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Abstract
A pastiche of Pre-Raphaelite art and aesthetic principles, Florence Claxton’s The Choice of Paris: An Idyll affirms the criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) voiced in Victorian England’s art-periodical press. Relying heavily on these periodical descriptions of Pre-Raphaelitism, the painting thus makes visible a textual discourse as much as a visual one. Central to this discourse is a culturally specific conception of artistic primitivism that appears in periodical reviews of Pre-Raphaelite art, one that conflates disparate notions of chronological and cultural primitivism in order to express in words an aesthetic idea conceived and executed in graphic form. Heavily dependent upon the textual – indeed, taking the shape it does because of the textual – Claxton’s Choice of Paris demonstrates, in this way, the complexly mediated means by which Pre-Raphaelitism circulated in print in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and beyond.
Acknowledgements
The author expresses thanks to Thomas J. Tobin for his assistance in clarifying the provenance of the four versions of Claxton’s painting and to the anonymous reviewers for Visual Culture in Britain for their comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which obtained the best-known (and last) watercolour version of The Choice of Paris in 1989, notes that there are three versions of the painting done by Claxton (two watercolours and an oil): one in the V&A collection, one ‘now in the collection of W. E. Fredeman’, and one that Fredeman reproduces in his Citation1960 article, ‘present whereabouts unknown’; see Victoria and Albert Museum, ‘Summary’. In fact, there are four known versions – three watercolours and an oil. In his 1960 article, Fredeman reproduces two: the oil version from the collection of Ralph Dutton, and a watercolour ‘reproduced from a negative in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham’; see Fredeman, ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, 523. This last version is distinguishable ‘by a triangular tear in the paper above the fireplace mirror’, and the attribution was something of a canard to disguise the fact that Fredeman himself owned this copy. It was the first watercolour version created and probably Claxton’s reference copy, never sold during her lifetime (personal communication with Thomas J. Tobin, December 12, 2015). This watercolour was purchased from Fredeman’s estate in December 2014 and is now in private hands; see Christie’s, ‘Sale 5877, Lot 208 – Florence Claxton’. In addition to the Christie’s ex-Fredeman version, a less familiar watercolour copy painted for Joseph Crawhall (with gallows, which are absent in the V&A painting) was auctioned in 2007 to a private collector; see Bonhams, ‘Lot 80: Florence Claxton’. Dearden suggests that Claxton’s Portland exhibit piece was the oil and not the watercolour; see Dearden, John Ruskin, 222. As this oil version is not available for public viewing, my remarks all refer to the V&A’s watercolour version.
2. The Christie’s ex-Fredeman version of The Choice of Paris was most probably the copy used by ILN engraver Thomas Gilks (personal communication with Thomas J. Tobin, December 12, 2015).
3. ‘“The Choice of Paris”’, Illustrated London News, 542.
4. Ibid.
5. See, for example, the satirical illustrations in Poems Inspired by Certain Pictures, published by John Burley Waring in 1857. Frederick Sandys’ illustration The Nightmare (1857), which parodically places Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt on the steed from Millais’s A Dream of the Past – Sir Isumbras at the Ford (1857), might also have influenced Claxton. On these and other PRB parodies, see Silver, ‘“The Only True Art of the Day”’; Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body; Stauffer, ‘Punch on Nineveh, Catholics, and the P.R.B.’.
6. Claxton executed scores of illustrations and a handful of paintings throughout her artistic career. Most of these conform to the conventions of mid-Victorian composition in their depiction of crinoline-bedecked ladies and carefully arranged domestic interiors.
7. ‘“The Choice of Paris”’, Illustrated London News, 541.
8. Fredeman identifies several of the paintings parodied by Claxton, as does the 1860 ILN reviewer. A more complete list is given on the V&A webpage describing the painting; see Victoria and Albert Museum, ‘More Information’.
9. Rosenfeld, ‘Florence Claxton’, 83.
10. Codell, ‘“Second Hand Images”’, 215.
11. See, for example, Cooper, ‘The Relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Painters Before Raphael’; Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art; Vaughan, Art and the Natural World; Langley, ‘Pre-Raphaelites or Ante-Dürerites?’; Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible; Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites.
