, the exotic. (It was, incidentally, the Punch cartoonist, George Du Maurier, who pilloried the aesthetes, not his son, the actor Gerald, as stated here.)

Oil paintings by Miles are rarer. They sometimes, like his touching study of a young girl in a melancholy reverie, For Pity and Love are Akin, pass through the sale rooms. Pause in the Match, with a seated girl in a white dress holding a tennis racquet, belongs, appropriately, to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club Museum. The American writer of short stories, Bret Harte, is the subject of one of Miles’ male portraits. He also exhibited landscapes at the Royal Academy, but, perhaps because of difficulties in tracing them, none are illustrated here. It would be good to see An Evening on Lough Muck, Connemara, painted while Miles was on holiday with Wilde.

Molly Whittington-Egan gives a through account of Miles’ background and early life. Grandson of a wealthy banker and son of a clergyman, Miles grew up in his father’s rectory at Bingham in Nottinghamshire. His mother was an artist who had taken classes at the Ruskin School in Oxford. The family was a large one, and Frank, his mother and sisters, decorated the church with frescoes, stained glass windows and ironwork.

One of the great strengths of this book is its correction of earlier errors. Frank Miles, we learn, was not, as has been assumed, a fellow Oxford undergraduate of Oscar Wilde, although they may well have met there in 1874 or 1875. There has been much speculation as to the precise nature of their relationship and that riddle remains unsolved. There can be no doubt that Miles and Wilde were close friends and one of the high points of this book is the account (from Wilde himself) of his visit to Bingham Rectory and of his delight in the family and the garden. Frank Miles, an enthusiastic botanist and gardener, would have been the ideal companion. Miles’ drawing of Wilde, reproduced here, represents his subject as wide eyed and serious.

Molly Whittington-Egan sees Miles as an original for some aspects of the character of Basil Hallward in Dorian Gray, published the year before Miles’ death and after the friendship had ended. The case is a convincing one, particularly in the light of another of the author’s corrections to the usual story of Wilde and Miles. Far from being a mere acolyte of Wilde, Miles was actually the benefactor. It was to his studio, in Salisbury Street off the Strand, that Wilde went on coming down from Oxford, although the exact financial arrangements (if any) are uncertain.

The eminence grise of this biography is the sculptor, Lord Ronald Gower. The author clearly establishes (again correcting popular belief) that Wilde and Frank Miles were already close friends when Gower entered the ‘Trinity’. In her view, Gower was the serpent in the garden, leading both men astray: ‘Gower was an extreme corrupting influence on Oscar and Frank’. Seven and ten years older than Miles and Wilde, and far more experienced, Gower mocked Wilde’s attraction to Catholicism and may have led Miles into the seamier side of London life. ‘Gower was an outsider, of the world, in a different league from the cautious, tortured university homosexual of the Walter Pater type.’ If Miles is (at least in part) the model for Basil Hallward, Gower has some points in common with Lord Henry Wotton, although the author questions whether he had anything approaching Wotton’s wit. Molly Whittington-Egan totally dismisses Gower’s work as a sculptor. His popular Shakespeare statue at Stratford is contemptuously, and not entirely fairly, described as ‘ridiculous’.

Another unsolved mystery which Molly Whittington-Egan raises is Canon Miles’ failure to realise that Gower was a corrupting influence upon his son, although he eventually believed this to be the case with Oscar Wilde. Gower’s title perhaps protected him from suspicion. It was Canon Miles who precipitated the rift between Miles and Wilde, writing to his son, and then to Oscar, to protest at some of the sentiments expressed in the latter’s 1881 volume of poetry. Frank’s mother even cut one of the poems out of her copy. The result was that Wilde left their shared home in Tite Street, Chelsea.

From the start, this book hints at disaster. When the blow falls, Miles’ rapid descent into syphilitic madness is dealt with comparatively briefly. Here again the author is correcting the errors of others. Some writers state that Miles died of an accidental overdose in 1888. His family, acutely aware of the shame involved in admitting to insanity in the family, preferred to report that he was dead in that year and obituaries appeared. In fact, he lived in an asylum until 1891.

This comparatively brief and very readable book sets the record straight on several important issues in the life of Frank Miles. One casualty of the reassessment is Robert Harborough Sherard’s dramatic tale of Miles’ fear of arrest and prosecution for sexual relations with underage girls and of Wilde’s holding off a group of policemen while his friend escaped over the rooftops.

