The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship (198 5), 4, 1 SS- 172

Nineteenth Century English Picture Frames

I: The Pre-Raphaelites

LYNN ROBERTS

The exhibition held in the Tate Gallery, London, in 1984 was an unusually large and splendid collection of paintings connected with Pre-Raphaelitism-so much so, that anyone visiting it might be forgiven for having failed to notice the number of equally unusual frames it contained. It was, in fact, a show-case for many of the artists’ own designs for their frames: an opportunity

to study another, lesser-known movement of the mid to late nineteenth century; to see the return of many painters to individually conceived, craftsman-produced methods of framing; and to compare them with the mass-produced and gimcrack composition mouldings against which the artists were reacting. The early nineteenth century was, in England, a very low point in the history of picture-framing. The large core of traditional patterns which had emerged from the designs of three previous centuries had, by the time of Victoria’s coronation, contracted to a small number of well-worn conventionalized forms. English frame design was almost totally derivative, the main styles being French Baroque and Rococo patterns, ‘name frames’ (e.g. ‘Carlo Maratta’ and ‘Morland’), and a few variable patterns built from combinations of stock ornaments. Looking-glass frames added a classical Renaissance strain, and neoclassical designs (again from French prototypes) had some currency.

Victorian frames tended, moreover, to be debased both in workmanship and propriety: instead of carving, flimsy deal ‘overlaid by a species of composition moulded into wretched forms’ ,’ with brassy gilding lacking in depth, and mouldings chosen for their superficial opulence rather than their suitability. Paintings of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century interiors show a universal preference for the ‘traditional’ swept gilt frame,2 and the means for cheap and rapid manufacture provided by new technological processes favoured the continuance of this ‘tradition’. The Carver and Gilder’s Guide, a trade manual of the early 1870s, noted that:

Within the last quarter of a century, moulding manufactories have sprung up in London, and in some of the principal towns of England; and in such demand have been Picture Frame Mouldings, that the engineer has produced a machine that, by the aid of steam power, will turn out an enormous amount of work.’

The products of these factories were lengths of pressed wooden mouldings, completely finished or ‘covered in whitening ready for the gilder’, while cheap pine replaced the quality ‘carver’s woods’, and composition, with its imitations of intricate carvings, spread like a fungal growth, concealing poor-quality workmanship. Papier mache provided an alternative form of inexpensive ornament, and even gilding suffered, through the growing use of base-metal leaf, gold paint, and th e oil-based method-less costly in terms of time than water-gilding but also less lustrous and prone to darken.

The artists themselves were often caught between the need to economize and the knowledge, for instance, that there was no substitute for the pure gold which lighted a picture and provided

0260-4779/&X5/02 0155-18 103.00 0 1985 Butterworth &Co (Publishers) Lrd

156 English Picture Frames: The Pre-Raphaelites

a foil for the colour. Rossetti’s experiments with silver cuffs may have been as much due to his financial state as anything else, and certainly his and Ford Madox Brown’s revival of the old Northern custom of laying gold leaf directly onto wood was both economic and very influential. Sir Charles Eastlake preferred the effect to conventional gilding. His book of the 186Os, Hints on Household Taste, was directed to a reconciliation of decorative art, function and popular taste, and in his discussion of framing for a domestic setting he remarks that, ‘The effect of oak-grain seen through leaf-gold is exceedingly good, and the appearance of texture thus produced is infinitely more interesting than the smooth monotony of gilt compo’.4

From the 1860s there was an increasing use of gilded wood in framing, and thus economic necessity could also have some beneficial effect in combating the general tendency towards cheap materials and methods of mass production. When the artists themselves began to experiment with frame design-tentatively in the late 184Os, and with increasing enthusiasm through the 185Os-both economics and the current mediocrity of framing were influences upon them. Other factors in the spread of original design might be found in, for example, a growing freedom of travel for the artist-and not only to Rome; the acquisition of early Italian and Gothic works of art for the National Gallery collection; the Victorian fashion for decorative patterns from diverse periods and countries, anthologized in works such as Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament; and the occasional precursor in frame design. Turner and Lawrence had adopted particular types of moulding or shapes of frame. Turner even created his own instant framing for an exhibition of marines by tacking lengths of ship’s cable round the four sides of each painting and ‘gilding’ them with yellow ochre. ’ In England in the 1840s Pugin designed, along with wardrobes and inkwells, picture frames of ‘Gothic’ inspiration;” Schinkel had produced uniform gallery frames of a neoclassical style in Germany in the 1820s;’ and, in France, Ingres experimented with designs of naturalistic flowers for his own work.’ These were still isolated instances of the artist-designed frame, but they were perhaps available as examples, even as catalysts, to those painters who travelled-like Brown, in Belgium, Italy, France and Switzerland, like Rossetti and Hunt in France and Belgium, and, later, like Leighton and Alma- Tadema, through Europe and beyond.

But the most specific of the various stimuli on artists to begin designing their own frames was the trend in painting and architecture which produced Pre-Raphaelitism itself. This was a combination of the Romantic and archaizing tendency of the Germanic Nazarene school with the related Gothic revival in England. The latter had reached a climax in Pugin’s work of the 18 30s and 1840s. It blended with the interest of the Nazarenes in reproducing an earlier, more ‘sincere’ art, and it was sharpened by the arrival of works by Van Eyck and Duccio (in their original frames) in the National Gallery in the 1840s and 1850s. William Dyce, the ‘English

Nazarene’, in designing his fresco for All Saints, Margaret Street in 1849, drew on the

architectural structure of fourteenth century Gothic altar-pieces, and his oil study for the fresco was framed in a smooth gilded cuff, with arched sight and cruciform motifs in the spandrels. The first two of these features are common to Ford Madox Brown’s early experiments in frame design. Although his Wyclifse (1848) has lost the original outer frame mentioned by Brown in his diaries,Y the integral painted arch with its roundels and cinquefoils shows the influence of Nazarene and early religious art as much in its presentation as in the actual painting-it is the secular analogue of Dyce’s fresco designs. Brown’s work on Chaucer at the Court of Edward III indicates that the large finished version” might have been even more ambitiously framed; his acknowledged purpose had been to produce an equivalent to the ‘display of the fruits of Italian religious sentiment and Italian glorification of Italian poets’,” and his study for the original conception takes the form of an altar-piece, with an integral framework of pointed and round- headed arches, ornamented with colonets, pierced work, and medallion heads in the points of the two side niches.12 In the final version, these niches, forming the wings of the triptych

LYNN ROBERTS 157

structure, were abandoned, but the smaller replica of Chaucer in the Tate has the outline of a pointed arch, like theirs, beneath its present frame.

