Notes
A MASTERPIECE FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF CORNWALL, TRURO
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Ernest Normand and his wife Henrietta Rae were exponents of an international style that reflected their partial training abroad. The greatest example of this phenomenon was Frederic, Lord Leighton, who had enjoyed an exhaustive apprenticeship in almost every capital in Europe in the 1840s and '50s; but following his election as president of the Royal Academy in 1878, many young artists who had studied initially in the RA Schools went on to complete their education in Paris or elsewhere. Normand and Rae went in 1890, spending several months at the Académie Julian in Paris, working under two of its best-known teachers, Jules Lefèbvre and Benjamin Constant, before joining an international circle of young artists, most of them experimenting with degrees of impressionism, at Grez, near Fontainebleau. Friends and contemporaries of the pair who followed a similar course included Arthur Hacker, H.H. La Thangue, Stanhope Forbes, Herbert Draper and Solomon J. Solomon, whose masterpiece Eve was sold in these Rooms on 16 December 2009 (lot 27).
One of Normand's largest and most ambitious works, Bondage was exhibited at the RA in 1895, when he was thirty-eight. Though born in London, he had been sent to Germany at the age of thirteen to receive a formal education and study commercial law. Returning to England in 1876, he entered his father's office, but his interest in art had been aroused in Germany and during the next few years he attended evening classes at the St Martin's School of Art while drawing from the antique in the British Museum. By 1880 he had decided to become an artist and entered the RA Schools. His first contribution to the summer exhibition, a 'study' representing Sorrow, was made the following year.
In view of Normand's devotion to historical subjects, it is interesting that the teacher who particularly encouraged him at the RA Schools was the Scotsman John Pettie, a specialist in historical genre in a bold and fluent style who had been an Academician since 1873. But such themes had always been central to the academic tradition, even if they were at long last going out of fashion, and Normand's mentors included many exponents. His teachers at Burlington House included the leading Academicians, while Leighton's influence pervaded the whole culture within which his art education was unfolding. In 1884 he and Henrietta Rae, who had met as students a decade earlier, eventually married, and the following year they took a studio in Holland Park Road, Kensington, at the heart of the artistic community over which Leighton presided with Olympian aplomb. It must have seemed a good career move at the time, and the couple did indeed enjoy close relations with Leighton, Val Prinsep, G.F. Watts and other local luminaries, all of whom took a keen interest in their work and showered them with advice. Eventually so much supervision, however well-intentioned, proved irksome, and in 1893 the couple moved to Upper Norwood, building themselves a glass-walled studio conducive to the plein air effects they had sought to capture since their stay at Grez. However, they still looked to Leighton for advice, and in the last years of his life they joined him in painting murals illustrating scenes from English history in the Royal Exchange in the City of London. Normand chose to paint King John signing Magna Carta and Rae The Charities of Sir Richard Whittington, the medieval mayor of London who was famous for his philanthropy no less than for his cat.
Bondage was painted soon after the move to Norwood, but Normand had been interested in the theme of the female slave trade long before that. In fact he had already treated it in at least two earlier pictures shown at the RA, The Bitter Draught of Slavery of 1885 (fig. 1) and An Alien, which followed in 1894. What was new about Bondage was its enormous scale. Perhaps the artist felt liberated by the larger studio that he and Rae had built at their new home. On the other hand, the picture seems to have been conceived as a sort of pendant to an equally colossal canvas that Rae completed at Norwood but started before they left Holland Park Road. Her picture, Psyche before the Throne of Venus, also treated the theme of woman's ignominious subjection. It was shown at the RA in 1894, a year before Bondage, and bought by that great late Victorian collector George McCulloch.
The subject of women sold into slavery, or simply bound or chained, fascinated the Victorians. The roots of the phenomenon were probably complex and have certainly been widely sought: in imperialism, the developing study of ethnology, widespread concern about white slavery and child prostitution, and of course the sexual allure of the images and the prurience they arouse. The subject is discussed by Richard Jenkyns in Dignity and Decadence: Victorian art and the Classical Inheritance, London, 1991, pp. 26-30, 115 ff, and by Alison Smith in her account of Bondage in the Exposed exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2001.