Although they lived close to each other in Chelsea, Wilde ruthlessly cut Miles after their quarrel and was unwilling to refer to him either before or after Miles’ death. The author thinks it likely that Wilde ‘did come to full knowledge of Frank’s fate’ and speculates, with percipience, that he was ‘terrified to consider the predicament of his old friend, once close, with whom he had shared so many adventures’.

· Leonée Ormond is Professor Emerita and Fellow of King’s College, London. University of London. She has published monographs, editions, and articles on many nineteenth and early twentieth century artists and writers, and is at present completing a life of the Punch cartoonist, Linley Sambourne.

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Tricia Cusack

ART AS EVANGELISM: ‘HOLMAN HUNT AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE VISION’

Manchester Art Gallery 11th October 2008 – 11th January 2009

This is an impressive exhibition and it has some special features. I might quibble with the title and its clichéd phrase ‘the Pre-Raphaelite Vision’ since this implies that there was a single way of seeing amongst the painters and that their sight was somehow privileged; on the other hand, Hunt in particular was seeking to propagate some sort of evangelical vision in his work.[1] The exhibition, organised by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and Manchester Art Gallery is the first international showing of William Holman Hunt’s work for more than 40 years. As well as iconic pictures like The Hireling Shepherd, Our English Coasts and The Shadow of Death, the exhibition includes the three versions of Hunt’s painting The Light of the World which have never previously been shown together. Manchester Art Gallery’s own version of Hunt’s extraordinary conception The Scapegoat is on display (Figure 1).[2] Finally, the exhibition includes Hunt’s lesser known watercolours and drawings.

Figure 1 William Holman Hunt The Scapegoat 1854-5 ©Manchester City Galleries

The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue, edited by Katharine Lochnan and Carol Jacobi and published by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, which contains ten scholarly essays that will be useful long after the exhibition has finished its travels. These have a rich array of topics ranging from a study of cloth and costume in his art, to an essay on Hunt’s relationship to Palestine. It might have been interesting too to include one specifically on the relevance of photography to Hunt’s work. My only quibble about the catalogue is that given the length and comprehensiveness of the text, it would have been extremely useful to have an index. As illustrated catalogues go, it is not expensive but the cost might have been reduced by omitting the unnecessary double colour-spread at the back and towards the front.

The exhibition is located in the new wing of Manchester Art Gallery. Entry is free and there have been up to a 1000 visitors some days.[3] The educational materials that provide interpretations of the exhibited works were written by Melva Croal, Curator of Art at the Manchester Gallery. At the start there is an illustrated booklet which can be collected for £2 deposited voluntarily in a box, a nice gesture of trust in the exhibition visitors. There are also ring-bound information sheets on individual paintings to borrow. These have points numbered on a coloured reproduction to explain various features of the pictures and are interesting, clear and concise. Photocopies of these sheets are then available free to visitors at the information desk. The works are distributed around a large and tall gallery space subdivided by movable partitions. The ‘rooms’ thus formed have been painted for this exhibition in saturated modern colours, dark greenish-blue to provide ‘a dramatic beginning to the exhibition’,[4] deep sky-blue and pinkish-brown, with informative text on boards of the same colours. These boards include curious details such as the fact that Hunt’s given middle name was Hobman, his mother’s surname, but owing to an error on the part of the priest he was registered and remained William Holman Hunt.

The background colours for the gallery spaces were selected for the exhibition by Melva Croal. She has explained that she chose the main blue colour based on her experience of the Pre-Raphaelite room where she had observed ‘how well this picked up the blues in Hunt’s work and also slightly counteracted the warmth in his colours’.[5] Croal had wanted a warmer, more intimate colour for the small room containing the family photographs, and the ‘red’, or pink-brown, had been suggested to her.[6]

The colours work well, especially where images of the Middle Eastern landscape are set against the pink-brown, with the wall behind and above, blue, evoking the imaginary colours of the desert. On this brown-pink background are pictures like The Afterglow in Egypt; The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and Hunt’s smaller version of The Scapegoat. There are extracts here from Hunt’s journals borrowed from the John Rylands University Library. These relate his experiences in the Middle East, describing places in detail, bribing local men, carrying his gun ready and trusting to God: ‘I commended myself to God’s merciful protection from all the dangers by which (sic) I had ventured to challenge in this pursuit’.[7]

One of the first ‘rooms’ contains the marvellous early painting of The Hireling Shepherd (1851-2: Figure 2) housed in a heavy and elaborate gilt frame designed by Hunt and decorated with sheaves and ears of wheat. Botanical detail like the blades of grass and the mallow growing near the water can be seen, together with the slight browning of the part-eaten apple and tangible textures of fabric such as the thickness of the woman’s skirt, and the roughness of the rope around the shepherd’s calves.

