Gleams of gold: the Fortunoff collection of paintings by Joseph Southall, currently on show at the Fine Art Society, London, is a comprehensive reminder of the talent of one of the few true Arts and Crafts painters.
Joseph Southall is that rare bird, an Arts and Crafts painter. He is probably the most important, if not the most celebrated (that distinction could be said to belong to Walter Crane); he was certainly among the most dedicated. An exhibition of his paintings currently at the Fine Art Society adds a further dimension to the huge survey of the Arts and Crafts movement at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Fine Art Society exhibition acts as a showcase for the acquisition by Cheltenham Art Gallery--repository of one of the best collections of Arts and Crafts in the country--of two of his finest and most characteristic works (Figs. 2 and 3). The purchase has been made with support from the National Art Collections Fund, appropriately given Southall's connection with one of the key founders of the Fund, Lady Herringham, of whom more later.Southall (1861-1944) lived and worked in Birmingham at a moment of artistic and cultural ferment, which had its focus at the Municipal School of Art in Margaret Street. Under its remarkable head, E.R. Taylor, the school offered a great range of craft techniques, taught by expert practitioners. Taylor ensured that through the school's influence, Birmingham, once seen solely as the source of cheap novelties, made an important and distinctive contribution to the Arts and Crafts Movement. (1)
Southall's career was largely devoted to painting but he also mastered a number of handicrafts in the true spirit of the artist-craftsman. He was a leading member of the Birmingham Group of Artist-Craftsmen, among whom were Arthur Gaskin and his wife, Georgie, Charles March Gere and his sister Margaret, Sidney Meteyard, Mary Newill, Henry Payne and his wife, Edith (sister of Charles and Margaret Gere), and Bernard Sleigh. There was no formal membership, it was simply unity of vision--and association with the Art School--which brought them together. They were all more or less under the spell of Ruskin, Morris and Burne-Jones and they belong in the category of late romantics, although their portraiture and domestic subjects were conceived in a distinctive modern idiom. The section devoted to the Birmingham Group was pivotal to the 'Last Romantics' show at the Barbican in 1989, between second phase Pre-Raphaelites such as Burne-Jones and the ambiguous modernity of Slade School Symbolists such as Augustus John and Stanley Spencer. (2)
Among the Group, Charles and Margaret Gere were the ones other than Southall who survived by painting alone; the others were forced to concentrate on some sideline for financial reasons, diversifying into stained glass, jewellery and silverwork, embroidery, gilding and illustration. Southall initially trained as an architect with the firm of Martin and Chamberlain, but found his time there unsatisfying and decided to learn carving and decorative painting instead. (3) He followed a well-trodden route in developing his art, through reading Ruskin and coming upon prints published by the Arundel Society, which, as he remarked, 'opened [his] eyes' to the marvels of medieval art and mural decoration. Through these influences he was drawn into experiments with media and techniques. He reacted intensely to the experience of his Italian visits, the first in 1883, becoming a lifelong admirer of the Italian primitives. Inspired by Ruskin's enthusiasm he sought out the work of Carpaccio. Indeed, the actual craft took a very central place in his painting, and it led him, with the encouragement of Ruskin, to adopt the difficult medium of tempera, which he was to struggle with all his life.
The tempera revival became the defining element in the identity of the group. It was a link to William Holman Hunt and G.E Watts as well as an important Arts and Crafts founder-member, Walter Crane. Southall's pupil Maxwell Armfield, who arrived at the Birmingham School of Art in 1899, carried the Birmingham tempera tradition on into the second half of the twentieth century (he died in 1972). The Society of Painters in Tempera was founded in 1901; one of the founder-members was Christiana Herringham, an influential figure in the Edwardian art world, who was an expert on tempera and translator of Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell' Arte (1899), textbook of the movement. (4) There were about fifty artist-members of the Society in its brief heyday (until about 1909) and three tempera exhibitions were held. In 1903 Southall became a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.