Whether Normand's commitment to the theme had any particular motive or simply showed his keen eye to a ready market, he must have been aware of the iconographical tradition within which he was working. It is no accident that some of the earliest treatments were in sculpture, when the artist could exploit the licence allowed him by the conventions of the medium: white marble, neoclassical form, and so on. The Greek Slave by the American Hiram Powers was one of the most famous statues of the day. Unveiled in London as early as 1845, it reappeared at the Great Exhibition six years later. Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously praised it for its 'passionless perfection', and it achieved widespread popularity through a variety of Parian versions on a reduced scale. It also inspired comparable works by the English sculptor John Bell, which again were much reproduced by Minton's for the domestic market.
But it was not long before the field was being colonised by painters. Many of them presented their protagonists in the acceptable context of classical legend or medieval romance, thus combining, as William Michael Rossetti put it, 'ancient fact and modern innuendo'. Between 1870 and 1891 Poynter, Leighton and Burne-Jones all treated the theme of Andromeda chained to her rock, while knights rescuing bound maidens were painted by Millais (1870), Dicksee (1885) and others. Normand must often have seen these productions at the RA or its more progressive rivals, the Grosvenor and New Galleries.
But the picture which perhaps impressed him most did not attempt to cloak bondage in mythic form; on the contrary, it positively revelled in its anecdotal possibilities, and 'modern innuendo' was almost all too evident. Edwin Long's Babylonian Marriage Market (fig. 2), illustrating a passage in Herodotus which describes how girls of marriageable age were auctioned off to would-be husbands, caused a sensation when it appeared at the RA in 1875. Enormous in scale and still generally considered the artist's masterpiece, it was the undisputed picture of the year. Crowds flocked to see it, and critics vied with one another to sing its praises and show off their erudition with long accounts of the subject and detailed descriptions of how it had been rendered on canvas. Long's election to associate membership of the RA was confidently predicted, and indeed followed a year later.
Normand was still a law student in Germany when this excitement occurred, but news of it may well have reached him. In any case, he would have had another chance to see the picture when, following the death of its first owner, the Lancashire cotton master and East India merchant Edward Hermon, it came up for sale at Christie's on 13 May 1882. Hermon's was one of the most important collections of academic paintings to be formed in the mid-Victorian period, and its dispersal aroused great interest, 'some thousands of persons', according to the Times, viewing it at Christie's King Street premises. Speculation about the Babylonian Marriage Market, the most famous picture in the sale, was particularly intense, and hopes for a good price were not disappointed. 'Loud cheering' broke out when the hammer fell at 6,300 guineas, a saleroom record for a work by a modern British artist that was not to be broken until Landseer's Monarch of the Glen changed hands for 6,900 guineas, again at Christie's, in 1892. Normand could hardly have had a more graphic demonstration of how successful an enormous painting on the theme of enslaved women could be.
The reverse of that theme was the concept of the femme fatale, woman as predatory vampire, that enjoyed such a phenomenal vogue during the Symbolist period. As the phrase suggests, this was particularly the case in France, so it is no surprise that the victimisation of women found pictorial expression there too. The name that leaps to mind in this context is that of Jean-Léon Gérôme, to whose edgy, unsettling vision the subject was perfectly tailored (fig. 3). As it happens, two versions of his composition A Vendre, showing naked women offered for sale in Cairo, were exhibited in London in the early 1870s, one at the RA in 1871, the other two years later at Ernest Gambart's French Gallery in Pall Mall. Normand was perhaps too young to have seen them but when he went to study in Paris in 1890 he would have encountered accounts of harems and female enslavement on an almost daily basis. Benjamin Constant, one of his teachers at Julian's, had visited Morocco in 1872 in the entourage of the French ambassador to the Sultan. Fascinated by the country, he remained two years, and on his return established himself as a leading Orientalist painter. Harem and other subjects, full of eastern beauties, were his stock in trade, while his Pigalle studio was encrusted with picturesque Moroccan artefacts collected on his travels. All this must have made a big impression on Normand. It was almost certainly Constant who advised him to visit Morocco himself in 1891, and the master's influence on his subsequent work is often apparent. Bondage is a key example, not only in terms of its subject matter but the 'open' composition, with its multiple points of focus across the rectangular canvas. The reviewer in the Times recognised as much; his description of the picture is a 'vast exercise in the manner of Benjamin Constant, is highly appropriate.