Figure 2 William Holman Hunt The Hireling Shepherd, 1851 © Manchester City Galleries

Nearby, is Our English Coasts (1852) not usually seen in its shiny gilt frame ornamented with vine leaves in relief and edged with dark brown. Hunt’s frames, often designed by him, indeed are a prominent feature of his paintings. Again, the painting seen in its proper scale and texture gives up its detail, the red admirals on the valerian, the little bits of vegetation protruding from the top of the distant hill.

Both of these paintings have a religious/moral theme – the strayed sheep, associated with neglect of the flock. Hunt was a member of the Anglican Church, but his grand-daughter, Diana Holman-Hunt[8] observed that Hunt ‘was never a church-goer and, until he was twenty-six, was an agnostic despite a passionate interest in the Middle East, as well as in the history of Christianity, Judaism and Islam’.[9] However Hunt associated The Light of the World with a personal epiphany when he believed he had felt the presence of Christ.[10] His religious belief took up the tenets of evangelicalism insofar as he felt a personal relation to God and depended on the authority of the bible and interpreting Old Testament prophecies as prefigurations of New Testament events.

Hunt spent a total of six and a half years in Palestine where he painted both versions of The Scapegoat as well as two versions of The Shadow of Death.[11] Although Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, the largest religious grouping there was the Jews. In Christian evangelical terms, the Jews had been exiled from their homeland because of their failure to see Christ as the Messiah and would regain it only with his return. British Christians in Palestine were engaged in a proselytising mission endeavouring to convert the Jews to Christianity and Hunt was close to some of them, who also assisted him in his project in the Holy Land.[12]

Both of the oil canvases of The Scapegoat, one of which is on show, are marvellous pictures. It is a pity that the two could not have been shown here together. The theme refers to the biblical goat sacrificed in the wilderness by the Jews to atone for their sins and anticipating or prefiguring Christ’s death on behalf of sinners. The frame for the larger painting incorporates text and imagery that link the Old Testament prophecies with the coming of the Messiah, suggesting that ‘Hunt wished to take the historic Jewish sacrificial rite and transform it into a Christian Martyrdom, making the goat a surrogate Christ’.[13]

Both pictures show the dying animal on the shore of the Dead Sea against a backdrop of lurid pink rocky mountains. Like Ruskin, Hunt was interested in geology[14] as well as evangelical religion. Hunt regarded The Scapegoat as a possible means of Christian conversion: ‘I am sanguine that it may be ... a means for lending any reflecting Jews to see a reference to the Messiah, as he was, and not as they understand – a temporal King’.[15] Despite the explanatory narrative, it has been suggested that the image has ‘resisted attempts at elucidation ... it continues to perplex’.[16] Perhaps one reason is its evasion of classification, for it is neither religious genre, nor landscape, nor animal painting (Boime 2002: 108).

The Corporation of Manchester purchased its painting of The Scapegoat (Figure 1) in 1906. The picture has a decorated gilt frame and is glass-fronted. The glass is reflective so this makes it a little hard to see the picture without interference. Hunt may have painted this smaller version during his study trip to the Dead Sea in late October 1854 when he sought to depict the light around the time of the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), which was on October 2 in that year,[17] although the caption for the picture at the current exhibition gives the dates as 1854-5, 1858. Hunt apparently executed the background to the larger canvas there in November 1854[18] although the completed canvas is dated and inscribed: Osdoom Dead Sea, ’54. In this version, the goat is brown and darkened by the coming night. Hunt had in fact considered depicting a black goat at Azazel, referring to a scapegoat but also to the he-goat avatar of Satan.[19] However, a bright rainbow arches from salty shore to sky like a symbol of redemption. This appears unnaturalistically bright and solid, a painterly stroke in an otherwise realistic landscape. It was omitted from the larger painting.

