Lot Essay
On 10 December 1902 the great dam at Aswan was opened by the Duke of Connaught. The start, in the words of the Illustrated London News, of "a new epoch in the history of the Nile," it had taken four years to build and harnessed the energies of 20,000 men. For the British contractor, Sir John Aird, it marked the climax of a distinguished career which had included the removal of the Crystal Palace to Sydenham, the completion of the Manchester Ship Canal, and many other projects at home and abroad. His achievements had brought him a baronetcy, a seat in Parliament, and a handsome house in Hyde Park Terrace, furnished with a fine collection of pictures by modern British artists.
Aird's pictures tended to be large imposing works, and almost without exception were academic in style. Leighton, Poynter, Alma-Tadema, Dicksee, Orchardson, Waterhouse, Fildes and others were represented. Alma-Tadema had contributed the picture which the Art Journal in 1891 called "the chef d'oeuvre of the collection," the sumptuous if sinister Roses of Heliogabalus. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888, it was sold by Christie's in London on June 11, 1993 (lot 121) for what is still the record sterling price for a work by the artist. Aird now invited its creator to attend the opening ceremonies at Aswan. A fellow guest was the twenty-eight year old Winston Churchill, M.P. for Oldham and a hero of the Boer War; he had been invited by Sir Ernest Cassel, the financier backing the project and another collector of Tadema's paintings.
The Finding of Moses was the direct outcome of Alma-Tadema's visit to Aswan. During the festivities he proposed three subjects for a picture to commemorate the occasion, and Aird (with a touch of forgivable folie de grandeur) chose this one on the grounds that it was another great event which had occured on the Nile. For the artist it meant a return to the Egyptian themes that he had explored in the 1860s, a period of transition in his work when he was moving from his early Merovingian subjects to the classical genre scenes with which he became so closely associated after he had settled in England in 1870 as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War. The picture was also to be by far the most important of his rare essays in biblical subject-matter.
It is symptomatic of Alma-Tadema's intensely professional approach that his late work shows neither a decline in powers nor any of the private, self-absorbed, quality which characterises that of, say, Goya or Burne-Jones. He simply continued to paint popular and scrupulously crafted paintings until his death in 1912. The Finding of Moses is the undisputed masterpiece of his last decade, as well as a late (perhaps the final?) flowering of the nineteenth-century's love-affair with Egypt, going back to Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798. In England it has only one serious rival, E.J. Poynter's Israel in Egypt of 1867 (Guildhall Art Gallery, London).
The picture is based on Exodus, chapter II, verse 6. Pharaoh's daughter, having come to the Nile to wash, discovers the infant Moses exposed in his 'ark' or cradle: 'And when she had opened it, she saw the child...And she had compassion on him'. Alma-Tadema interprets this theme with a good deal of freedom. Time has obviously passed since the actual discovery, enough in fact for the attendants to have decorated the cradle with the lotus flowers which grow so profusely on the Nile, and the party to be nearing home. The mood of the picture is light-hearted, and Pharaoh's daughter seems to show not so much 'compassion' for the child as amusement at her curious adventure. Above all, the idea that she takes the child home is the artist's invention; in the biblical text his mother and sister present themselves incognito, and the princess hands him over to them for rearing.
Yet any artistic license of this kind is combined with the archaeological accuracy, based on painstaking research, for which Alma-Tadema was famous. Cartouches on the princess's throne identify her as the daughter of Ramses II (1279-1212BC), who is generally assumed to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The party is approaching Memphis, the capital of the Old Kingdom, probably making for the temple of Ptah, the god of creation, whose priests, their ritually shaven heads and fine white linen drapery signifying purification, figure prominently in the entourage. The bound Asiatic captives represented on the princess's footstool refer to the Israelite captivity, while on the far bank, against a backdrop of the Pyramids of Gizeh, droves of Hebrew slaves labour under the watchful eyes of swarthy Egyptian overseers. Memphis and Gizeh are indeed close, both being near the modern Cairo. Aswan is many miles up-river.
All this might be mere pedantry but for the artistry with which it is handled. Unlike Aird's earlier Roses of Heliogabalus, a daringly diffuse design betraying Japanese influence, The Finding of Moses is a tightly structured frieze-like composition, suitable to an Egyptian theme. The light and airy color scheme is dominated by the brilliant blues and purples of the larkspurs in the foreground, a note echoed elswhere in the design by such details as the lotus flowers and the throne's lapis-lazuli inlay, and offset by contrasting touches of orange, yellow and pink. There are exquisite passages of painting - the larkspurs themselves, the princess's diaphanous drapery, the partially hidden red granite statue of a Pharaoh to the left; while bold compositional motifs, such as the white pottery water jars barely relieved against the pale waters of the Nile, add an intellectual ingredient which holds the attention after the purely narrative felicities have been absorbed.
The picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905, having been two years on the easel. According to P.C. Standing (op. cit.) the artist's wife "pathetically pointed out to him that the infant Moses was 'two years old, and need no longer be carried.'" More, however, had changed than the age of the baby. In England the vogue for literary and historical subjects was rapidly waning as French realism gained a hold on public taste. Burne-Jones had seen his last major work return from exhibition unsold in 1897, and many of the younger exponents were diversifying into the more lucrative field of portraiture.
In this new critical climate, the response to The Finding of Moses, though popular, was predictably muted. The Times, while praising the 'unsurpassable' larkspurs and other 'wonderful accessories,' had general reservations, and the Athenaeum was almost insultingly patronizing. Within a few years, critics of the Roger Fry school would be declaring the art of Alma-Tadema irrelevant, with the result that he fell dramatically out of favor.
This change is reflected in the history of The Finding of Moses. Aird paid 5000 guineas for it in 1904, but when it left his family in 1935 it made only 820 guineas, and the executors of its next owner, the mustard magnate Sit Jeremiah Colman, sold it for 260 guineas in 1942. The nadir of its fortunes was reached in 1960, when the London dealers, Newman's, were trying to sell it for a client. A story has gained currency that it was bought for its frame and the painting itself 'dumped in an alley in St. James's' (The Times, March 9, 1995). As Bernard Hart, a director of Newman's at the time, has pointed out (The Times, March 21, 1995), this is not correct, but his story of how he tried in vain to find a museum to take the picture as a gift is hardly less depressing. In fact the picture was only to come into its own again when it went to New York and was sold to Allen Funt, of Candid Camera fame, joining the great collection of Alma-Tadema's work which he began to form in the 1960s and exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 1973. Funt sold it in London later that year, when it was bought by the present owner.
It is probably no accident that the picture finally found appreciation in the context of entertainment. As several modern critics have pointed out, most notably Mario Amaya in 'The Painter who inspired Hollywood', an article published in the Sunday Times Magazine, February 18, 1968, the true heirs to Alma-Tadema's pictures are not other paintings but the products of the epic film industry -- blockbusters such as D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. De Mille's Cleopatra (1934) and The Ten Commandments (1956), the script-writers and designers for which are known to have studied pictures like The Finding of Moses. Alma-Tadema, who loved a joke, would have been amused to know that a style which according to the pundits was utterly without significance in the history of modern painting should prove to be a potent source of inspiration for what many would argue is the most vital art-form of the twentieth century.
We are grateful to Professor Vern G. Swanson, Director of the Springville Museum of Art, Utah, for his assistance in preparing this entry.
Aird's pictures tended to be large imposing works, and almost without exception were academic in style. Leighton, Poynter, Alma-Tadema, Dicksee, Orchardson, Waterhouse, Fildes and others were represented. Alma-Tadema had contributed the picture which the Art Journal in 1891 called "the chef d'oeuvre of the collection," the sumptuous if sinister Roses of Heliogabalus. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888, it was sold by Christie's in London on June 11, 1993 (lot 121) for what is still the record sterling price for a work by the artist. Aird now invited its creator to attend the opening ceremonies at Aswan. A fellow guest was the twenty-eight year old Winston Churchill, M.P. for Oldham and a hero of the Boer War; he had been invited by Sir Ernest Cassel, the financier backing the project and another collector of Tadema's paintings.
The Finding of Moses was the direct outcome of Alma-Tadema's visit to Aswan. During the festivities he proposed three subjects for a picture to commemorate the occasion, and Aird (with a touch of forgivable folie de grandeur) chose this one on the grounds that it was another great event which had occured on the Nile. For the artist it meant a return to the Egyptian themes that he had explored in the 1860s, a period of transition in his work when he was moving from his early Merovingian subjects to the classical genre scenes with which he became so closely associated after he had settled in England in 1870 as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War. The picture was also to be by far the most important of his rare essays in biblical subject-matter.
It is symptomatic of Alma-Tadema's intensely professional approach that his late work shows neither a decline in powers nor any of the private, self-absorbed, quality which characterises that of, say, Goya or Burne-Jones. He simply continued to paint popular and scrupulously crafted paintings until his death in 1912. The Finding of Moses is the undisputed masterpiece of his last decade, as well as a late (perhaps the final?) flowering of the nineteenth-century's love-affair with Egypt, going back to Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798. In England it has only one serious rival, E.J. Poynter's Israel in Egypt of 1867 (Guildhall Art Gallery, London).