For a brief period in 1847, whilst WJK~@ and Chaucer were in progress, Rossetti became Brown’s pupil and was introduced both to the Nazarene element in their style and to the idea of a work of art conceived as a whole with its setting. This had immediate effect in his first exhibited picture, The Girlhood ofMary Virgin (1849).‘j Although it was reframed in 1864, the darkened top corners show that the original sight was shaped to a shallow segmental arch. William Michael Rossetti noted that the various symbolic objects in the painting were glossed in two sonnets, printed on gilt paper at the base of the frame, and echoing the panel of inscriptions which would have appeared on a fourteenth century Florentine altar-piece, between the main picture panel and the predella. I4 This religious, Gothic vein also appeared in Rossetti’s second exhibited oil-painting, Ecce Ancillu Domini (18 50). It too has been reframed, but according to William Michael the original frame reflected the style of the title in the Latin ‘mottoes’ inscribed upon it (later anglicized, to avoid the charge of ‘Popery’);15 whilst the painting may also once have had an arched sight. I6 The Athenaeum review of the Free Exhibition where it was shown attacked its ‘unintelligent imitation of the technicalities of old art-golden glories, fanciful scribblings on the frames, and other infantine absurdities’,” and attacked them as though part of a minor movement; so it is clear that these early works by Brown and Rossetti were not merely isolated eccentricities.

The extravagant proof of this takes the form of a vast polytych, The River of Life, by Andrew MacCaIlum.‘s Painted the same year as Ecce An&z, the year of MacCaIlum’s first acceptance by the Royal Academy, it was either never submitted, or was too much of a ‘golden glory’ for Academic stomachs. It consists of a continuous landscape in five panels, progressing in time from dawn to night: an allegory of human life under the headings Birth, Youth, Manhood, Decline and Death, assembled, with three lunettes depicting man and the guardians of his spiritual life, in an immense gilded housing, shaped at the top in a domed ogee arch. Inscriptions in black plaster capital letters surround the outer border frame and head the internal arch of each panel, and the whole is presented in terms of a full-blooded Gothic altar-piece, in which the form supports the allegory. MacCallum was living in London during 18 50, but it is uncertain whether he had any contact with Brown, Dyce or Rossetti, or whether he was travelling the same route quite independently.

A strong element in the Gothicizing tendency was that of Anglo-Catholicism. It was as important in the beginning for Rossetti as for Pugin, although his interest in High Church symbolism was partly romantic and partly literary; for others a sincere faith in Anglo-Catholic principles informed the Pre-Raphaelite determination to emulate the honesty they found in early art. In 185 1, Charles Allston Collins completed his Convent Thoughts,” and Millais designed the frame for it-apparently his first attempt in this field. Millais announced in a letter to his patron, Thomas Combe: ‘I have designed a frame for Charles’ painting of “Lilies”, which, I expect, will be acknowledged to be the best frame in England’.” It is certainly accomplished; the simple form belies the sophistication of the idea behind it, that of combining an outer frame and an inner arched cuff in one structure, emphasizing through contrast the emblematic richness of the moulded lily stems and of the inscription. Frame and picture exercise the same tension between restraint and elaboration, and Millais’ design so effectively exploits this, through the play of matt and burnished gilding, basic geometric shapes and decorative propriety, that it is interesting to speculate on the form of the original frame for Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop.

Although the combination of Gothic shape, text and symbol in Millais’ frame with the subject of Collins’s painting was close to the spirit of the original designs, there was an increasing inclination to use the earlier forms for purely decorative effect. This can be seen in the group of ivy-wreathed frames made for Arthur Hughes between 1852 and 1860. Hughes was living in London in 1849, the first year he exhibited at the Academy, and may have been influenced by

158 English Picture Frames: The Pre-Raphaelites

the work of Brown” and of the newly formed PRB. But just as his sympathies lay most with their technique and their leaning towards Romantic literature, so his use of similar elements of design was solely to create a unified decorative object of picture and frame. In Ophelia,22 for instance, which is reminiscent of Convent Though with its gilt plate frame, semi-circular sight, black-letter inscription and garland of ivy leaves, these features are chosen not for any supporting symbolism but for the decorative repetition of painted and gilded ivy. The frame of Hughes’s April Love is similarly purely ornamental,23 although here the door-like arched sight intensifies the effect of the image seen through the frame, after the old notion of a window open on an illusory world, creating a tension with the flat, decorative surface. Ruskin, who found the Gothic idiom objectionable when used in the High Church symbolic style of Convent Thoughts, thought April Love enchanting.

It was Brown, and perhaps Holman Hunt, who used the Gothic forms in their truest sense for the longest period-Hunt, for instance, in The Awakening Conscience,24 where a curve-topped gilt cuff was enclosed in a border frame, ornamented along the flat by emblems set into roundels, which pointed up the symbolism of a secular ‘modern life’ subject.*’ Both the shape of the frame and the use of emblematic marigolds and bells are related to sixteenth and seventeenth century Northern prototypes of secular art, while the religious resonances of the emblems, crowned by the Christian symbol of the star, look back to the floral symbols in the frames of fifteenth century Florentine altar-pieces. With Brown, although the Nazarene cast in his work soon changed to a Pre-Raphaelite realism, one early design-Oure Ludye of Good Children*“-carried his reinterpretation of Early Italian art forward to 1864, when the picture received its present frame. The gilded cuff and deep fluted chamfers derive from Brown’s and Rossetti’s decorative frames of the 186Os, but the arched sight, the inscription and, most of all, the roundels with their sepia-painted angel heads which surround the cuff on three sides, look back to similar sources to those of the study for Chaucer. The shallow arch and the painted roundels are surely modelled on some such work as Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna,27 which Brown might have seen during his Italian trip of 1845; and like the latter, but in a minor key, frame and painting are in complete harmony with the spirit of Gothic art and on the level of pure decoration.