The Shadow of Death (1870-3: Figure 3) shows Christ in the carpenter’s shop as his shadow on the wall prefigures the crucifixion.[20] It is another outstanding work, whether or not one sympathises with its religious message. The Shadow of Death with its lifesize figures is well-displayed alone on a tall wall, but hung quite low so that the detail is clearly seen, from the fig branch outside, to the tactile fabrics and the individual teeth and inside of the open mouth of the figure of Christ.

Figure 3 William Holman Hunt The Shadow of Death 1870-3 ©Manchester City Galleries

Two of Hunt’s versions of The Light of the World are displayed together in one of the blue spaces. The first, containing a slightly worried-looking Christ figure (the expression does not show in reproduction) was started in 1851 and finished two years later in 1853; the second, smaller and brighter version (Figure 5) was begun that year and completed in 1854. This was produced jointly by Hunt and the artist Frederic George Stephens. Indeed, according to Diana Holman-Hunt, Stephens painted ‘most of the second version of The Light of the World’ and ‘got no credit for this’.[21] On display too is a lantern Hunt designed to use as a model (Figure 4), which he had made in brass and copper in 1851-2 by William Hacking: it does not have the Islamic crescent that he was to incorporate in his later painting.

Figure 4 Lantern designed by William Holman Hunt © Manchester City Galleries

The Light of the World became familiar from the 1860s through the distribution of reproductions from steel-plate engravings. The third version of The Light of the World on show here (Figure 6) was painted with Edward Robert Hughes from 1900-1904. The figure here is larger than lifesize and the painting (oil on canvas) is housed in a huge elaborate gilt frame complete with classical pilasters and cornice and supported on a little pedestal extension of the gallery wall. It usually hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral. This was designed to present a manlier Christ figure than that in the earlier versions, for which Hunt had used female models and which was likely to be interpreted as effeminate in attitude and facial features.[22]

This third version was toured around British imperial colonies and dominions (Canada; Australia; New Zealand and South Africa) becoming ‘the most travelled artwork in history’ and viewed by around seven million people.[23] It was subsequently dedicated at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1908. Hunt, in imperialist mode, seems to have regarded his Christ as a universal ‘light of the world’; indeed, he added a star and crescent to his lantern to represent the incorporation of ‘Mohammedanism’.[24] Following its wider travels, The Light of the World effectively became ‘an icon of British Imperial Protestantism’.[25]

Figure 5 William Holman Hunt The Light of the World 1851-6 ©Manchester City Galleries

Figure 6 William Holman Hunt The Light of the World 1900-4 © Christie’s 2008. Reproduced with permission of the Dean & Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral

The picture is highly symbolic in typical Pre-Raphaelite mode, basing its symbolism on Christian biblical texts. The frame of the third version carries the biblical motto ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with me’. Christ being or bringing ‘the light of the world’ is interpreted somewhat literally, as he carries a lantern and knocks at a weed-covered door to make an entrance, perhaps to an individual soul. Hunt noted that ‘I shall have a door choked up with weeds, to show that it has not been opened for a long time’.[26] The orchard includes reference to the tree of life, while the fallen apples can stand for both transgression and redemption.

The Light of the World was painted at one point indoors in day-time, Hunt using curtains to screen his model with a lantern, which he scrutinised in the gloom through a peephole, so that he was achieving his realist effects with a kind of camera obscura technique. Lindsay Smith has discussed the complex relationship between photography and Pre-Raphaelite painting, which does not merely consist in one medium borrowing from another, as the advent of photography entailed particular cultural expectations and raised new questions. Thus as Smith suggests: ‘‘The discourse of photography makes the condition of ‘having been there’ an aesthetic necessity, while at the same time creating the possibility for a new kind of simulation, or faking, as the necessary obverse of such a radical optical fidelity’.[27] Pre-Raphaelite paintings were not necessarily executed ‘truthfully’ on site.