Crucial as the experience of Constant's atelier must have been for Normand, it should not be forgotten that he had painted his Bitter Draught of Slavery (fig. 1), a major tribute to the theme of captive womanhood, a full five years before he went to Paris. That picture, moreover, had been exhibited at just about the time that he joined the Holland Park circle of artists gathered round Leighton, and belongs to a group of large canvases showing women as victims of humiliation or violence which this coterie produced in the late 1880s.
Leighton's own all-important offering was Captive Andromache (Fig. 4), the enormous processional painting, arguably his masterpiece, that he showed at the RA in 1888. This moving account of the fate of Hector's widow, carried off as a trophy to Thessaly by the son of Achilles, her husband's slayer, was on the easel for well over a year, and Normand must have watched its progress almost from the moment he became Leighton's neighbour in 1885. It would probably not have inspired The Bitter Draught, exhibited that spring, although it is perhaps worth noting that Leighton had been contemplating Captive Andromache since the early 1870s; but at least it would have confirmed a pre-existing penchant for this type of subject. Like Long's Babylonian Marriage Market, it would also have shown that it could be treated on a heroic scale, a lesson that dramatically bore fruit in Bondage.
Meanwhile two contemporaries of Normand's who had settled near him in Holland Park Road were making their own contribution to the genre. Herbert Schmalz, Normand's senior by a year, had taken a studio there in 1880, and in 1888, the year of Captive Andromache, he sent his Faithful unto Death: 'Christianae and Leones!' to the RA (fig. 5). Sold in these Rooms on 28 November 2000 (lot 55), this gruesome picture shows a row of naked girls, each chained to a post, awaiting death by being eaten by lions in the Coliseum at Rome, a type of subject which, as critics noted at the time, had been much treated by Gérôme. This picture is not only exactly contemporary with Captive Andromache but has a logistical connection; the sitter for the foremost girl seems to be one of the Pullan sisters who were among Leighton's favourite models, possibly Edith, the second eldest, who married Schmalz in 1889. But whereas Leighton sublimates the theme of victimhood, making it the pretext for an idealised vision of the ancient world, Schmalz emphasises its most horrific and sadistic aspects. In all three of his own treatments Normand steers a middle course between these two extremes.
The other artist who offers meaningful comparisons is Solomon J. Solomon, a man four years younger than Normand who arrived in Holland Park Road in 1887. During his ten-year residence Solomon more than played his part in the production of large subject pictures with women taking central roles, although he kept his options open. Ajax and Cassandra (1886; Ballarat, Australia) has been aptly described as 'one of the most violent rape scenes of the century'. On the other hand Sampson (1887; Liverpool) turns the tables completely, casting Delilah as a femme fatale of the most vindictive kind. Solomon's relationship with Normand is particularly interesting since he had preceded him to Paris in 1879, working not at Julian's but under Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Moreover, half-way through his tutelage (he left Paris in 1883) he had visited Morocco with his friend Arthur Hacker. Hearing Solomon reminisce about these experiences may well have encouraged Normand to follow a similar path a decade later, even if Constant rekindled his desire to visit Morocco.
Although Bondage was painted shortly after Normand had left the claustrophobic milieu of Holland Park Road, it may be seen as a late example of the 'woman as victim' pictures that emanated from Leighton's circle at this period. What is interesting is that, being so late, it reflects not only the ethos of Holland Park but the experience of working with Benjamin Constant, thus giving fused expression to these two powerful influences.