Rossetti soon moved on from the Gothic phase of his early oils, and with the series of decorative, poetic water-colours which occupied him into the 1860s his interest in framing altered subtly. His earliest experiments in an ornamental form are probably the frames of Borgia and the 18 54 Salutation of Beatrice; 28 these are extremely simple in form, with a wide central flat and large hollow to the sight, recalling the type of frame on the National Gallery’s newly acquired Van Eyck, or on the other Early Flemish Masters noted by Rossetti on his 1849 continental expedition.29 The flat and hollow are fastened by horizontal butt joints, rather than mitres, after the fashion of fifteenth century Dutch secular frames. There is also a possible Dutch influence in the roundels decorating the flats of these frames; and their similarity to those on Hunt’s Awakening Conscience underlines the spread of interest in frame design amongst the Pre- Raphaelites and their followers, and the frequent interchange of ideas.30

As the 1850s gave way to the 186Os, however, Rossetti evolved an original plaster moulding, most often associated with a series of smallish oil-paintings which portray, without properly becoming portraits, bust-length, rather sensuous images of women. Triangular in section, with an outer dot-and-arrow bead, it opposes straight planes with semi-circular indentations (Brown described it as ‘Rossetti’s thumb-mark pattern’ j’). It is difficult to date its introduction, as the completion dates of Rossetti’s paintings were not necessarily those of their framing. It may possibly have been designed for La Boccu Bacciata of 1859,‘* but is more probably related to the paintings of 186 1. This date is supported by another feature of these frames: in the 18 SOS, both Rossetti and Brown had used wide mounts or cuffs, covered with gesso and gilded, Brown often adding a deep chamfer and unusually shaped sight,33 while Rossetti experimented in a few

LYNN ROBERTS IS9

cases with silvered cuffs.j4 But with Rossetti’s oil-paintings of women, the cuffs have been gilded directly onto the wooden surface, of which, being oak, or oak veneered on pine, the grain is very apparent through the gold leaf. Also, in the paintings from 186 1 onwards, the cuffs have

vertical butt joints instead of mitres. Alastair Grieve places the earliest use of gilt wood cuffs with

paintings dating from 1862, ” and the first authenticated instance with a frame datable to 1863;r6 but their use on pictures of 1861 or before may be inferred from a letter of 1861, in which Rossetti writes, ‘Dixon [a protege of Ruskin] had the coolness to write to me the other day, wanting the proper measurements and mode of making for oak frames!“’ Since most frame-makers appear to have been adept at pirating and copying patterns, only a quite uncommon design would require measurements and the exact method of making it. The mitre had been the exclusive form of frame joint in England and France for more than 200 years, and as most nineteenth century carvers and gilders were less and less concerned with the actual craft of woodwork, it seems probable that what Dixon was requesting was the method of constructing butt-jointed cuffs, which he would have seen on the gilded oak frames of Rossetti’s pictures before or during August 186 1.

Brown did not begin to use gilded oak and butt joints until about 1864, but his own ideas and those devised with Rossetti in the early 1860s shaped, for example, the frame (completed mid- January 186 3) of Cordelia at the Bedside of Lear’*- of which Brown wrote to the owner:‘. . I am

glad the frame of King Lear is so much to your taste-I had told Green to employ all or any of my patterns, as it might spread a taste for a different kind of thing from the debased article now in use . .‘.39 His patterns included the ‘thumb-mark’ moulding, set, with a dot-and-arrow trim, on a grooved, deeply chamfered reverse rebate frame, and an arched gilt cuff set with roundels. The cuff is also chamfered, a development from the bevelled gilt cuffs of 18 50s’ pictures such as The Last of England; but on Lear the bevel is even wider and is grooved. It has been gilded and then rubbed down to the bare wood, the three flutes retaining the gold and giving definition at the sight edge similar to that of a wash-line mount on a water-colour. This effect is repeated in the grooved outer chamfer of the frame, and adds to the play of light and shade in the thumb-nail mouldings. Rossetti’s version of this linear detail is a flat reeded band, appearing first on the 18 59 diptych, The Salutation of Beatrice, framed in 1863. 4o It was also used by Spencer Stanhope, who had a studio beneath Rossetti’s from c. 1857 to 1862- 186 3 .4’ In its simplest state it is an ebonized reeded border with an inner gilt bevel, the reeds barred with squares of gold, and derives from parcel-gilt Netherlandish prototypes of the sixteenth century and earlier.

It is adapted, in the most famous of all Pre-Raphaelite frames, to a band of gilt wood reeds set with carved squares and roundels in various combinations. Roundels of different sorts had been used since The Awakening Conscience and Rossetti’s 18 54 Salutation of Beatrice, while Brown had set little composition buttons or paterae into gilt cuffs such as those on bur, and the alternation of round and square shapes had been used even as far back as 18 55, in the cheap pressed moulding of Brown’s Windermere and Rossetti’s Paolo e Francesca, both framed in that year. The reed-and-roundel frame which grew out of these earlier designs was, as Rossetti used it, a reeded plate with ‘chefs-square’ in the corner cassettes and roundels along the sides, a wide cuff and an inner double fillet broken by lozenges and tiny circles in the corners (e.g. the 18 74 frame of Ecce Am&z). Brown used the same construction, with different inner mouldings; he also combined the reeded plate with his own deep outer chamfer, and a cuff with a fluted bevel (e.g. The Coat of Many Colours, 1865). The basic design can be dated to 186 3 by a series of three letters from Rossetti to Brown in September of 1 867,42 which contain the minutest specifications for different frames and reveal the importance placed by both on their construction (their size proportional to the painted figures, the choice of a black or gold foil for the colours at the sight edge, the width of the cuff, and the interplay of the reeding with the motifs on the roundels). This last concern with oppositions of round and square also recalls the play of parallel lines and

English Picture Frames: The Pre-Raphaelites 160

1. MacCallum, The RiverofLife (Manchester City Art Gallerres). 2. Collins’s Convent Thoughts, frame by Millars (Ashmolean). 3. Hughes’sApri/Love (fate). 4. Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (late). 5. F.M. Brown, C&e Ladye of Good Children (late). 6. Duccro, the Rucellai Madonna (Uffizi). (Photo: Mansell Collectron). 7. Rossetti, Regina Cordium (Forbes Magazine Collection at Old

Battersea House). 6. Detarl from Rosseth’s Paolo e Francesca (fate). 9. Detail from F.M. Brown’s Cordelia at the Bedside ofLear (fate).

10. Spencer Stanhope, Portrait Study (Forbes Magazine Collection at Old Battersea House).

11. Rossettr. Ecceflncilla (fate). 12. Detail from F.M. Brown’s Christ Washing Peter’s feet rate). 13. Holman Hunt, The HWe/vrgShepherd(Manchester CAG).

14. Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat (Lady Lever Gallery). 15. Holman Hunt, TheFinding ofUurSaviourn the Temple (Birmrngham

CAG). 16. Rossehi, Beafa Beafnk (Tate). 17. Detail from Holman Hunt’s The Lantern-Maker’s Courtsbp

(Birmingham CAG). 16. Holman Hunt, TheAffergbwh Egypt (Ashmolean). 19. Rossettt, medallron on La Ghirlandafa (Guildhall Art Gallery).

LYNN ROBERTS 161

6

20. Sandys, Medea (Birmingham CAG). 21. Detail from Millais’ Ophelia (late). 22. Whistler, The Little White Girl (Tate).

23. Edward Hale, The Three Princesses (Guildhall Art Gallery). 24. Detail from Holman Hunt’s May Ahming on Magdalen Tower(Lady

Lever Gallery).

Enpfisb Picture Frames: ‘Ibe Pre-Ruphaelites .