Hunt’s large religious painting Triumph of the Innocents (1883-5) was first displayed at the Fine Art Society, London in 1885, illuminated in a darkened room against mulberry-coloured drapes. The Manchester exhibition has tried to reproduce this effect by hanging the picture in an alcove built into a corner of the gallery standing for a room and painted dark bottle-green, and spotlighting the painting which is placed in front of ‘mulberry’ velvet drapes. There is a little rope-rail to keep the spectator at a respectful distance and a bench against the wall facing the work to enable the viewer to contemplate it. It was notable that some occupants of the bench whispered to each other as if in church. This painting unlike most of Hunt’s works, in my view, hardly merits such reverence being spoiled by many chubby figures of child spirits which seem grotesquely and redundantly muscular, as if Hunt applied his knowledge of adult anatomy to the children’s bodies. These figures are veiled in little classical robes or if naked modestly display their rears. The whole is contained once more in a huge and heavy gilt frame, ringed with a relief frieze of pomegranates. A photogravure of this picture produced by Goupil & Co. in 1888 for the Fine Art Society is displayed elsewhere in the exhibition, and its frame designed by C.R. Ashbee and The Guild of Handicraft is perhaps of more interest than the image. Crafted of exposed wood it has a classical cornice and gilt side friezes of pineapples, grapes and pomegranates in relief, with text below from John Ruskin’s The Art of England.

The exhibition will move from Manchester to Toronto in February, and in June to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis. In summary, it is an excellent and thought-provoking exhibition, with well-researched supporting materials,[28] and like every good exhibition it raises questions rather than simply providing the viewer with pat answers.

[1]Melva Croal, Curator of Art, Manchester Art Gallery explained to me that the exhibition title, originally used by the Art Gallery of Ontario, reflected the fact that ‘Holman Hunt is often seen as the one who stuck to Pre-Raphaelite principles all this life [unlike] Millais and Rossetti’: email to author, 22.12.08.

[2] The larger version of The Scapegoat is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool.

[3] As there is free entry, numbers cannot be exact; this is an estimate by one of the regular exhibition attendants.

[4] Croal, email to author, 22.12.08.

[5] Croal, email to author, 22.12.08.

[6] Croal, email to author, 22.12.08.

[7] William Holman Hunt, Journal, 1854.

[8] The family name was later hyphenated.

[9] Holman-Hunt 1989: 9.

[10] Mane-Wheoki 2008: 114; Tromans 2008: 136.

[11] Tromans 2008: 135.

[12] Tromans 2008: 151. Boime 2002: 101-2. The dominant organisations were the evangelical London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews and the Presbyterian British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews: Boime 2002: 101.

[13] Boime 2002: 95.

[14] Hunt disapproved of the Church’s rejection of new findings in geology: Tromans 2008: 136.

[15] Hunt to Millais, November 1854, quoted in Boime 2002: 107. In the 1890s, Hunt sympathised with the new Zionist movement, seeing ‘the return of Jews to Palestine both as politically desirable and as evidence of the worldly expression of divine prophecy’: Tromans 2008: 156.

[16] Smith 1992: 37.

[17] Boime 2002: 95.

[18] Boime 2002: 95.

[19] Boime 2002: 108.

[20] In this case, both parts of the narrative occur in the New Testament.

[21] Holman-Hunt 1989: 13.

[22] Mane-Wheoki 2008: 124-5.

[23] Mane-Wheoki 2008: 113.

[24] Mane-Wheoki 2008: 127.

[25] Mane-Wheoki 2008: 128; Smith 1992: 47. Although the picture did not tour there it was well-known in the United States: Mane-Wheoki 2008: 130.

[26] Hunt quoted in Boime 2002: 97.

[27] Smith 1992: 45.

[28] The educational materials such as panels, labels and spiral-bound keys are accompanying the exhibition to the Art Gallery of Ontario, although they might be adapted; for example the word length for labels is limited to 80 at the Toronto gallery: Croal, email to author, 22.12.08.

References

Boime, Albert. 2002. ‘William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat: Rite of Forgiveness/Transference of Blame’. The Art Bulletin. Vol. 84, No. 1: 94-114.

Holman-Hunt, Diana. 1989. ‘Introduction’ in Anne Clark Amor, William Holman Hunt: The True Pre-Raphaelite. London: Constable, 8-13.

Lochnan, Katharine and Jacobi, Carol, eds. 2008. Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario.

Mane-Wheoki, Jonathan. 2008. ‘The Light of the World: Mission and Message’ in Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision edited by Katharine Lochnan and Carol Jacobi, Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 113-32.

Smith, Lindsay. 1992. ‘“The Seed of the Flower”: Photography and Pre-Raphaelitism’. The Huntington Library Quarterly. Vol. 55, No. 1: 37-53.

