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Lot Essay
The original, oil version of this well-known satire on the Pre-Raphaelites was exhibited at the Portland Gallery in the spring 1860 and was subsequently engraved, appearing in the Illustrated London News on 2 June. There are also at least four watercolour versions all differing in detail from each other and from the oil. Twelve years since the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, the movement still aroused intense controversy and was the subject of jokes and ridicule in the press, such as Frederick Sandys’ celebrated engraving The Nightmare (1857) and George du Maurier’s Legend of Camelot, published in Punch in 1866.
Florence and her sister Adelaide were the daughters of Marshall Claxton, a minor painter of historical and biblical subjects. Florence exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere and was also a prolific illustrator of books and periodicals, much of her work appearing in a weekly paper called London Society.
Claxton based her satire on one of the most familiar subjects in classical mythology, the beauty contest in which the shepherd Paris awards a golden apple, to Venus, thus arousing the fury of her rivals, Juno and Minerva, and precipitating the Trojan War. In a room on the left, John Everett Millais, is seen presenting an apple to a grotesquely scrawny, red-haired Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’. Behind him a second painter examines the feet of another, equally hideous female model, while two more gaze at her with rapt adoration. References to Ruskin abound; the room is replete with details suggestive of Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience; portraits of Raphael, Van Dyck and Reynolds are hung with their faces to the wall; and an apostle from one of the Raphael Cartoons is shown the door.
The ivy-covered wall separating the interior from the landscape is of a type that features in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, a reference which is emphasised by the depiction of an artist carefully studying the brickwork through opera glasses. The landscape contains figures from Pre-Raphaelite paintings exhibited during the 1850s: Millais’ Blind Girl, Sir Isumbras, Vale of Rest and Spring, Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat, John Brett’s Stonebreaker, W. L. Windus’s Burd Helen, and others. The blossom seen at the far right is a reference to Ruskin’s injunction to artists to study this as it appears against a blue spring sky, made in his Academy Notes of 1858.
Florence and her sister Adelaide were the daughters of Marshall Claxton, a minor painter of historical and biblical subjects. Florence exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere and was also a prolific illustrator of books and periodicals, much of her work appearing in a weekly paper called London Society.
Claxton based her satire on one of the most familiar subjects in classical mythology, the beauty contest in which the shepherd Paris awards a golden apple, to Venus, thus arousing the fury of her rivals, Juno and Minerva, and precipitating the Trojan War. In a room on the left, John Everett Millais, is seen presenting an apple to a grotesquely scrawny, red-haired Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’. Behind him a second painter examines the feet of another, equally hideous female model, while two more gaze at her with rapt adoration. References to Ruskin abound; the room is replete with details suggestive of Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience; portraits of Raphael, Van Dyck and Reynolds are hung with their faces to the wall; and an apostle from one of the Raphael Cartoons is shown the door.
The ivy-covered wall separating the interior from the landscape is of a type that features in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, a reference which is emphasised by the depiction of an artist carefully studying the brickwork through opera glasses. The landscape contains figures from Pre-Raphaelite paintings exhibited during the 1850s: Millais’ Blind Girl, Sir Isumbras, Vale of Rest and Spring, Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat, John Brett’s Stonebreaker, W. L. Windus’s Burd Helen, and others. The blossom seen at the far right is a reference to Ruskin’s injunction to artists to study this as it appears against a blue spring sky, made in his Academy Notes of 1858.