Lot 15: f - Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A. 1833-1898 , a woodland nymph oil on canvas

signed and dated l.l.: P H Calderon - 1883 oil on canvas

measurements note 66.5 by 43.5 cm., 26 1/4 by 17 1/4 in.

London, Frost and Reed;
Christie's, 27 May 1992, lot 224;
Private collection

Philip Hermogenes Calderon is perhaps the best-known and most versatile of the group of painters known as the St John's Wood Clique. He was born at Poitiers, with a French mother and a father who is said to have been a renegade Spanish priest who became a Professor of Spanish Literature at King College in London. In 1850 Calderon became a student at Leigh's private drawing academy on Newman Street in Bloomsbury and a year later he went to Paris to continue his studies. His earliest exhibits at the Royal Academy show a marked PreRaphaelite influence, particularly Broken Vows of 1857 (Tate Britain), the success of which made the artist's name and By the Waters of Babylon of 1852 (Tate Britain). In 1864 Calderon became an Associate of the Royal Academy aged only thirty-one and was made a full member three years later. It was not only in England that Calderon's work was appreciated, for at the Paris exhibition of 1867 he obtained the first medal given to an English artist, and the ribbon to the Legion d'Honeur. In later years Calderon painted a series of religious pictures which now appear rather daring, including St Elizabeth of Hungary's Great Act of Renunciation of 1891 (Tate Britain) in which the young saint is stripped naked and kneeling at a church altar. It may have been Calderon's experience as a student in Paris and his exhibition of pictures at the Salon where artists were given more licence to paint the naked human figure, that encouraged him to paint nude subjects.

In the 1880s Calderon was preoccupied with the subject of women bathing and painted several pictures of nubile young maidens robing or disrobing at the side of pools within forest glades. Examples include The Virgin's Bower of 1870 in which women are gathering water at a stream and Joyous Summer, Pleasant it was When the Woods were Green which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882 and depicts Grecian girls gossipping while reattiring after bathing. The present picture illustrates the words of John Keat's poem Hyperion; 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale. Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn/ Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star'. Although the subject of the painting was suggested, or is emphasised by, the lines from Hyperion it is not an illustration of the scene in which the usurped Titan Hyperion is led by his sister Thea to a glade where the other Titans sit in melancholy despair lamenting their loss of their battle with the Olympians. The painting is essentially an academic study of feminine beauty but with an added suggestion of ancient mythology and contemporary poetry. The pose of the dryad nymph is similar to traditional depictions of the goddess Aphrodite Anadyonome arranging her hair after rising from the ocean whilst the setting of a woodland glade suggests that the girl may be an oread or naiad water nymph.

This picture is contained in a fine English gilded frame c.1800.