Tromans, Nicholas. 2008. ‘Palestine: Picture of Prophecy’ in Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision edited by Katharine Lochnan and Carol Jacobi, Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 135-58.

· Tricia Cusack currently teaches in the University of Birmingham’s Centre for European Languages and Cultures.

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Morna O’Neill

MANET, BAUDELAIRE, AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Larry L. Ligo: Manet, Baudelaire, and Photography. Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press 2006. 775pp. 162 halftones. $199.95. ISBN: 978-0-7734-5695-2 (book 1) 0-7734-5697-X (book 2)

Although Charles Baudelaire described Constantin Guys, a Dutch illustrator, as ‘the painter of modern life,’ scholars have productively applied the poet’s description of an artist who is ‘looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call “modernity”’ to Édouard Manet. Yet they have often disagreed over the specific ways in which we can apply this appellation to Manet. How can we explain, for example, the numerous references to Old Master painting found in Manet’s canvases? Are they intended as ironical, even jaundiced, commentary on a bankrupt tradition, or are they earnest expressions of artistic admiration and emulation? How do we find in Manet’s art ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ that Baudelaire described as ‘one half of art,’ with ‘the other being the eternal and the immovable.’

In Manet, Baudelaire, and Photography, Larry L. Ligo pursues this dynamic, exploring the connections between Baudelaire’s aesthetic philosophy and Manet’s paintings. As the title suggests, the book also addresses a third constituent: photography. While the inter-relation of these three has long been suggested, this is the first text to treat them synthetically. Ligo argues for the influence of photography on Manet’s art both formally and conceptually, an understanding of this new medium gleaned from the artist’s engagement with the writings and philosophy of Baudelaire. Perhaps the best way to think about these three areas is through Baudelaire’s notion of correspondence: a ‘co-mingling’ (57) as Ligo describes it, the evocation of one through the other. This reading re-orients Baudelaire as an important critical voice in the aesthetic debates surrounding photography in the mid-nineteenth century. At times, Baudelaire himself hardly seemed to endorse photography, or at least a particular type of photography which he coupled with ‘the great industrial madness of our times.’ In particular, he objects to the way in which photography, as a mode of image-making, can confuse ‘the results of a material science’ with ‘the products of the beautiful.’[29] Intriguingly, for readers of The Oscholars, Baudelaire’s critique would later play a role in the reception of Oscar Wilde’s own self-fashioning. In the case of the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company against the photographer Napoleon Sarony, the case rested on whether or not copyright acts granted protection to photographers. The prosecution argued that ‘all the photographer did was to put Mr. Wilde in a particular suit of clothes and have him cross his legs in a particular fashion,’[30] Sarony, a purveyor of ‘industrial madness’ as a popular New York studio photographer, countered that he ‘invented’ Oscar Wilde, since he ‘arranged the said Oscar Wilde in a graceful position, and suggested and evoked the desired expression.’[31]

The text begins with a foreword by the art historian Bradford Collins on the historiography of Manet studies and modernism more broadly, glossing the context within which we must situate Ligo’s study ‘in order to appreciate’ it. As Collins points out, art history from the nineteenth century to the 1970s ‘was characterized by two competing methodological approaches.’ Broadly speaking, he describes these poles as the Hegelian zeitgeist (which was channeled by the genius artist) and the consideration of art within the context of society and politics. The latter was often influenced by Marxism and named ‘the social history of art.’ In the 1980s, however, the situation became more complex and more contentious, as feminist, neo-Marxist, neo-formalist and deconstructionist critics reinterpreted the artist and his work. For Collins, Ligo returns to an older model of scholarship to explore the iconography of Manet’s paintings. Yet Ligo’s readings of many of Manet’s paintings work with, rather than against, other recent studies of the artist.

This book contains much that is thought-provoking, engaging, and interesting. Although not all of it is entirely new, what is new is the suggestion of an iconographic program for Manet: As Ligo states, ‘it is my contention that Manet carefully thought through and implemented an elaborate iconographical program in every major painting produced’ (2).

