Lot 112: Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, ARWS (Canadian, 1859-1912) First Love

Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, ARWS (Canadian, 1859-1912) First Love
First Love
signed with monogram (lower left)
pastel
88.3 x 58.4cm (34 3/4 x 23in).

Footnotes

• Provenance
  The Fine Art Society, London, November 1980.
  Private collection, UK (acquired from the above).
  
  Exhibited
  London, New English Art Club, 1887, no. 2.
  London, The Fine Art Society, The Rustic Image, Rural Themes in British Painting, 1880-1912, 1979, no. 4 (titled Young Boy with a Rabbit in a Basket).
  
  Literature
  Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', 1887 (illustrated p. 88).
  Judith Cook, Melissa Hardie and Christiania Payne, Singing from the Walls, the Life and Art of Elizabeth Forbes, Bristol, 2000, no. 4.88, p. 180 (work is listed as a painting and the subject: 'young man carrying a basket to/from a young woman for whom he has romantic feelings').
  
  'They have not treated you very well, dearest ...' wrote Stanhope Forbes to his fiancé, Elizabeth Armstrong, on 27 April 1887.υ1 He was referring to the hanging committee of the New English Art Club exhibition which had placed Armstrong's pastel, First Love, 'high up' on the wall. For readers of the Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', in which it was reproduced, there was no mistaking the picture (fig 1).
  
  The consolation for Elizabeth, as Forbes reported, was that looking round the show, this was one of the few pictures that had been sold. Touring the other spring exhibitions with his old student friend, Henry Herbert La Thangue, he reported that Elizabeth had fared rather better in the Society of British Artists where her works were hung at eye level, although his companion questioned why they all were so low in tone.
  
  Armstrong at this point was in a dilemma. She was influenced by Whistler, was friendly with Walter and Ellen Sickert, and yet was being pulled ever closer to Forbes and his circle of Newlyn painters.υ2 Despite having moved to Cornwall she was still spending time in London. In 1887 at the New English, and elsewhere, the factions were forming. The members of the club were mostly painters of peasants and fisherfolk based in London, the Home Counties and Cornwall, with some input from leaders of the Glasgow School, and they all revered the rural Naturalism of the Paris Salon, especially that of its master, the recently deceased Jules Bastien-Lepage. In 1887, after their ejection from the British Artists, Whistler's followers, led by Sickert, would infiltrate and eventually capture the club. These painters later declared themselves 'London Impressionists'. However, at this point, all were still speaking to one another, and the formidable force was the emergent Newlyn School in which Forbes was jockeying for leadership. With his eye on success at the Royal Academy, he was increasingly critical of the club and anxious, at the same time, to maintain his relationship with the talented Miss Armstrong to whom he was engaged to be married. While personal relationships and shifting allegiances in London art politics should not be ignored when considering a picture of a country lad with his pet rabbit, what does this important early pastel have to tell us?
  
  The picture is highly significant in several ways. Firstly, its subject and style position Armstrong firmly in the New English mainstream.υ3 Placing First Love beside Lepage's Pas Mèche, 1882 or Clausen's Shepherd Boy, 1883 (private collection), there is obvious kinship of subject, palette and format (fig 2). Yet where Lepage's boy is positively aggressive, Armstrong's is all innocence and tenderness – sentiments we find in pictures of children by other club luminaries such as Fred Brown, Walter Osborne and Blandford Fletcher.
  
  Secondly, the use of pastel at this point, could in itself be regarded as 'French' and therefore revolutionary. Indeed it would be tempting to assume that Armstrong must have been influenced by Degas's pastels, if the visual evidence did not suggest otherwise.υ4 As Clausen and others had already discovered, the medium was well-suited to on-the-spot observational drawing. Working at close quarters with a model in a country lane, one had to anchor the figure and establish the space around it, avoiding distortion or disproportion. Crucially, Armstrong's boy is observed from a standing position, at close quarters, giving the impression of a direct encounter.υ5 At the same time, in her case, one had to give a sense of movement as the boy carefully reveals the prized pet he has tamed. While all this is far from Degas's dancers and Whistler's light pastel sketches of classical figures, it was thoroughly acceptable in Newlyn, where Armstrong would have found stylish single figure subjects by Edwin Harris, Fred Hall and Chevalier Tayler – some represented on country roads.
  
  La Thangue however, wondered why Armstrong's work was so low in tone. Did he not appreciate that the Newlyn painters favoured grey days when light levels were more consistent? Or was he not aware of Whistler's insistence on tonal harmony? La Thangue was of course well aware of both factors, and with a moment's thought he might have conceded that in adding sunshine to her pastel, Armstrong would destroy its resonance, and distract from that object of desire which is the country boy's first love. There would be time for sunny scenes later. For the present, all eyes are on the carefully modelled figure and the quiescent creature in his basket.
  
  We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
  
  υ1 Hyman Kreitman Archive, Tate. Elizabeth Knowles, Stanhope Forbes, Father of the Newlyn School, 2017 (Sansom & Co), p. 37, indicates that Elizabeth's work was 'well on the line', quoting the same letter. This mis-reading confuses the New English Art Club exhibition at the Dudley Gallery in Piccadilly, with the Society of British Artists show at Suffolk Street.
  υ2 Armstrong first became aware of Forbes while in Brittany in 1882, but they did not actually meet until her visit to Newlyn with her mother near the end of 1885; Caroline Fox and Francis Greenacre, Painting in Newlyn 1880-1930, 1985 (Exhibition catalogue, Barbican Art Gallery, London), pp. 77-78.
  υ3 Cook, Hardie and Payne list this work as a painting and surmise that the 'young man is carrying a basket to a young woman for whom he has romantic feelings'.
  υ4 Being friendly with the Sickerts must have meant that Armstrong was able to admire the remarkable use of pastel by Degas. Ellen Cobden Sickert had recently purchased Degas's pastel Danceuse Verte, c. 1880 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid).
  υ5 As in other works of this type, La Thangue's Return from the Fields 1886 (Tate), or Clausen's Stonepickers, 1887 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne) for instance, the foreground steeply tilts to a high horizon.