8

11

13

LYNN ROBERTS 163

-, . .

14

15

18

_----\

23

LYNN ROBERTS 165

curves of the thumb-mark moulding; both designs, together with the linear patterns of plain reeds and fluted bevels, use the simplest of geometric forms to achieve a decorative effect of great

sophistication, contrasted with contempora~ bastardized French mouldin~. This is epitomized in Brown’s extraordinary frame of 1865 for Christ gibing Peter’s Feet,‘” a

sort of compendium of the patterns mentioned above, including Brown’s deep chamfer on the outer edge, its flutes replaced by Rossetti’s gold-barred black reeding; a gilded reed-and-roundel moulding on the flat forward face; a butt-jointed cuff inset with composition buttons; a wide fluted inner bevel; and a gilt slip at the sight edge. This extravagant m&nge of ornaments in fact results in a superlatively beautiful frame, its golds and blacks suited to the deep mellow tones of the painting, the apparently heterogeneous detailing restrained and ordered by the geometric principles underlying it. It is at once rich, and almost severe. These decorative frames of the 1860s were seminal in their effect; elements from them were used by Hughes, Simeon Solomon, Bume-Jones and Marie Stillman, and are found on paintings by Leighton, Hunt and Millais. Besides their subtle relationships of shape and line, they display an interest in texture-the contrasts of gilded or stained oak, ebonized wood and gessoed mounts, carved ornaments and sparingly used composition. They emphasize, in a Ruskinian sense, the ‘honesty’ of their materials as against the uniform blandness of mass-produced plaster frames; and they express a decorative originality combined with a sense of appropriateness for their purpose.

But besides these first decorative styles, there were other categories developing from the earlier Gothic-inspired designs. One of these, closer to the Gothic, and now seen as archetypically Victorian, comprises those frames which use symbols and inscriptions to expand upon or to gloss the content of the paintings, often themselves highly symbolic. The beginnings of such a category can be seen in the frame, probably of his own design, for Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd (185 l).‘@ The painting itself works on two levels: the depiction, not of ‘Dresden china bergers, but a real shepherd, and a real shepherdess, and a landscape in full sunlight’; and the expression, through the metaphor of the neglectful shepherd-p~tor occupied by ‘vain questions of no value’, of current criticisms of the Church.4s And the design of the frame supports both levels. It is of a very simple structure, a plain curved moulding edged by an outer rail, and is ornamented by naturalistic ears of wheat, with stook-like sheaves in the centres and corners-a rustic parody of the Dresden bergers’ Rococo scrolls and shells, and appropriate to the realistic landscape, yet also an image of the destructive lure of the cornfield, from which the shepherd should protect his flock.

Symbolism was also used by Rossetti on the frames for his Dante subjects-for example, that of the 1854 water-colour The Salutatirm of Beatrice46 is decorated with emblematic motifs of the sun and of seven-pointed stars, the Neoplatonic symbols used by Dante and Petrarch as images for the earthly beloved, and for the ideal Virtue to which she is the spiritual guide. These are underpinned by the relevant quotation inscribed from the Divina Commedia, bringing the design close in concept to that of The A~a~~~ng Cons&e; save that where Rossetti’s bias is to the romantic and literary, that of Hunt is specifically Christian and moral. This becomes even more evident in Hunt’s design for the frame of The Scapegoat. 47 Here the emblems are designed, not only to support the Old Testament reference, but, by allusion to the events of the New Testament, to extend the meaning beyond the compass of the actual painting.

In its structure the frame is a further simplification of the cambered mouldings used on The libeling Sb~b~d to a wide, shallow cushion between two edging trims. This austere, gilded border provides a foil for the lurid Dead Sea sunset, without distraction from the intensity of the painted image, and it is also an effective setting for the four panels of motifs set in low relief in its surface. At the bottom a seven-branched candelabrum is flanked by title and text, mirrored in the top flat by seven stars and a quotation stamping the scapegoat as a type of Christ. And on the lateral mouldings, two unobtrusively significant emblems replace the rainbow which was

166 English Picture Frames: The Pre-Raphaelites

painted into the preliminary study, but deliberately omitted from the final version. Because of this omission, if the picture is seen unframed it appears unrelievedly bleak, a single stark, despairing image; the message of hope conveyed by the rainbow is now concentrated in the sides of the frame-on the Ieft, where a dove bearing a sprig of olive faces the goat, and on the right, where a cruciform plant hints at the redemptive power of Christ. Thus, without its frame, the picture loses not only its explanatory gloss, but, in the symbols of spiritual hope, its entire Christian application.

This is perhaps less true of what is, nevertheless, one of Hunt’s most impressive designs for a frame-that of The ~i~~i~g of Our Saviour in the T~Fie, 48 best described in the words of F. G. Stephens:

Even the very frame was not without its demands upon the thought of the painter. One side of this, occupied by the cross-staff that sustained the brazen serpent, . . . is typical of the olden law of Moses . . . on the other, a cross of thorns, with a garland of flowers about it, expresses the New Law. The centre is surmounted by a sun at full glory, and the moon eclipsed; the space from this to the corners is ftied up with stars. At the foot a diaper of heartseases, the symbol of peace,-and daisies,-of humility, devotion, as well as universality.49

He goes on to note one of the first critical responses to an artist-designed frame; the reviewer of the Ma~c~s~~ Guardian remarked of the picture: ‘. . . it absolutely overflows with significance. There are symbols everywhere. . . Nay, the symbols have overflowed the picture, and expanded themselves all over the frame’.” The whole is intricately patterned in shallow relief on a frame which is given a faintly aedicular form by its gabled top. Hunt stated that it was ‘designed by myself with ivory flat, in what I meant to be semi-barbaric splendour’,5’ an apt description of a setting which provided the necessary transition from the exotic interior of the temple to the Victorian walls on which it would hang.

Rossetti’s most elaborate frames never approached Hunt’s Temple in their weight of symbolism, but he produced some equally effective designs, notably that for Beatu Beatrix.” The frame of the 18 59 diptych, The Salutation of Beatrice, had been painted on the mounting with the figure of Love and emblematic poppies, and copiously glossed, but for Beata Beatrix the frame is of simpler construction, inscription is kept to a minimum, and emphasis is given to the symbols confined in the four central medallions. These are sited across the sloping flats of the four sides, but are themselves level with the forward edge of the frame. The variation of light achieved by this opposition of planes throws them into greater relief, and the reduction of all other detail increases the focus, icon-like, on the picture. This, representing the moment of Beatrice’s death, is given further metaphorical meaning through the cosmic symbols of sun, moon and stars, and sea-girt earth, modelled in low relief in the four medallions, the moon standing for Beatrice herself in her spiritual journey between the earth and the sun, which is Christ or the Platonic Ideal. This concentration of symbot on an otherwise plain moulding is reminiscent of the Scapegoat frame, with its similar intensification of a static image.

