Lot 61: Matthew Ridley Corbet, ARA (British 1850-1902)

Classical maidens
signed with monogram and dated '1876-9' (lower left), inscribed 'Begun in 1876/finished in 1879/MRC' on the reverse
oil on canvas
61 x 147 cm. (24 x 58 in.)
unframed

Watts, Mary Seton, Catalogue of G. F. Watt's works, Watts Gallery Archive, p.30.
(2)

Newell, Christopher, The Etruscans: Painters of the Italian Landscape 1850-1900,
Exhibition Catalogue, 1989, p. 16.
(3)

Ibid, p. 38.

Educated at Cheltenham College and originally destined for a military career, Matthew Ridley Corbet was instead apprenticed to the painter Alexander Davis Cooper, before studying at the Slade and the RA schools. He went on to work for George Frederick Watts as a studio assistant, and it is recorded that on 'the largest of the canvases upon which the Court of Death... was painted, Mr. Matthew Corbett [sic] laid in the design in Terra verte and white some time early in the seventies' (1). This bears testament to the high regard in which Watts held the artist.

Corbet's first calling was towards portraiture, and he exhibited four portraits at the Royal Academy between 1875-79. However, an encounter with Giovanni Costa and Frederic Leighton in Perugia in 1878 was to have a significant effect on the artist's work. Costa, who had similarly enlightened Leighton's attitude towards landscape painting, was father of the school of painters known as the Etruscans, which was founded in 1878. The group, which included William Blake Richmond and George Howard, sought inspiration from the beauty of the Tuscan landscape. According to Christopher Newall, 'the essential principle of Etruscan painting is concerned with the careful distillation of sentiment, that quality which moves a painter to the emotional rendition of a subject or association in a painting with which a viewer may identify or sympathise' (2). Corbet, who worked with the group from 1880 to 1884, was to become Costa's 'closest artistic confederate' (3). The school found a forum for exhibiting their work at the Grosvenor and the New Galleries in London, as well as in Italy. In 1891 Corbet married the American painter Edith Murch, who was already working with Costa in Italy.

Painted between 1876 and 1879, while Corbet was still exhibiting portraits at the Royal Academy, the present lot shows the influence of the classical subjects which artists such as Leighton, Albert Joseph Moore and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema were exhibiting at the academies. In works such as Leighton's Greek girls picking up pebbles by the sea (1871, RA exhibit) we see a similar portrayal of classical maidens with the Mediterranean coast acting as a backdrop. In Classical Maidens we see the eight beauties informally arranged in a line, one bending to fasten a loose shoelace, another sitting to arrange her hair. The orange groves beyond the marble wall and the bright blue Mediterranean sea are reminiscent of Corbet's 1883 RA exhibit In the sacred grove. Corbet continued to exhibit at the RA throughout his career, and late in his life, two of his works were purchased by the Chantrey Bequest, one of which, Val d'Arno: Evening, is a typically evocative representation of the Tuscan landscape. Both works are in the collection of the Tate Gallery.

Notes:
(1)