12. Despite the meagre amount of available information, feminist art historians in the 1990s created a fairly coherent narrative of Claxton’s life and work; see Nunn, Victorian Women Artists; Nunn, Problem Pictures; Casteras, ‘The Necessity of a Name’; Casteras and Peterson, The Struggle for Fame; Cherry, Painting Women; King, ‘Feminist Arts’; King, ‘Florence (Anne) Claxton’. More recently, other scholars have continued to fill in gaps in Claxton’s history; see Van Remoortel, Women, Work, and the Victorian Periodical; Flood, ‘Contrary to the Habits of Their Sex?’; Walton, ‘Suitable Work for Women?’.
13. Clayton, English Female Artists, 41.
14. Claxton’s date of birth, recorded incorrectly (or as ‘unknown’) in a variety of sources (including the V&A), is listed as August 26, 1838 on her baptismal record; see Claxton, ‘Register of Baptism’. The discrepancies in her birth date have probably arisen because her christening took place (in Greenwich) several months after her birth and because her age is listed incorrectly as 40 in the 1881 England Census; see Farrington, ‘1881 England Census’.
15. In 1848, for example, the Art-Union praises ‘various works’ of Marshall Claxton for being ‘of quite excellent quality’; see ‘The Free Exhibition’, Art-Union, 144. This critic’s response is typical.
16. Nunn, Problem Pictures, 121. Lennon indicates that Florence Claxton also had a younger brother, Richard, who died as an infant in Sydney, Australia in May 1852; see Lennon, ‘Florence Claxton’.
17. ‘Fine-Art Gossip’, 217. See also Charles Dickens’s account of Marshall Claxton’s Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me, which Dickens calls the ‘first large picture ever painted, or (by many people), ever seen, in Australia’; see [Dickens], ‘Chips: The Fine Arts in Australia’, 597.
18. Nunn, Problem Pictures, 123.
19. King, ‘Florence (Anne) Claxton’, 404.
20. Codell, ‘“Second Hand Images”’, 218.
21. Claxton was, of course, able to see Pre-Raphaelite art itself once she settled in England. Her initial first-hand impressions were probably made at the Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition, held just as her family returned from their time abroad. There is no definitive evidence that Claxton attended this exhibition, but a painting by her father (Marshall Claxton’s My Grandmother) hung in Saloon F along with several of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that Claxton parodies in The Choice of Paris, which suggests that she did attend. Also compelling is the fact that caricatures by ‘Tennyson Longfellow Smith’, which are similar enough to Claxton’s as to suggest her knowledge of them, were published in response to the Art-Treasures Exhibition; see Smith [Waring], Poems Inspired by Certain Pictures.
22. Flood, ‘Contrary to the Habits of Their Sex?’, 112.
23. Van Remoortel, Women, Work, and the Victorian Periodical, 99–100.
24. Clayton, English Female Artists, 44–45.
25. See Sussman, ‘The Language of Criticism’, 21–29; Landow, ‘The Art-Journal, 1850–1880’, 71–76.
26. This theme of betrayal is established most fully via Claxton’s parody of Calderon’s painting, Broken Vows, to which Claxton makes visual and textual reference in The Choice of Paris. For more on Calderon’s painting and the idea of aesthetic betrayal in Claxton’s piece, see Horrocks, ‘Broken Vows and Broken Homes’.
27. Sussman, ‘The Language of Criticism’, 26–27.
28. Fredeman, ‘Pre-Raphaelites in Caricature’, 525. Fredeman’s article, written exactly 100 years after the first exhibition of The Choice of Paris, is one of just two extended analyses of Claxton’s painting (the second is Horrocks, ‘Broken Vows and Broken Homes’ in 2015). The painting is mentioned by a handful of other critics, all of whom note the uniqueness of the satire but none of whom discuss the piece at length; see Rosenfeld, ‘Florence Claxton’; Cruise, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing.
29. Fredeman, ‘Pre-Raphaelites in Caricature’, 526.
30. Ibid., 525.
31. Ibid., 529.
32. Sussman, ‘The Language of Criticism’, 26.
33. Other details in the painting appear to confirm this as well. For example, Claxton’s caricatures of two of Millais’s paintings – Spring, or Apple Blossoms and The Vale of Rest – also seem to be illustrations of critiques that appeared in various art periodicals; see ‘Ruskin vs. Raphael’, 232n1; ‘London Exhibitions – Conflict of the Schools’, 132.