The medallions on the frame of Beatu Beatrix had developed from the roundels and moulded paterae used by Rossetti, Hunt and Brown in the 1850s and 1860s; although rounded knops, rosettes and circles were used on the very earliest frames, and were the first, simplest forms of architectural decoration. But, from the I 860s onwards, many artists produced frames in which a round motif is a large, important feature of the design, rather than a subordinate detail-even, as with Beata Beatrix, the sole ornament of a very plain structure-and such frames became almost an analogue of eighteenth century ‘centre and corner’ frames, with their prominent shell and flower motifs. There is an early example on one of Hunt’s Near Eastern water-colours, Cairo: Sunset of 1854.53 The raised parallel f&ets on the gilt mount hold in each corner an

LYNN ROBERTS 167

Arabian medallion of intertwined loops and flowers; it is a strong pattern to use on a water-

colour, and although the high colour of the picture, the simple moulding and the wide mount combine to support it fairly successfully, the decorative unity of the whole is somewhat at the expense of the painting. Similar medallions are used on Tbe Lantern-Maker’s Court&p and on the small version of The Afterglow in Egypt. f4 For the latter, the medallion becomes the central focus on each member of a severely simplified plate frame, very like that of Beatu Beatrix, except that the flat is parallel with the picture surface. Gilded on gesso, its only other ornament is a tiny double fillet at either edge, knotted squarewise in each corner. The paring-down of all surface detail, and its concentration in the intricate loops of the medallions, gives the figure of the woman within the blond, reflective rabbet the same intensity as Rossetti’s painting; and if its framing date could be established, this might illuminate its relationship both to Beutu Beatrix and

to Rossetti’s later series of medallion-framed pictures. These, like his early gilt-mounted water-colours and the oil-paintings of women in thumb-

mark mouldings, form a coherent group: generally large, sensuous in conception and brushwork, they show an increasing tendency to an exaggeration of feature and richness of colour which demand a compensating reduction of detaiI in their frames. The frames are identical with that of Beutu Beatrix, except that the Neoplatonic symbols are replaced by abstract carved medallions, compared by Alastair Grieve to ‘the seed formations of an exotic fruit’, which echo the compositional curves of the paintings, and suggest an emblematic image of ‘growth and continual change’.” He places the earliest of these frames in 1868, and it is unlikely that Beutu Beatrix was framed before this date. The Argo was completed in 1863, and the type of medallion seems to indicate that it might have been framed with Cairo: Sunset and The Lantern-Maker in the early 1860s. If Rossetti had seen it then, it might have impressed him sufficiently to surface in unconscious repetition in his own work four or five years later.56 His first medallion frames, such as The Beloved, Proserpina and La Gbirhdata, are made like The A~erg~~ and Beat~x with four med~ions; the larger versions have different numbers and arrangements, according to the overall balance of the picture.

The medallion series had no widespread influence, the paintings being sold directly to Rossetti’s patrons and rarely exhibited until the 188 3 retrospective; but Sandys, the friend and fellow-artist of Rossetti, designed at least two frames with reverse rebates and, standing proud of these, four central medallions ornamented with Celtic knots and animals.” Few of his frames are so immediately derivative, ~though he was evidently stimulated by Rossetti’s work to begin producing his own designs, and he did make use of the reed-and-roundel frame, with a gilt butt- jointed cuff incised with further roundels, for a group of large portraits in coloured chalks produced in the 1880s. Most of his own designs are extremely individual, including geometric patterns which make use of the play of light on faceted surfaces, and a revival of the Gothic idiom, which had a new phase of life from the early 1860s.

Brown’s frame for Ozrre Ladye had been a late instance, in the true archaizing spirit, of a fashion which had hardly outlasted the mid- 185Os-the picture having been conceived eighteen years before. Now Sandys began a number of paintings very close in subject and style to Rossetti’s work, although where his images of languorousfemmesfatales achieve the decorative, sensuous aspects of Rossetti’s women, they lack their energizing, symbolic power. The frames are much more original, Gothic in influence, but replacing the characteristic arched gilt mounts and black- letter inscriptions of the first Gothic revival with new features, to great decorative effect. In Medeu, for example, and in Morgan-le-Fuy,” a deep band of round strip mouldings, inside a simple hollow frame, encloses three sides of the painting only; the bottom section has been replaced by a wide chamfer sloping inward and up to the sight edge. This is the church-window ‘rain-sill’ pattern, in which the three sides of rounded mouldings imitate the colonets of the original Early Netherlandish design, used for fifteenth and sixteenth century portraits, where the

168 English Picture Frames: The Pre-Raphaelites

sitters, like Medea, were placed behind a trompe l’oeil painted ledge. In Sandys’ version of the design the colonet structure is emphasized by the insertion, again on three sides only, of a dot- and-arrow moulding (used frequently by Rossetti and Brown), and by a complex play of matt and burnished surface on the colonets themselves, while an inner black slip provides a foil for the rich colouring of the pictures and a transition to the illusionistic window-frame. On the frame of Vivien, the decorative effect is heightened by a gilt oak flat carved with a run of faceted lozenges, and similarly abstract patterns of blocks or discs set at different angles are used to frame paintings of single female figures, looking forward to the decorative work of Albert Moore.

Between the purely decorative and the symbolic type of design, there is another category-the attributive frame, where ornament either echoes some detail of the painting it houses, or is peculiarly appropriate to it (as, for instance, in a traditional portrait frame, bearing trophies connected with the subject). Hughes’ ivy-wreathed frame for Opbelia exemplifies the type; it also carries a quotation, another attributive feature. Millais’ frame for his own Ophelia,59 painted the same year, is a further example, although far less original. Apart from his design for Convent Thoughts, Millais relied on a few stock mouldings, and Ophelia is interesting because, on the foundation of a hollow frame covered with an ugly machine-stamped pattern, small bunches of naturalistic flowers in high relief have been added at the centres and corners. They are almost certainly of Millais’ design, since they include most of Ophelia’s painted flowers-forget-me- nots, roses, daisies, violets, anemones and wild daffodils. In the 1840s and 1850s Ingres was experimenting with a very similar combination of a traditional moulding and naturally modelled groups of flowers,60 and it is possible that Millais, hearing of or seeing such a frame, might have adapted the idea to his own pocket. Although the composition base is cheap and nasty, the flowers are pretty as well as apt. This is an example of the hybrid frame-elements chosen from pattern books and built up to the artist’s order, traditional frames modified in varying degrees, and frames left, with a general specification, to the taste and invention of the frame-maker. Equally, the design might be determined, wholly or partly, by the purchaser of a picture, through the medium of the artist or otherwise; these qualifications are necessary to reveal the heterogeneous origins of some nineteenth century frames.