The picture is based on Exodus, chapter II, verse 6. Pharaoh's daughter, having come to the Nile to wash, discovers the infant Moses exposed in his 'ark' or cradle: 'And when she had opened it, she saw the child...And she had compassion on him'. Alma-Tadema interprets this theme with a good deal of freedom. Time has obviously passed since the actual discovery, enough in fact for the attendants to have decorated the cradle with the lotus flowers which grow so profusely on the Nile, and the party to be nearing home. The mood of the picture is light-hearted, and Pharaoh's daughter seems to show not so much 'compassion' for the child as amusement at her curious adventure. Above all, the idea that she takes the child home is the artist's invention; in the biblical text his mother and sister present themselves incognito, and the princess hands him over to them for rearing.
Yet any artistic license of this kind is combined with the archaeological accuracy, based on painstaking research, for which Alma-Tadema was famous. Cartouches on the princess's throne identify her as the daughter of Ramses II (1279-1212BC), who is generally assumed to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The party is approaching Memphis, the capital of the Old Kingdom, probably making for the temple of Ptah, the god of creation, whose priests, their ritually shaven heads and fine white linen drapery signifying purification, figure prominently in the entourage. The bound Asiatic captives represented on the princess's footstool refer to the Israelite captivity, while on the far bank, against a backdrop of the Pyramids of Gizeh, droves of Hebrew slaves labour under the watchful eyes of swarthy Egyptian overseers. Memphis and Gizeh are indeed close, both being near the modern Cairo. Aswan is many miles up-river.
All this might be mere pedantry but for the artistry with which it is handled. Unlike Aird's earlier Roses of Heliogabalus, a daringly diffuse design betraying Japanese influence, The Finding of Moses is a tightly structured frieze-like composition, suitable to an Egyptian theme. The light and airy color scheme is dominated by the brilliant blues and purples of the larkspurs in the foreground, a note echoed elswhere in the design by such details as the lotus flowers and the throne's lapis-lazuli inlay, and offset by contrasting touches of orange, yellow and pink. There are exquisite passages of painting - the larkspurs themselves, the princess's diaphanous drapery, the partially hidden red granite statue of a Pharaoh to the left; while bold compositional motifs, such as the white pottery water jars barely relieved against the pale waters of the Nile, add an intellectual ingredient which holds the attention after the purely narrative felicities have been absorbed.
The picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905, having been two years on the easel. According to P.C. Standing (op. cit.) the artist's wife "pathetically pointed out to him that the infant Moses was 'two years old, and need no longer be carried.'" More, however, had changed than the age of the baby. In England the vogue for literary and historical subjects was rapidly waning as French realism gained a hold on public taste. Burne-Jones had seen his last major work return from exhibition unsold in 1897, and many of the younger exponents were diversifying into the more lucrative field of portraiture.
In this new critical climate, the response to The Finding of Moses, though popular, was predictably muted. The Times, while praising the 'unsurpassable' larkspurs and other 'wonderful accessories,' had general reservations, and the Athenaeum was almost insultingly patronizing. Within a few years, critics of the Roger Fry school would be declaring the art of Alma-Tadema irrelevant, with the result that he fell dramatically out of favor.
This change is reflected in the history of The Finding of Moses. Aird paid 5000 guineas for it in 1904, but when it left his family in 1935 it made only 820 guineas, and the executors of its next owner, the mustard magnate Sit Jeremiah Colman, sold it for 260 guineas in 1942. The nadir of its fortunes was reached in 1960, when the London dealers, Newman's, were trying to sell it for a client. A story has gained currency that it was bought for its frame and the painting itself 'dumped in an alley in St. James's' (The Times, March 9, 1995). As Bernard Hart, a director of Newman's at the time, has pointed out (The Times, March 21, 1995), this is not correct, but his story of how he tried in vain to find a museum to take the picture as a gift is hardly less depressing. In fact the picture was only to come into its own again when it went to New York and was sold to Allen Funt, of Candid Camera fame, joining the great collection of Alma-Tadema's work which he began to form in the 1960s and exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 1973. Funt sold it in London later that year, when it was bought by the present owner.
It is probably no accident that the picture finally found appreciation in the context of entertainment. As several modern critics have pointed out, most notably Mario Amaya in 'The Painter who inspired Hollywood', an article published in the Sunday Times Magazine, February 18, 1968, the true heirs to Alma-Tadema's pictures are not other paintings but the products of the epic film industry -- blockbusters such as D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. De Mille's Cleopatra (1934) and The Ten Commandments (1956), the script-writers and designers for which are known to have studied pictures like The Finding of Moses. Alma-Tadema, who loved a joke, would have been amused to know that a style which according to the pundits was utterly without significance in the history of modern painting should prove to be a potent source of inspiration for what many would argue is the most vital art-form of the twentieth century.
We are grateful to Professor Vern G. Swanson, Director of the Springville Museum of Art, Utah, for his assistance in preparing this entry.