At the outset of his career he received advice from Burne-Jones, whom he first encountered in 1893, when the celebrated artist visited the Art School in his native city to encourage the students. Later, Southall made several visits to Burne-Jones and in November 1897 took with him Beauty Seeing the Image of Her Home in the Fountain (Beauty at the Fountain) (Fig. 2). Southall recorded Burne-Jones's opinion: 'E B-J did not quite like the face but admired the rest very much & said the red drapery she sits on was "a heavenly red"--liked "the little chap" on fountain and the pigeons very much also the hands and arms he praised most warmly & the jewel on the bracelet'. (5) The picture is in tempera on panel, which Southall had returned to after a period when he abandoned the difficult technique in favour of oil painting. Burne-Jones had of course fastened on the key to Southall's mesmerising quality, his use of the red spectrum of shimmering colour. The subject of Beauty and the Beast preoccupied Southall over a long period. Another episode from the story painted in tempera on canvas in the year following Beauty at the Fountain, was the largest easel picture he ever attempted. The two were shown at the first Tempera Society exhibition, at Leighton House in 1901.
For all that Southall did not appear to profit much from his architectural training, it informed the character of his work, with its almost obsessive attention to detail. Ruskin had praised Southall's drawings made on his eight-week Italian tour of 1883, saying that he had 'never seen architecture better drawn'. (6) At the time of the first exhibition devoted specifically to the Group, at the Fine Art Society's galleries in 1907, then as now in New Bond Street, a critic for the Studio magazine wrote, 'The leading characteristic of this collection as a whole is its architectural basis, its sense of the unity of all the arts in due subordination to the master craft.' (7) Other traits singled out for comment were 'a fine sense of surface or joy in the beauty and specific quality of materials', remarks particularly applicable to Southall. The bright, clear light in his paintings appears like an Arts and Crafts article of faith, casting aside the heavily shadowed tonalities of the Victorians. The aims of the Group were to master the full range of art and craft, but many of the members, like Southall's dearest friend, Arthur Gaskin, found they had to set painting aside in favour of a money-making craft workshop, which, for a variety of reasons, Southall was able to avoid.
One feature of the Birmingham scene at this time was the continuance of the Victorian mural-painting tradition. Southall, who experimented with true fresco and tempera, worked in Birmingham itself. Henry Payne was involved with a late phase of the Palace of Westminster decorations as well as the famous chapel at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. A communal Birmingham Group project initiated by Taylor was the mural scheme for the Birmingham Town Hall. (8) As to his other craft credentials, Southall was a talented illustrator (this was a particular speciality of the Birmingham Group) and engraver. He designed and painted picture frames and mirror frames that were gilded by his wife or his friends Charles Gere and Edith Payne and set with semi-precious stones by Georgie Gaskin. He made a small number of miniature-set jewels; he designed Greek lace which was made up by his mother.
In fact, each of Southall's technically-demanding paintings fulfils the ideals of the artist-craftsman, in that the elaborately moulded and decorated frames were conceived as integral and hand-gilded, usually by Southall's wife. The gold is of an amazing richness, achieved by methods learned from the Italian renaissance, specifically the notebooks of Cennino Cennini. The picture-frames in the present exhibition are noteworthy, particularly the baroque design for Beauty at the Fountain, and the bold architectonic frame to Hortus Inclusus (Fig. 3). This was a tour de force of patient labour over nearly three months by Southall's future wife, Anna Elizabeth Baker, who is the subject of the painting, shown with their cat Colin.
For this luminously rich work Southall employed the particularly unforgiving medium of watercolour on vellum. The Hortus Inclusus or enclosed garden is a medieval or renaissance conceit, in which a secret garden is invested with complex symbolism. The exquisite medieval miniatures illustrating the Romaunt of the Rose (translated from the French by Geoffrey Chaucer) inspired Victorian romantics, who responded to the idea of the Queen of Heaven in her secret garden. There are elements from the Romaunt illustrations here, the double enclosure of high topiary hedges surrounded by a crenellated outer wall.
Southall's long route to success in his profession was made possible by a number of interlinked factors: his tiny inherited income, his late marriage to a first cousin (they delayed their marriage because they had decided to deny themselves children on account of their consanguinity), patience in the face of disappointment and his own dogged temperament, conditioned by his Quaker faith. He did in the end enjoy a considerable success, particularly in France (he exhibited at the Paris Salon and at the Galeries Georges Petit) and he is one of the most highly regarded among those who kept alive well into the twentieth century the spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism. His modern reputation is a curious hybrid, in that just one or two of his works are widely known in reproduction, notably Corporation Street, Birmingham, his mural for Birmingham Art Gallery, and a seaside subject, Along the Shore (Oldham Art Galleries and Museum). Often the owners of these reproductions have not pondered the identity of the artist and his name remains little known. Otherwise, his work rarely comes up for sale and, like that of fellow Birmingham Group painters, is infrequently exhibited. The exhibition currently at the Fine Art Society is, therefore, something of a rarity.