34. Young, Pre-Raffaellitism, 161.
35. Masson, ‘Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature’, 200. Two years before Masson, Dickens made a similar remark about Pre-Raphaelites’ attention to minute detail, claiming that ‘we are informed that every brick in the house will be a portrait’; see [Dickens], ‘Old Lamps for New Ones’, 266.
36. For two other written (rather than visual) examples of satire that target the generic Pre-Raphaelite artist painting a brick wall, published in the years immediately following the exhibition of The Choice of Paris, see ‘Woman and Art’; ‘The Pre-Raphaelites (by a Post-Raphaelite)’.
37. ‘Art in the House of Commons’, 175.
38. Warnum, ‘Modern Moves in Art’, 269.
39. Hardman, ‘The Pictures of the Season’, 82.
40. ‘Fine Arts: Royal Academy’, Literary Gazette, 434.
41. ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Private View (First Notice)’, 8.
42. See Cooper, ‘The Relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Painters Before Raphael’; Vaughan, Art and the Natural World; Langley, ‘Pre-Raphaelites or Ante-Dürerites?’.
43. Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, 8–9.
44. The 2015 issue of the Journal of Art Historiography edited by Corbey and Van Damme devotes itself entirely to examinations of pre-twentieth-century European discussions of primitive art, providing a body of scholarship that directly addresses the inaccuracy of the twentieth-century ‘discovery’ of a primitive aesthetic.
45. Martin, The Languages of Difference, 34.
46. Brown, The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage, 25.
47. Abadía, ‘The Reception of Palaeolithic Art’, 1.
48. Connelly, ‘John Ruskin and the Savage Gothic’, 1.
49. Ibid., 4.
50. Abadía, ‘The Reception of Palaeolithic Art’, 1.
51. Ibid., 2.
52. Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, 107.
53. Ibid., 9.
54. Ibid., 13.
55. Martin, The Languages of Difference, 21.
56. Cooper, ‘The Popularization of Renaissance Art’, 263. Goldwater, making a distinction between this kind of antiquarian revivalism and the artistic primitivism of early-twentieth-century European artists, suggests that the Pre-Raphaelites and the Nazarenes should technically be considered archaists rather than primitives; see Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, 261–2. Gombrich agrees, but suggests that the Pre-Raphaelite style is ‘as far removed from the modes of the German Nazarenes as it is from the modes of the quattrocento, to which it is supposed to pay tribute’; see Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive, 141. In fact, as the periodical reviews attest, Victorian critics made no such distinction between archaism and primitivism – yet another example of the range of meanings contained within mid-nineteenth-century notions of ‘the primitive’.
57. Hardman, ‘The Pictures of the Season’, 82.
58. ‘Reviews’, Art-Journal, 251. During the Victorian era, Italian art before the fifteenth century (the ‘quattrocento’) was generally lumped into the broad category of ‘medieval’ or ‘Gothic’ art in galleries and museums, and art produced between the Hellenic era and the seventeenth century was variably called ‘early’, ‘primitive’, or ‘Pre-Raphaelite’; see Laurent, ‘An Inventory of the Pre-Raphaelite Mental Museum’, 20. As the nineteenth century wore on and collectors became more familiar with pre-Renaissance art (spurred on, in part, by the controversy surrounding the PRB), more careful distinctions began to be made. See also Cooper, ‘The Popularization of Renaissance Art’, 265.
59. Cooper, ‘The Popularization of Renaissance Art’, 266.
60. Hardman, ‘The Pictures of the Season’, 82.
61. Taylor, ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Second Notice’, 8.
62. Hardman, ‘The Pictures of the Season’, 82.
63. ‘Fine Arts: The Pre-Raphaelites’, 512.
64. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, 1–6.
65. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural primitivism was also attributed to children, peasants, and occasionally women (especially prostitutes) and the insane; see Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, 59. While not separated from the viewer by geography or cultural tradition, all of these represented a cultural other, a deviation from European standards of normalcy.
