Thursday, May 31, 2012

Ophelia dress

Elizabeth Siddall wore a very fine silver embroidered dress bought by Millais from a second-hand shop for four pounds (this would be about £250 today). In March, 1852, Millais wrote to Mrs Combe "To-day I have purchased a really splendid lady's ancient dress- all flowered over in silver embroidery-and I am going to paint it for 'Ophelia'. You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds." (The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, John Guille Millais, vol. 1, 1899, p.162).

Probably Millais' first sketch for Ophelia The Pierpont Morgan Library


Maria Francesca Rossetti,


Georgiana Burne-Jones and Pip


Sponsa de Libano - Edward Burne Jones 1891


Joan of Arc - John Everett Millais 1865


Phosphorus and Hesperus - Evelyn de Morgan


The Spirit of the Summit- Lord Frederic Leighton 1894


Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Chorister - Charles Stanley Pollitt


I've been tracking down late pre raphaelite influences. This was exhibited at the RA in 1916. As a boy Pollitt wrote to Holman Hunt for advice and became his protege; going to the art school in Manchester at Hunt's expense. By then Hunt was nearly blind and the young boy led him round the galleries as they discussed the paintings. 

In 1916 Politt was living in Florence. He became a copyist at the Uffizi and later a professor of English at the Vatican.

In this picture it was painted in Hunt's influenced wet white style and is reminiscent of May Morning.

Water Babies ~ Sir Edward John Poynter


Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema - Colosseum


Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Proserpine, 1877


La Bella Mano - Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1875