This is really a story of two people, the artist and the collector. (9) The exhibition comprises the fruits of a collecting passion pursued over a very long period. In an unlikely conjunction, the Birmingham Quaker artist appealed strongly to a Manhattan businessman, Alan Fortunoff. Fortunoff, a Russian-Jewish second-generation immigrant, who surprisingly attended a Quaker school, built up a successful luxury retail business, with a succession of increasingly elegant stores in Manhattan selling silver, objets d'art and jewellery. A lover of the art of the nineteenth century, particularly at its most technically sophisticated, he also collected the work of Southall's fellow tempera painter Maxwell Armfield, the portraitist Gerald Brockhurst, realist William Strang and vorticist C.R. Nevinson--all noted for their stylishness, refinement and high finish--as well as masterpieces of Victorian illustrated book production by the likes of Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser. Logically, he should have collected American work in the same genre, by artists such as Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth, but he did not choose to. In Southall he saw light, finish, intensity, but he must also have been drawn by more specifically jewel-like qualities of colour and the gleam of gold.
Southall sometimes used gold paint to enhance details in his watercolours and miniatures to emphasise their medieval qualities. The first of his pictures to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, Cinderella (1893-94, Tate, London), was executed in watercolour enhanced with gold paint in a style reminiscent of medieval miniature painting. When it seemed appropriate, Southall actually gilded areas of the picture surface, giving a very intricate halo to the figure of Christ in a late work, At the Well of Samaria of 1935. (10) The nimbus of St Dorothea in St Dorothea and Her Sisters Refusing to Worship the Idol of 1901-1902 took '2 1/2 leaves of best gold'. (11) For this remarkable work he was named by a contemporary critic 'A Modern Gozzoli', an aspect of Southall's inspiration appreciated by Fortunoff, who owned one of Southall's early studies from the Gozzoli decorations in the Campo Santo in Pisa.
In common with the almost photo-realist portrait style of these Birmingham painters, Southall was able to depict jewels as if they could be plucked from the surface of the work. Brockhurst, too, had this facility. In the present exhibition both Hortus Inclusus a and The Coral Necklace (Fig. 10) demonstrate this quality, with, in the latter, the subtlety of showing the coral beads against the sitter's skin. This portrait, also of Anna Elizabeth Baker, whose marriage to Southall was still almost a decade in the future, is heavily annotated with technical information on medium and colour. It is in its original frame. These loving and searching images of his future wife are very moving in the context of Southall's austere Quaker personality and the necessary self-restraint which both of them had to exercise for close on twenty years.
The shimmering textiles and Italianate vistas of Southall's romantic subjects were matched by his intense response to light on buildings and landscape and the metallic glitter of sunlight on a seascape. His response to the architecture of Italy, which Ruskin had noted, remained a constant; In Tuscany (Fig. 7) dates from 1906 but the Italian trips continued until 1937, when he made his last visit to Venice. Love of landscape is second only to architecture in Southall's subject-matter and, in spite of what seems like a certain uniformity of approach, his sense of place and atmosphere is very strong, apparent in this tranquil English view of The Meadow (Fig. 8) dating from 1920.
Cleaning the Lines of 1900 (Fig. 6) is one of the earliest in a succession of beach scenes with fishermen and their boats. A study for the boat (private collection) is inscribed 'Overstrand' and dated '14 VII 1900'. Later, the annual seaside visit took the Southalls to Southwold in Suffolk, and such was the regularity of their lives that they rarely deviated from the same month and place thereafter. It is hardly appropriate to refer to this annual pilgrimage as a holiday, since many works of art were made in Southwold, including a drawing in conte crayon and coloured chalk (Fig. 1) dated 9 July 1920. Another seaside place the Southalls returned to many times was the Fowey estuary, near Polruan in Cornwall. The White Barque at Fowey (1943, Fig. 9) was painted in the year before Southall's death and shows the depth of his willpower. In 1937 he had a serious illness from which he never really recovered, but he continued to work, even on the long drawn-out commission for the mural decoration of the Council House in Birmingham, which proceeded with agonising slowness.