66. See Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, 8; Vaughan, Art and the Natural World, 57. As Phillips notes, both cultural and chronological conceptions of primitivism are fundamentally based on the idea of time. People believed by Victorians to be culturally ‘primitive’ were simply held to exist in a ‘pre-modern time which was past or passing’; see Phillips, ‘Aesthetic Primitivism Revisited’, 1. The same held true for children and peasants: nineteenth-century ‘primitives’ who lived in the current age and shared one’s ethnicity and nationality but who were believed to represent an earlier period in human evolution.
67. This particular notion of primitivism was, according to Connelly, constructed in eighteenth-century Britain, based on attributes thought to be universal among all non-Western cultures; see Connelly, The Sleep of Reason, 5.
68. [Stone], ‘The Royal Academy’, 591. Although this review is unsigned, Ghose attributes it to the painter and art critic Frank Stone, and for ease of citation, I follow Ghose here; see Ghose, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Contemporary Criticism, 33.
69. [Stone], ‘The Royal Academy’, 590.
70. B[allantyne], ‘The Pre-Raffaellites’, 185.
71. Cooper examines some of the ways in which primitivism was discussed in the 1830s and 1840s, while Graham and Haskell consider ideas associated with early European art circulating in Britain even before this; see Cooper, ‘The Relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Painters Before Raphael’, 411; Graham, ‘Artistic Inspirations’, 33; Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, 47.
72. Prettejohn notes that much of the discomfort felt by critics and viewers of Pre-Raphaelite art resulted from the reframing of older artistic elements within a mid-Victorian aesthetic setting. Pre-Raphaelite art brought primitive visual characteristics ‘into shocking friction with the illusionistic sophistication and technical refinement ordinarily expected of painting in the modernised and industrialised world of Victorian England’; see Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 19.
73. [Stone], ‘The Royal Academy’, 590.
74. Although Claxton makes no overt visual reference to Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), her flattening of the composition and her use of multiple lines of recession call this earlier painting to mind. Like Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–49), too, Claxton seems to be alluding to the compressed visual style of the medieval manuscript illuminations that interested Rossetti.
75. Sandys’ The Nightmare is particularly evident as a satirical precursor to The Choice of Paris in Claxton’s depiction of Sir Isumbras. Sandys makes this Millais painting the central feature of his parody, transforming Isumbras’ black steed into an ass labelled ‘J.R., Oxon’ to indicate John Ruskin. On this ass, Sandys seats caricatures of Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti. Sandys’ pastoral background, too, brings Claxton’s background to mind.
76. The Athenaeum, for example, called Sir Isumbras ‘monstrous’ and the horse ‘such an animal as Noah would have shut the door against’; see ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, Athenaeum, 602.
77. It does, of course, have a later counterpart in the arts and crafts work that would occupy second-generation Pre-Raphaelite artists such as William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Morris’ work in the 1870s and 1880s, in particular, focuses on the same decorative media (fabric, upholstery, wallpapers, tapestry, carpets) with which Claxton seems fascinated in The Choice of Paris.
78. One recalls Dickens’ condemnation of Millais’s Mary as ‘so horrible in her ugliness that […] she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster in […] the lowest ginshop in England’; see [Dickens], ‘Old Lamps for New Ones’, 265–6).
79. ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Third Notice’, 5.
80. ‘The Great Masters of Art’, 273.
81. ‘The Italian Pre-Raphaelites’, 651.
82. ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, Art-Journal, 286.
83. Ibid.
84. See, for example, ‘The English Pre-Raphaelites’, 6, 8; ‘The Royal Academy’, 153; ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Third Notice’, 5.
85. ‘Fine Arts: Royal Academy, Paintings’, Athenaeum, 575.
86. Taylor, ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Second Notice’, 8.
87. [Stone], ‘The Royal Academy’, 590.
88. ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Third Notice’, 5.