Amongst artist-designed attributive frames, Hunt’s_as in so many other categories-form a distinctive group. His travels in the Near East provided him with as much source-material for his frames as for his paintings: architectural details, traditional woven patterns, pavement mosaics, etc. For instance, the group of water-colours painted in the mid- 18 50s in Palestine and Egypt, and including Cairo: Sunset,6’ have plain, square-sectioned frames decorated in black on gold with braided patterns of Arabian and Persian derivation, besides the gilt mounts with their raised, interlaced fillets and (on one or two) Eastern medallions. Similar medallions ornament the top corners and bottom centre of the frame for The Lantern-Maker’s Courtship, but there they are swallowed in an intricately embossed diaper which covers the flat plate frame entirely-a spectacularly inventive use of composition, creating a shimmering and exotic border for the painting. The frame of the large Afteglozv in Egypt 62 is equally inventive, translating Gothic architectural forms into Eastern terms, so that two cusped arches are imposed on a border frame, their crossings filled with a springing design of wheat-ears and scrolled papyrus.

It seems a long leap from Holman Hunt to Whistler, whose frames are usually thought of as purely decorative, but in the group of four designed by the latter in 1864 there is a very similar attributive element which reflects the Japonaiserie of the ‘paintings. They share the same basic structure-a carved border frame with shallow fillets enclosing a flat-and are ornamented variously with Japanese motifs incised into the wood like fine poker-work. The Lunge Lijzen of the Six Marks,63 a painting of a very European girl in a kimono amid a picturesque arrangement of porcelain vases, is named partly from the frame with its decoration of six Japanese potter’s marks. These, like the all-over patterning of the flat and fillets, can be identified, but Whistler

LYNN ROBERTS 169

cared little for the meaning of such symbols, choosing them solely for their visual attractiveness and because, like Hunt’s Eastern designs, they reflect the Japanizing aspect of the picture. In the same group of frames, that of The Little White Gir164 was decorated with six medallions, stamped not with potter’s marks but with cherry blossoms, recalling the poppies on Rossetti’s 186 3 frame for the diptych Salutation of Beatrice. 65 Here the flowers echo those in the painting,

. : and may carry an allusion to virginity. An equally strikmg feature of the frame was the verses written by Swinburne to the picture, which were printed on gilt paper and stuck over the two lateral flats. Whistler may have taken this idea from the sonnets on the original frame of Rossetti’s GirlhoodofMary Virgin, returned to him that year (1864) and then reframed, although by the 1870s the series of poems and quotations inscribed upon Rossetti’s medallion frames had caused Whistler to gibe ‘Why not frame the sonnet?‘66 His poems were important to Rossetti, however, part of the work of, art as a whole; a marriage of text and picture relying on the interaction of each with the other (as in Blake’s work), not a mere chaining of caption and illustration. Often especially written ‘to embody the conception’, the siting of the poems- around the decorative medallions of his large frames, or on applied panels-is as important as their style and finish. As Rossetti wrote, not altogether flippantly, ‘An inscription . is much more difficult to do properly than a picture. If it is a bit too large or too black, the picture goes to the devil . .‘.67

Not everyone, however, took such care over the completeness of his design, and as the century passed and many more artists produced their own frames, the results were often coarsened and extreme. An example of this is the frame of Edward Hales’ The Three Princesses,68 its massive castellations carved from solid sections of wood, and matching the stepped buttresses of the castle in the background of the painting. This outer portion is separated from the picture by a flat of stained wood and by the gilt slip or rabbet characteristic of Victorian frames, but the lightweight nature of the subject, its picturesque fairy-tale quality, is overborne by the emphatic relief of the carving and its harsh lights and shades. These are emphasized by the odd composition, the figures being so close to the sight edge that the top member of the frame closes claustrophobically in upon them. Nor has the artist been helped by the subsequent invention of the zip fastener!

It remained for Holman Hunt, again, to produce a late, superb version of the attributive frame. This is the design for May Morning on Magdalen Toz~er,~~ innovative not only in the decoration of plants and creatures celebrating the dawn on the parts of the frame which correspond to earth and sky, but in its material: it was carried out in repousse copperwork at C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicrafts in 1889, Hunt remarking of this that ‘there was a certain venturesomeness in [it]’ .70 It is constructed as a border frame, the outer fillet, central flat and inner mouldings executed in three separate sections of copper sheet over a wooden core (an idea not so very dissimilar from the laying of gold leaf on a wooden base). Hunt had intended partly to help the newly formed Guild by this commission, but he was amply repaid by the result, as a contemporary reviewer noted:

Feeling, as most artists do, that the glaring, shining yellow of the gilt frame is an affront . and, more often than not, interfering with the key in which the picture is painted,-he

has devised a new frame of dull, beaten copper. This . forms an admirable and reticent setting, indefinite in colour, and free from the stereo-typed features of the joiner’s mouldings and mitred corners. Mr Hunt has had the frame decorated with a design symbolical of the idea of the picture. Thus, below we have the rising sun, on either side of which are ‘frogs and fishes awakening into joyous life’. On the upright members are growing and flowering plants, and above birds and butterflies . a very creditable piece of craftsmanship.7’

170 English Picture Frames: The Pre-Rapbaelites

The colour of the copper is not in fact indefinite, but the same warm hue as the painted Gothic pillars of Magdalen Tower, toning with the faces of the choir in the dawn light and with the heaped flowers in the foreground. The whole work has great decorative beauty: it is a tour de

force, a complete unity of the frame with the painting it surrounds. Hunt was justified in writing of it, ‘I wish Ruskin could see the work, for I feel sure that he would be much pleased with it, and [as could be said of the whole development of frame design by the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates] even be encouraged to hope better for the artistic life of our country by seeing it.“’

Notes

1. Charles L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (London, 3rd ed. 1872), pp. 194 ff. First published 1869.

2. See John Cornforth, English Interiors: 1790-1848 (London, 1978).

3. The Carver and Gilder? Guide, ‘By a Practical Hand’ (c, 18 74), p. 16.

4. Eastlake, op.cit. Note 1. Note that the term ‘cuff describes the separate inner part of a frame-the analogue, on an

oil-painting, of the card mount on a water-colour. It is the American equivalent of the English ‘flat’, and is used here

to save confusion with the level panels (also known as ‘flats’) of the frame itself.

5. John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (London, 1969). This idea has been used again to frame a Turner in

the Tate Gallery.