When Bondage appeared at the RA, F.G. Stephens, the veteran art critic on the Athenaeum, described it as representing 'the inspection of native slaves by a pseudo-Oriental potentate'. Normand, he wrote, 'was desirous of succeeding to the popularity of the late Mr Long' (Long had died in 1891), but whereas the older artist had 'carefully let us know (whether) he meant Egypt of Assyria', Normand 'leaves us in the dark as to the identity of his monarch'.
This is not strictly true. As Alison Smith has observed, the scene is clearly set in ancient Egypt. True, the picture is 'essentially a historical fantasy', but its image of Egypt as 'sensual, material and slave-owning' owes much to Old Testament stories of Joseph and the Exodus. The canvas is in a magnificent purpose-built frame, and Smith quotes an unpublished manuscript by N.H. Nail which argues that 'references to Rameses II in the cartouches' and the 'winged sun disk with cobras' are 'relevant to the subject since Rameses was widely regarded in the nineteenth century as the Pharaoh of oppression and the Exodus'. Symbols of Egyptian royal power, she adds, are also found in the picture itself, 'with the statues of the lion-headed goddess copied from sculpture in the British Museum and the montage of temple, pylon and obelisk in the distance'.
In fact Normand had covered this ground before in his painting The Death of the Firstborn, shown at the RA in 1889, in which a distraught Pharaoh is seen leaving his son's deathbed while his womenfolk comfort the dying infant, a priest seeks divine intervention, and slaves look on. Although the picture seems to be lost, an old photograph exists and it is clear that in some respects it anticipated Bondage, introducing similar buildings in the background and making bold compositional use of an awning stretched across the upper part of the picture to shield the figures from the baking sun.
The statues in Bondage copied from ones in the British Museum tell us much about the artist's sources. His early studies in the Museum would have familiarised him with its treasures, but Smith suggests that he may have looked further afield. He might, for example, have known of the work of Gaston Maspero, the French director-general of excavations in Egypt in the 1880s, or Flinders Petrie's seminal History of Egypt(1894), not to mention 'the numerous travel guides issued at a time when Egypt was a British protectorate'. There was of course nothing new in a painter making use of archaeological evidence in this way. Edward Poynter had done so to dramatic effect when painting his panoramic Israel in Egypt (1867; Guildhall Art Gallery, London), and Alma-Tadema had drawn the ruins of Pompeii when visiting Italy in 1863-4, as well as relying heavily on photographs for his elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world, whether set in Roman times or biblical Egypt. Normand was following a path well trodden by artists whose work would have been familiar to him from exhibitions and who had probably taught him in the RA schools.
The present picture was bought for the considerable sum of 1,200 gns by Christopher Henry Hawkins, a wealthy diplomat and collector who had a London house, 10 Portland Place, and a magnificent country seat in Cornwall. Trewithen House, built to designs by the London architect Tomas Edwards, is one of the country's finest eighteenth-century buildings. The Hawkins family had owned it since 1715 and it is still in their possession, having passed down through ten generations. No doubt it provided Christopher Hawkins with the space to house Normand's colossal canvas, but the picture can never have fitted easily into an eighteenth-century setting and in 1909 he widow gave it to the Royal Institution of Cornwall, where it has remained to this day. Overlooked during the long period of eclipse from which Victorian painting suffered in the twentieth century, it returned to the spotlight in 2001 when it provided a dramatic finale to the Tate Gallery's survey of the nude in Victorian art, provocatively entitled Exposed.
In addition to the present lot, The Royal Institution of Cornwall will deaccession Herbert James Draper's masterpiece The Seamaiden, which will be offered in the upcoming sale of Victorian and British Impressionist pictures on the 16th of June 2010 as lot 168. Please see pages 66-67 in the printed catalogue. The full catalogue entry is available on www.christies.com.
