Lot 44: Vates

Charles Edward Hallé (1846-1914) Vates signed 'C.E. Hallé' (on the step) oil on canvas 60 x 31 in. (150 x 76.2 cm.)

Possibly London, New Gallery, 1889, no. 46.

This is either a version of a larger work, or a fragment of the work itself. It corresponds to the left-hand side of Vates, (The Seer, or Prophet), a picture exhibited by Hallé at the New Gallery in 1889 with the following couplet in the catalogue:

'Seek not to fathom what is best unknown,
Nor lift with prying hand the veil of Fate'.

The New Gallery picture included a second, older woman on the right, presumably a seeker of the oracle's advice, while a brazier is seen in the foreground. The full composition is illustrated in outline in Henry Blackburn's Academy Sketches, 1889.

Hallé was born in Paris, the son of Sir Charles Hallé, the pianist and conductor, and came to England with his parents around the time of the revolution in 1848. His earliest teachers were Richard Doyle (a lifelong friend) and Baron Marochetti. He then entered the Royal Academy schools, and at the age of 16 spent a year in Paris, studying under Ingres's pupil Victor Mottez. When his health broke down he went on to travel in Italy, where he seems to have been particularly responsive to the neo-classical and Nazarene tradition in Rome. In 1867 he spent a year in Venice, a city which he claimed 'captivated me, and laid a spell on me which I have never quite shaken off'. Back in London Hallé met Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and in 1877 he and Joseph Comyns Carr assisted Sir Coutts Lindsay in the founding of the Grosvenor Gallery, to show the work of the more advanced artists of the day. It immediately became the flagship of the Aesthetic Movement. When disputes arose over the running of the Grosvenor, Hallé and Carr withdrew and, with the support of Burne-Jones and other luminaries, opened the New Gallery in Regent Street in 1888.

Hallé continued to paint, exhibiting regularly at the Grosvenor and New Galleries, but he is remembered chiefly for the key part he played in these ventures, with their commitment to innovative art, their amibitious and wide ranging winter exhibitions, and above all their revolutionary approach to display.

The composition of the present picture is strongly reminiscent of Reynolds's Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which Hallé would have seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Reynolds's composition in turn ultimately derives from the figure of Isaiah by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which Hallé would also have seen on his travels.