6. Examples of frames by Pugin may be seen on the portraits of his wife and himself (1845) by J.R. Herbert, Palace

of Westminster. 7. The ‘Schinkel’ frame, a shallow ogee moulding decorated with palmettes at regular intervals, was standard in the

Berlin GemaIdegaIerie, 1823-l 830; see Claus Grimm, The Book ofpicture Frames (Munich, 1978; transl. by Nancy

M. Gordon &Walter L. Strauss, New York, 198 1). no.370, p.261.

8,FramesbyIngresareahoshown byGrimm,op.cit.Note7,nos 377-378,p.265.Thesecondwasdesignedc.1856

for Mme Moitessier (National Gallery).

9. F.M. Brown, The First Translation of the Bible into English: Wycl@e Reading His Translation of tbe N&o Testament to His Protector, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in the Presence of Chaucer and Gower, His Retainers (1847-l 848,

1859-1861). oil on canvas, 47 x 60% inches, Bradford Art Gallery. Reproduced in The Pre-Rupbaelites (Tate

Gallery, 1984). See Virginia Surtees, The Diary of Ford Mahx Brown (Yale, 198 l), p. 3 5; entries for March 1848.

10. F.M. Brown, Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (1845- 18 5 l), oil on canvas, 15 3 x 124 inches, Art Gallery of

New South Wales, Sydney.

1 1. Ford Madox Hueffer, F.M. Brown: a Record of His L$ and Work (London, 1896), p.4 1: Letter to George Rae, 3

January 1865.

12. F.M. Brown, The Seeds and Fruits ofEnglish Poetry (1845- 185 1,s 3), o’ on canvas, 13 % x 18’/8 inches, Visitors II

of the Ashmolean Museum. Reproduced in The Pre-Rapbaelites (Tate Gallery, 1984).

13 D.G. Rossetti. The Girlbood ofMary Virgin (1849). o il on canvas, 3 2 ‘/4 x 25 % inches, Tate Gallery. Reference to

reframing in 0. Doughty and J.R. Wahl, Letters of D. G. Rossetti (Oxford, 1965), no.571, to Brown, 7 December

1864. 14. W.M. Rossetti, D.G. Rossetti: His Family Letters (London, 1895), Vol. I, p. 143; noted by Alastair Grieve, ‘The

Applied An of D.G. Rossetti: 1. His Picture-Frames’, Burlington Magazine, CXV, January 197 3, pp. 16 ff.

15. W.M. Rossetti, ‘Notes on Rossetti and His Works’, Art Journaf, XLVI, May 1884, p. 15 1; noted by Grieve,

op.cn. Note 14. 16. D.G. Rossetti, Ecce A&la Domini (1849-1850), o on canvas, 28% x 16% inches, Tate Gallery. The exposed il surface was once half an inch bigger at the right, and 1% inches bigger at the top. 17. Quoted in Family Lerters, op.cit. Note 14.

18. Andrew MacCalIum Jr, The River of Lzj2 (1850); lunettes, oil on board; oblong, arched and hexagonal panels, oil

on canvas, frame size 50 x 122 % inches, Manchester CAG.

19. C.A. Collins, Convent Tbougbts (185 l), oil on canvas, 3 3 ‘/s x 2 3 ‘/B inches, Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum.

20. J.G. MiIIais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, Bart (London, 1899), Vol. I, p. 100.

2 1. Although Hughes apparently only met Brown in May 1855-Tate Gallery records.

22. Arthur Hughes, Opbelia (1852). oil on canvas, 271/16 x 48% inches, frame size 37 x 58 inches, Manchester

CAG. 2 3. Arthur Hughes, April Love (1856). oil on canvas, 36% x 2Or//16 inches, Tate Gallery.

24. Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1852), oil on canvas, 29 L/4 x 2 1% inches, Tate Gallery.

25. ‘Upon the frame are ringing bells, and marigolds, the emblems of warning and sorrow.’ F.G. Stephens, W. Holman Hunt and His Works (London, 1860), p. 34.

LYNN ROBERTS 171

26. F.M. Brown, Oure Ladye of Good Children (1847-1861) body coIour and pastel on paper, 30% x 23 ‘/4 inches,

Tate Gallery. 2 7 Duccio, The Rucehi Madonna ( 12 8 S), panel, 18 9 % x 114% inches, Sta Maria Novella, Florence.

28. D.G. Rossetti, Borgiu (1851), water-colour, 9% x 9% inches, Carlisle Museum and Art Gallery; The Salutation

of Beatrice in tbe Garden of Eden ( 18 54)) water-colour, 11% x 9% inches, Fitzwilliam Museum. Both are noted as early

examples by Grieve, opcit. Note 14. 29. Jan van Eyck, Man in a Turban (early C 1 S), National Gallery. Acquisition date 185 1. For Rossetti’s reaction to

early Flemish works: W. Holman Hunt, Pre-Rupbuelites and tbe Pre-Rupbuelite Brotberbood (London, 1905), Vol. I,

p.185. 30. Brown and Rossetti, and Rossetti and Hunt, were very close at this time: see hners of D.G. Rossetti, opcit. Note

13 (from 1853 on); Diana Holman-Hunt, My Grundfutber, His Wives and Loves (London, 1969).

3 1. Letter from Brown to his patron, Leathart, 16 January 186 3 ; information from Mary Bennett.

32. D.G. Rossetti, La Boccu Bucciutu (1859), oil on panel, 12% x lOii/~a inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

There is slight uncertainty as to whether this version is actually by Rossetti, according to Alastair Grieve; in his article, op.cit. Note 14, he suggests Fair Rosumund (186 1) as the earliest example of the thumb-mark moulding.

3 3. F.M. Brown, Winhere (1848, 1854), oil on canvas, 6% x 18% inches, Lady Lever Art Gallery; Tbe Lust of England (1855), oil on panel, 32fi x 29% inches, Birmingham CAG. Both have an oval sight and were framed in

1855. 3 4. D.G. Rossetti, Dante i Dream ( 18 56). water-colour, 18 % x 2 5 Yi inches, Tate Gallery. Grieve, op.cit. Note 14,

mentions the article by Vernon Lushingon describing the silver cuff of the original frame (now lost). L.errers of D.G. Rossetti, op.cit. Note 13, no.915, 22 J anuary 1870, records the gilding of Elizabeth SiddaII’s Clerk Suunuhs, by then

lead-coloured due to Rossetti’s failure to prevent the oxidization of the silver cuff with a coat of lacquer.

3 5. D.G. Rossetti, Girl at a Lattice (1862), oil on canvas, 12 x 10% inches, Fitzwilham Museum, Grieve, op.cit. Note

14. 3 6, Tbe Salutation of Beatrice on Eurtb and in E&n ( 18 5 9), two cupboard panels painted for Morris and framed as a

diptych in 1863, each 29% x 3 1% inches, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Grieve, opcit. Note 14.

37.L.ertersofD.G. Rossetti, op.cit. Note 13, no.392, 14August 1861.