89. Rippingille, ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, 598.
90. Rhodes asserts the opposite: ‘artists and critics alike used the word primitive in their writings during the period from around 1900 to the First World War, but it is unlikely that it referred to tribal cultures at this time, for whom the term savage was more usual’. ‘Primitive’, he claims, ‘commonly refers in art history to artists who have been traditionally regarded as the harbingers of a new art’ as were the ‘progressive early Italian masters’; see Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, 21. Nineteenth-century British periodical reviews, which use ‘primitive’ for both challenge the former part of this conclusion, as well as the implied assertion that critics did not use the word prior to 1900.
91. ‘Primitive’, OED Online.
92. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, 8.
93. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1.
94. Martin, The Languages of Difference, 23.
95. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason, 5.
96. Ibid., 6.
97. Ibid., 5.
98. Ibid., 6.
99. Connelly, ‘John Ruskin and the Savage Gothic’, 9.
100. Nor did this happen in other intellectual fields. Martin remarks that Victorian anthropologists ‘were fearless in their comparisons […] of cultures past or present, near or far’; see Martin, The Languages of Difference, 35. Some eighteenth-century writers also regarded the living ‘primitive’ in his remote village as the counterpart of the pre-modern European; see Aldridge, ‘Primitivism’, 603.
101. Ruskin is perhaps the best-known proponent of such a conflation. For him, the culturally primitive art object and the chronologically primitive art object were organically allied forms that shared a number of important similarities. In ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853), he attributes to European Gothic art nearly all the visual characteristics typically attributed to non-Western art under the auspices of a wide-ranging Ruskinian ‘primitivism’; see Connelly, ‘John Ruskin and the Savage Gothic’, 9–10.
102. ‘The Royal Academy: The Eighty-Third Exhibition’, 153.
103. Ibid.
104. ‘The National Gallery: Pictures by Gaddi’, 300.
105. Ibid.
106. Abadía, ‘The Reception of Palaeolithic Art’, 2.
107. Gauguin’s primitivist work – which Connelly describes as a ‘stylistic mash-up’ combining ‘medieval cloissoné, Italian Gothic painting, Marquesan sculpture, Japanese woodblock prints, Javanese Buddhist temple sculpture, and pre-Columbian reliefs’ – offers a possible example among well-known European artists; see Connelly, ‘John Ruskin and the Savage Gothic’, 2.
108. Interestingly, Claxton does not seem to integrate into her work any specifically non-Western styles or motifs that she must have encountered in her early travels around the globe. She reproduces the association of culturally primitive art with ornament, but this is as far as her parody goes.
109. Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 93.
110. Ibid., 88.
111. See, for example, Wright, who asserts that a ‘tendency’ towards caricature is displayed most often by people ‘in a rude state of society’, an ‘appreciation of, and sensitiveness to, ridicule’ being found most often ‘among savages’; see Wright, History of Caricature and Grotesque, 2. See also Malcolm, who writes that a lack of mimetic skill among living ‘primitives’ reduces their artistic endeavours to caricature: ‘A savage cannot transfer just conception to wood or stone; on the contrary, he seems to lose all recollection that he had ever viewed the human species, and creates monsters from his own disordered imagination – a fact very difficult to account for’; Malcolm, An Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing, 6–7.
112. The Choice of Paris is not the only caricature in which Claxton uses grotesquery; see, for example, her best-known oil painting Woman’s Work: A Medley (Citation1861), or Adventures of a Woman in Search of Her Rights (1871). In this she follows a tradition of British caricaturists stretching back to the eighteenth century who made the grotesque a key element in their caricature.
113. ‘Conventional’ was the term used by Victorians to describe the ‘artificial treatment of natural objects’ as opposed to the direct imitation of nature; see ‘Conventional’, OED Online.
114. Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism, 5.
115. See Ruskin, ‘The Two Paths’, 261; Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 5–15. Despite his affection for non-Western art, however, Jones, too, performs the conflation of cultural and chronological primitivism evident in Claxton’s Choice of Paris and in contemporaneous periodical reviews of Pre-Raphaelite art; see Sloboda, ‘The Grammar of Ornament’; Jespersen, ‘Originality and Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament’.
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Jamie Horrocks
Jamie Horrocks is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, USA, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture and gender studies. Her research interests centre on Victorian aesthetics and the intersection of literature and art, especially in the later nineteenth century. She has published on Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, the Aesthetic Movement, and Victorian periodical illustration.