This study appears in two volumes, and the first volume is divided into two parts. Part One considers Manet’s relationship with Baudelaire, Baudelaire’s own aesthetic, and the development of Manet’s ‘mature style.’ In this first part, Ligo combines a close reading of Baudelaire’s poetry and his critical writings to develop key aspects of his aesthetic philosophy such as beauty, memory, and imagination , among others (47). In the next chapter, he parallels these ideals with Baudelaire’s comments on photography. It is perhaps this section that I found the most problematic. I think his text would have benefited from a more sustained engagement with the technology of photography circa 1860 and the specifically French context for these concerns, as explored in Elizabeth Anne McCauley’s Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). For example, he deploys English authors almost exclusively, looking to Francis Frith and Elizabeth Eastlake for his understanding of the medium. Overall, however, I found Ligo’s suggestion of ‘photographic features’ in Baudelaire’s intriguing, as he connects the ‘dualism’ of Baudelaire’s poetry with the ‘innate dualism’ (the positive and negative, as it were) of photography (109).

At the end of Part One and throughout Part Two, Ligo elucidates Manet’s engagement with this dualism. Part Two is divided into chronological subsections and moves into a more focused consideration of individual works by Manet, treating most of the major canvases of the period 1859-1865. In addition, he reads many of the paintings of this period as meta-commentaries on the artist’s own quest to realize Baudelaire’s aesthetic in his work. Thus, The Resurrecting Christ with Angels (usually known as Dead Christ with Angels; c. 1864, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Incident in a Bullfight (1863-1865, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) ‘present Manet’s veiled self-portraits as a Baudelairian artist whose ongoing commitment to become a Baudelairian painter-photographer of modern life had recently led to his professional martyrdom’ (305). In assembling these networks of correspondences between Manet, Baudelaire, and photography, Ligo provides many insights into the works. He does make some imaginative leaps that to my mind are not always justified by the evidence presented, but in doing so he provides suggestive new readings for canonical paintings, such as The Street Singer (c. 1862, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Book Two continues this chronological structure, as it begins with a continuation of Book One, treating various themes in Manet’s work between the years 1866 and 1869. The main innovation of this section, which continues the close-reading of individual works found in the first part of the book, is the discussion of Japonisme in terms of a Baudelairian aesthetic. Although Ligo acknowledges that Manet would have looked to other sources for this idea, Ligo fruitfully connects the theme of dualism, developed earlier, to that taste for Japanese prints. The remainder of Part Two considers the legacy of Baudelaire’s aesthetic in the art of Manet after the death of the poet in 1866. Ligo suggests that Manet remembered and honored Baudelaire in various works, even as he continued to work through various aspects of Baudelaire’s aesthetic, especially in regards to photography. The third part of the book treats the remainder of artist’s career, from 1870 until his death in 1883 with special attention to his interaction with Impressionism. A decade older than artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre Renoir, Manet exerted a considerable influence on these younger artists, and he likewise engaged their new aesthetic. Ligo suggests that we should consider this interaction in the context of Baudelaire’s aesthetic: ‘Could it be that an ‘impressionistic’ approach to painting provided Manet with a very sophisticated and subtle means of developing key features of the Baudelairien aesthetic in his work?’ Ligo finds this aesthetic at work in these later paintings as well, such as The Railway (1873; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). Ligo concludes his exploration of Manet, Baudelaire, and photography with a reading of Manet’s last great canvas, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1883; Courtauld Institute Gallery of Art, London). He suggests that the painting is a return to the themes of Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ in particular the section on ‘Women and Prostitutes.’ In the melancholic barmaid, Ligo reads a self-portrait of the artist and a ‘one-canvas retrospective’ (734) of his career.

The book has numerous illustrations–162 altogether, although all are reproduced in black and white on non-glossy paper. Unfortunately, the virtues of the book—the close reading and explanation of Manet’s style and iconography—are not well-served by the design, and the press could have invested more in the editing process and the physical production of the volumes.

[29] Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon of 1859,’as quoted in Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, 1.

[30] ‘Did Sarony Invent Oscar Wilde?’ New York Times December 14, 1883, 4.

[31] Ibid.

· Morna O'Neill is a specialist in late nineteenth-century European art, in particular the conjunction of art, design, and politics.  Her current research addresses the work of Walter Crane (1845-1915) within the context of the Aesthetic movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, and socialist politics, the subject of her forthcoming book.   She is Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Vanderbilt University.

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Antoine Capet

WILLIAM MORRIS AND EDWARD BURNE-JONES

Caroline Arscott: William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2008. ISBN: 0300140932 and ISBN: 9780300140934, 259 pages.

This review was first published in Historians of British Art Newsletter, Jennifer Way, Editor. Fall/Winter 2008-2009: pp. 23-24, and is here republished by kind permission of author and publisher.