38. F.M. Brown, Cordeliu at tbe BedrideofLear (1849-1851), oil on canvas, 28 x 39 inches, Tate Gallery.

3 9 Letter from Brown to Leathart, 8 February 186 3 ; information from Mary Bennett.

40. Op.cit. Note 36.

41. Cited by Grieve, opcit. Note 14. See, for example, the pencil study of a head by J.R. Spencer Stanhope, Forbes

Magazine Collection. Stanhope also used a variation of the thumb-mark moulding, with triangular indentations, on

Tbougbts of tbe Past (1858-1859), Tate Gallery.

42. Ltters0fD.G. Ross&, op.cit. Note 13, no.734, 1867; no.737, 7 September 1867; and no.738, 9 September

1867.

43. F.M. Brown, Christ Wusbingl’ereri Feet(1852-1856) oil on canvas, 45% x 52 inches, Tate Gallery. ‘The new

frame was ordered for James WyUie in 1865 [family letters]‘; note by Mary Bennett, Tate Gallery records.

44. Holman Hunt, Tbe Hireling Sbepberd (1851), oil on canvas, 301/1a x 43 % inches, frame size 44 x 57 x 3%

inches, Manchester CAG.

45. Letter from Hunt, 1897; quoted by Julian Treuherz, Pre-Rupbuelite Paintingsfrom the Manchester City Art Gullery (Manchester, 1980-1981), pp.37-38.

46. Op.cit. Note 28.

47. Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat (18 54), oil on canvas, 3 3 % x 54% inches, Lady Lever AK Gallery. Frame designed

in Palestine, February 1855: see Mary Bennett, ‘Footnotes to the Holman Hunt Exhibition’ (Appendix II), Liverpool Bulletin, XIII, 1968-1970, pp. 26-64.

48. Holman Hunt, The Finding of Our Suviour in the Temple (1854-l 860), oil on canvas, 3 3 % x 55% inches,

Birmingham CAG. The small replica at Sudeley Gallery has an identical, scaled-down frame; and Stephens adapted a

dark oak version for the engraving.

49. Stephens, opcit. Note 25, p.78. The ‘garland of flowers’ is of love-lies-bleeding, supposed to have grown at the

foot of the Cross. 50. Ibid., p.115.

5 1. Holman Hunt, opcit. Note 29, Vol. II, p. 19 3.

52. D.G. Rossetti, Beutu Beatrix (1860-1870; d.1864), oil on canvas, 34 x 26 inches, Tate Gallery.

53. Holman Hunt, Cairo: Sunset on tbe Gebel Mokuttum (1854), water-colour, 6% x 14 inches, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester. Framed c. 1860 for Plint: see Mary Bennett, op.cit. Note 47.

54. Holman Hunt, Tbe Lantern-Maker’s Cowtsbip (1854- 1861), oil on canvas, 2 1% x 13 % inches, Birmingham CAG, The Aftegho in Egypt (c. 186 3), oil on canvas, 3 2 % x 14% inches, Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum. An

identical medallion can be found in Owen Jones, Tbe Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856), Plate XXXV.

55. Grieve, op.cit. Note 14.

172 English Picture Frames: The Pre-Raphaehes

56. Accordingto Diana Holman-Hunt, op.cit. Note 30, pp. 182-184, Hunt’s friendship with Rossetti ended in 1857, because of Annie MiUer.

57. Frederick Sandys, Oriana (1861); Autzunn (c. 1861-1862), oil on panel, 9% x 14 inches, Birmingham CAG.

Sandys became friends with Rossetti in 1857, by 1862 was a constant caller at 16 Cheyne Walk, and for most of 1866

he lived there. See: Betty O’Looney (Elzea), Frederick Sand’s: 1829-1904 (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 1974);

and E.R. and J. PennelI, Tbe Life of James McNeil1 Whistler (London, 1908), p. 109.

58. Frederick Sandys, Me&a (1868), oil on panel, 24% x 18 % inches, Morgan-le-Fuy (1864), oil on panel, 24% x

17 % inches; both Birmingham CAG.

59. J.E. Milk&, Aphelia (185 l- 1852), oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, Tate Gallery.

60. Op.cit. Note 8.

6 1. Holman Hunt-group of five water-colours; four, including Cairo: Sunset, at Whitworth Art Gallery, University

of Manchester; and The Dead Sea at Siloam at Birmingham CAG.

62. Holman Hunt, 7’be Ajierglow in Egypt (1854-1863). oil on canvas, 73 x 34 inches, Southampton CAG. A

preliminary study for this frame exists (ex-colI. Mrs Burt).

6 3. J.M. Whistler, Purple and Rose: the Lunge L&en of tbe Six Marks (1864), Phladelphia Museum of Art; the other

three paintings are Rose and Silver: Lu Princesse du Pays & la Porcelaine and Caprice in Purple and Gold No 2. The Golden Screen, both Freer Gallery of Art; and Symphony in Wbite: No 2. The Little white Girl, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches,

Tate Gallery. The first three reproduced, with frames, by Ira Horowitz, ‘Whistler’s Frames’, Art Journal, XXXIX,

Winter 1979, no.2, pp. 124-13 1; where the motifs are solemnly identified and translated.

64. Reframed after 4 April 1892 because of a weakness in the original. See letters of that date between Whistler and

J.C. Potter: A.McLaren Young et al., Tbe Paintings of J.M. Wbisth: A Catalogue Raisond (Yale and London, 1980),

no.52. It is reproduced with most of the original frame by E.R. and J. PenneIl, op.cit. Note 57 (19 11 ed. only), p. 124.

65. Blossom similar to both flowers is used on the blue cherry-tree ginger jars; Whistler was introduced to the

collecting of ‘blue & white’ by Rossetti: Alastair Grieve, ‘Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites’, Art Quarterly, XXXIV,

Summer 197 1, no.2, pp.2 19-228. Mr Horowitz suggests that it is plum blossom, or passion flowers connoting

‘amorous emotion’; the latter is unlikely, and passion flowers did not mean ‘amorous emotion’ to the Victorians--vi&

Convent Tbougbts. 66. William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London, 1975), p, 38.

67. W.M. Rossetti, D.G. Rossetti: Designer and Writer(London, 1889), p.90: letter to George Rae, 1873.

68. Edward Hale, 7’be Tbree Princesses (188 l), oil on canvas, 52 x 8 1% inches, Guildhall Art Gallery

69. Holman Hunt, May Morning on Mug&h Tower (1890), Lady Lever AR Gallery.

70. C.R. Ashbee, GuiMArcbives: letter from Hunt to F.H. Hubbard, Guild workman and Secretary of the Guild, 19

May 1889.

7 1. Ibid., unidentified review of Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 7 October 1889.

72. Ibid., letter to Hubbard.