Standing rather apart from the various categories of fairy-tale and romance, religious subjects, portraiture, landscape, seascape and decorative murals, Balloons to Sell (1909, Fig. 4) is a rare essay in domestic genre painting. It shows Southall's nephew, Ned Allen, whom he captured first in a sketch which he sent in a letter to Arthur Gaskin in 1908. In the letter he remarks 'Here is a little sketch of my little Allen nephew in Croydon marching round the dining room chanting his little musical chant "balloons to sell"--If only I could paint him!' (12) The picture is particularly touching in the light of the Southall's decision not to have children of their own.
Eventually Fortunoff's holding spanned the whole of Southall's career, and an almost complete gamut of his materials and techniques, probably more by coincidence than deliberate planning. Mr and Mrs Fortunoff simply bought what they admired, and what the works have in common is a certain panache, most evident in the buon fresco panel In the Rue de Rivoli (Fig. 5) of 1912. This rare item gave the Fortunoffs the unusual privilege of representing Southall as a mural painter in their collection. Although mural painting was a key element in the careers of many Victorian and Edwardian artists, this is the trickiest aspect of their work to survey effectively in a collection or a gallery exhibition. Buried in the provenances of Fortunoff's collection are other connections among these paintings, intimations of Southall's closest friendships: Mrs Southall herself owned Hortus Inclusus and Balloons to Sell; Arthur Gaskin was the confidant for the development of Balloons to Sell; Charles Gere was given an intense and atmospheric watercolour of Overstrand beach, almost certainly painted on the site, which served as the study for Cleaning the Lines. Maxwell Armfield owned the painting itself. That is not to say that Southall lacked patrons, among them two distinguished lawyers, Lord Ilford, who owned The Meadow, and Lord Blanesburgh, as well as Quaker admirers such as the Heatons and the Cadburys, but ties of friendship among the Birmingham Group artists were strong and an important part of the Group ethos.
(1) Alan Crawford (ed.), By Hammer and Hand: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham, Birmingham, 1984.
(2) John Christian, The Last Romantics, the Romantic Tradition in British Art, Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer, exh. cat., Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1989.
(3) Full details of Southall's life and career, with a chronology, are given in Joseph Southall, 1861-1944, Artist-Craftsman, exh. cat., Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1980.
(4) M. Lago, Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene, Columbia, 1996. See H. Spooner, 'Pure Painting: Joseph Southall, Christiana Herringham and the Tempera Revival', The British Art Journal, vol. iv, no. 2, 2003, pp. 49-56.
(5) Joseph Southall ..., op. cit., no, B3.
(6) Ruskin gave Southall one of his only architectural commissions, to design a Museum at Bewdley in Staffordshire for Ruskin's Guild of St George. When the scheme foundered Southall remarked ruefully 'My chance as an architect vanished and years of obscurity without a little bitterness of soul followed' (ibid., p. 6).
(7) C. Napier-Clavering, 'Birmingham Painters and Craftsmen' in Studio, vol. XLII, 1908, pp. 215-22. The exhibition had opened at the very end of 1907, in November.
(8) For all these initiatives, see Clare A.P. Willsdon, Mural Painting In Britain 1840 1940: Image and Meaning, Oxford, 2000, pp. 184, 214.
(9) It might be said to be a story of three people, the enabling dealer being the third of the triumvirate. Fortunoff bought his first Southall painting in 1970, the year following the Fine Art Society's 'full-circle' exhibition of Birmingham Group works. The 1907 Group exhibition was commemorated in 1969 in The Earthly Paradise, which introduced a modern public to this entirely forgotten School. After Fortunoff's purchase of The Man and the Boat (ex Lord Blanesburgh collection) Peyton Skipwith guided him to one jewel-like example after another. The present exhibition is the evidence for their discrimination.
(10) Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, see Joseph Southall ..., op. cit., no. C3.
(11) Ibid., no. C1.
(12) Ibid., no. E25.
'Joseph Southall: Sixty Works from the Fortunoff Collection' opened at the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London W1 on 15 March and continues until 16 April.
Charlotte Gere is a specialist in nineteenth-century decorative arts. She is co-author of Great Women Collectors (1999) with Marina Vaizey.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Gere, Charlotte |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Apollo |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUE |
| Date: | Apr 1, 2005 |
| Words: | 3216 |
| Previous Article: | Byzantium in Berkshire: fresh information on Sir Edwin Lutyens's first mausoleum, the Hannen columbarium at St Mary, Wargrave, Berkshire, is provided... |
| Next Article: | Transcribing antiquity: Peter Howell reviews the latest volumes in one of the great scholarly publishing ventures of the day: the catalogue of... |
| Topics: | |