Lot 472: English School, mid 19th Century

Touchstone and Corin (?) oil on canvas 36 x 24 in. (91.3 x 60.8 cm.) NOTES The picture clearly shows Pre-Raphaelite influence, and would appear to date from the mid to late 1850s. The Brotherhood had been launched in 1848, and despite the harsh criticism levelled at its earliest productions by the critics, it soon gained adherents and it is commonplace to find an artist adopting the style at this period. The subject of the present picture is uncertain, but one possibility is the dialogue between the jester Touchstone and the elderly shepherd Corin in the Forest of Arden ( As You Like It, Act III, scene 2). As You Like It was a popular literary source in Pre-Raphaelite circles, inspiring such artists as John Everett Millais, Walter Howell Deverell and Arthur Hughes. The present picture is comparable in style to the work of Edward W. Rainford, as well as to the early productions of the better-known Henry Stacy Marks (1829-1898), with whom Rainford was associated. The artists were fellow students in the early 1850s at the art school kept by James Matthews Leigh at 79 Newman Street, Bloomsbury. Both specialised at this period in Shakespearian themes, and both adopted the Pre-Raphaelite style at its most quirky and mannered. Stacy Marks' picture Hamlet, Horatio and Osric, shown at the National Institution in 1854 and sold at Christie's in London on 8 November 1996, lot 69, makes a good comparison, as does Rainford's Hotspur and the Courtier (Forbes Magazine Collection; see Shakespeare in Western Art, exhibition circulated in Japan by the Tokyo Shimbun, 1992-3, no. 70, reproduced in catalogue), an illustration to Henry IV, Part 1 which was exhibited at the British Institution in 1852. This was described in the Athenaeum as 'the worst example' of the Pre-Raphaelite 'mania' to be found in the exhibition. 'There could not be a more effectual comment on the absurdity of the practice...', the writer continued, 'It is a caricature on the extravagant theories of the school, - a censure on those who would elevate it into consideration, - a libel on even the illuminated page of the medieval missal which it affects to imitate'. Our picture might well have invited the same kind of comment, so typical of the blind hostility which Pre-Raphaelitism was capable of arousing in the early 1850s.