Caroline Arscott, Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, continues her exploration of Burne-Jones (1833-1898) and William Morris (1834-1896) by this examination of what she calls ‘the interconnections in theme, allusion and formal strategy between Burne-Jones’s paintings and the designs of Morris.’ (9) The reader is very appropriately reminded that their collaboration started very early in their lives, with their work for the Oxford Union in 1857, and culminated with the Kelmscott Chaucer ‘completed just before Morris’s death in 1896.’ (16-17)

Contrary to so many ‘coffee-table books’ on the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends which seem to flood the market nowadays, the text is not a thinly-disguised pretext for the (superb) reproductions which constitute an undeniable attraction of the large-size volume. Far from it: the text proper is extremely dense, often hard to follow because of the complexity and variety of the strands pursued, and sometimes difficult to agree with – as it should be in any work with an innovative ambition.

One characteristic of the cautious scholar is that he is wary of audacious rapprochements. Comparing works in different media can be more confusing than it is enlightening – at least this is what this reviewer’s generation was taught. Yet this is precisely what Dr Arscott undertakes to do, drawing parallels not only between works in different media by Burne-Jones and William Morris, but also between these works and a wide variety of images – the farthest removed from the (late nineteenth-century) Zeitgeist, which according to older conventions of art interpretation provided the only legitimate foundation for such comparisons, being a still of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984) (fig.26). Naturally, there is a justification for these forays into ‘extraneous’ territory: in this instance, the author is exploring the theme of ‘the man-machine’, in connection with Burne-Jones’s fascination for historic armour and his work on the (male) body in action. Likewise, the illustrated discussion of books treating of the introduction of breech-loading guns and new kinds of cartridges – though not infringing the chronological framework – might be seen as taking the reader too far from the theme announced in the title of the book: but again, Dr Arscott has the last word, explaining that ‘The metaphors and adjectives that are applied to the new guns and projectiles can indeed be used to summon up a hero’s body for the modern day.’ (77) The rest of the chapter (Chapter 3) is devoted to a masterly exploration of the representation of bare skin v. armour in Burne-Jones’s works, notably his various renderings of the story of Perseus. The skin, in all the acceptations of the word – literal as well as figurative, biological (fig.58) as well as mental – provides in fact the central element in the book, with the unifying idea that Burne-Jones’s work is associated with the external (epidermal) aspect while that of William Morris has more to do with the internal (dermal) side – things of course being more complicated. For instance, Burne-Jones’s preoccupation with the outer skin in Chapter 3 is followed by a discussion of William Morris in terms of ‘Heart and Flesh’ (Chapter 4). And one returns to the epidermal with Chapter 5, devoted to Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series. The ‘potential for beauty in pattern embedded in flesh’ (127), as in tattooed bodies, is examined in relation to Morris’s works in the next chapter, with many suggested or at least potential rapprochements between the nineteenth-century illustrations and Morris designs reproduced – but also in Chapter 7, which notably discusses Burne-Jones’s fascination with tattooed people as ‘exhibited’ in 1880s and 1890s London. In Chapter 8 (‘Morris: The River’), the above/under duality of the human skin is extended to the surface of the water, leading to an insightful commentary on Morris’s 1883-1887 series of patterns named after rivers (Avon, Lea, etc). The last chapter attempts to reassemble all the threads again, concentrating on the two friends’ common work in stained glass for the Church of St. Philip in Birmingham, with another allusion to the theme of organic flesh rendered by inorganic glass. (217) The only real criticism that one may level at this very ambitious monograph is that it ends abruptly with this chapter, with no general conclusion.

It is evidently impossible in a short review to do justice to all the challenging insights which the book contains. Contextualisation is of course mandatory when seriously discussing any oeuvre: what makes the strength of Dr Arscott’s volume, arguably, is that she does this work of contextualization from so many new perspectives. Not everybody will agree with them – but this is the rule of the game. On the other hand, everybody will agree that Interlacings constitutes a capital addition to Burne-Jones and William Morris Studies. It goes without saying that it should be in all Art School and British Studies libraries: besides the impeccable, up-to-date Bibliography, advanced students and colleagues will particularly appreciate the copious (twenty-five pages on double columns), most informative Notes which often open new vistas in themselves.

· Antoine Capet is Professor of British Civilisation at the University of Rouen.

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