Artists – Page 7 – Number One London

A Look at The Look of Love

A guest blog by Jo Manning

Jo Manning (with Lily)

The LOOK OF LOVE exhibit has opened in Birmingham, Alabama, at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I was fortunate enough to be there for the opening and the first couple of days of the show, which runs until the end of June. For museum information, click here.

Dr David and Nan Skier

Before discussing this spectacular exhibit – the first of its kind in the world – and one that, with its accompanying catalog, sets the standard for research on this unique portrait miniature-cum-jewelry that has been, up until now, so little known in either the art or jewelry worlds, some backstory…

I often tell people that one never knows, after one’s book is published and sent out into the marketplace, who will see it, who will be affected by it, and what repercussions it will generate. My biography of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a notorious courtesan of the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries, was sold in bookstores and museum gift shops.

At one of the latter, the Bass Museum of Art’s gift shop in Miami Beach, Florida, it was seen by Dr David Skier, an eye surgeon from Birmingham, who thought his wife would enjoy it. One of the things he noticed in the book was a sidebar on Lover’s Eyes — eye miniatures – with a photo of a ring in the “collection of the author”.

This was of great interest to Dr Skier because he and his wife Nan had quietly been collecting these beautiful objects for many years and had accumulated some 70+ of them. (They now own 100+ of these miniatures.) Assuming that I had a collection of these objects, they wrote to my publisher Simon & Schuster, asking for my contact information. The publisher referred them to my agent, Jenny Bent of the Bent Agency, and she contacted me. I responded promptly with the news that, no, I owned just the one ring, and that I’d become interested in them after seeing the eye miniatures in the collection of my writing colleague Candice Hern, who owned several lovely brooches. I was also entranced by the story of how they came about and their subsequent history.

The Skiers became friends, and when I was asked to contribute to the catalog for an exhibition of their collection called The Look of Love, I said I would be happy to do so, but that I did not in any way consider myself an expert on the subject. No, they said, we’d like you to write some stories, vignettes, inspired by the eyes in their collection. I thought this was a brilliant idea, frankly, because each of the eyes had a story – an unknown story for the most part, to be sure, as sitters and artists were mostly unidentified – and the eyes do speak to the viewer. I gave my imagination full rein and wrote five stories for their consideration. To my knowledge, this is another first; I know of no fiction in the catalogs of art shows. Essays on the art and history, yes, those are standard, but bits of fiction…nope!

I have to confess that the stories came very easily, which does not always happen to a writer. But the eyes drew me in, and I chose the most eloquent, in my opinion, and wrote away. My goal was to illuminate how these objects of love and affection came about, what they meant in a society with mores quite unlike our own, who the artists might be and why they painted them, what the symbolism involved meant to people in that era, and, yes, the aura they held of clandestine love tokens was very appealing to me, as a writer of historical romance.

The stories are: “Pippa and William”; “Ursula Engleheart Prepares Tea For Her Artist Husband George…”; “I Mourn Your Loss, My Beloved…”; “My Mother, Mariah Norcross”; and “The Grey Eye in Great-Aunt Lavinia’s Jewelry Box”.

Pippa and William are star-crossed lovers (not to be confused with Pippa Middleton and Prince William J) who meet as children, fall in love, but cannot marry because of dynastic “rules” governing marriage; Ursula Engleheart is the story of a prolific painter of miniatures (an estimated 5,000 of them in his lifetime) who paints eyes for clandestine lovers but doesn’t sign them to avoid trouble with his patrons, their parents; I Mourn Your Loss tells a sad tale of two of the many young men who perished in the Napoleonic Wars and how all that remains of one of them is the lover’s eye he gave to his fiancée; My Mother, Mariah Norcross is another bereavement story that also illustrates the perils of epidemics in that Georgian era and its horrific costs to families; and, finally, the last story, of what was found in Great-Aunt Lavinia’s Jewelry Box by careless heirs, speculates on the possible unfortunate fate of many an eye miniature.

The exhibition, and the beautifully illustrated 208 page catalog – a proper coffee-table book! – have each garnered wonderful publicity. The catalog will probably become a collector’s item as well as an important research source on the subject of eye miniatures; the essays by Dr. Graham Boettcher, the curator, and Elle Shushan, a dealer in portrait miniatures, are outstanding, detailed, and most readable.

Graham Boettcher

Elle Shushan

The exhibit is exquisite, mounted with extreme delicacy and care by the professionals at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the oohs and ahhs of those visiting the jewel of a room in which it is housed brings joy to everyone who’s been involved in its creation and implementation, but most of all to Nan and Dr David Skier, who collected these gorgeous pieces that combine art/history/and jewelry in such a unique manner. Plans are underway to bring the exhibit to other cities; the catalog can be ordered through Amazon, where it has been Number One in its category – Art and Antiques – for weeks. It can also be ordered from the English publisher

D Giles Ltd here.

Nan Skier talks about the collection here. Scroll down half a page for the presentation.

There are special events surrounding the Look of Love which can be found on the museum’s web site here.

The coverage has been overwhelming: Take a look at the Vanity Fair web article, for example, here.

A beautiful article appears in Antiques & Fine Arts which requires an online FREE registration. Here is the online site: http://www.antiquesandfineart.com/

Many other articles area available on the internet and through the museum’s website.

A postscript: One of the several delightful people I met – including dealers/art consultants/appraisers Reagan Upshaw, Michael Quick, and Sonja Weber (the book is dedicated to her late husband Barry Weber, who often appeared on Antiques Roadshow) — was Thomas Sully, a painter and direct descendant of the English-born American painter of the same name.

Tom Sully self-portrait miniature

Tom Sully paints portrait miniatures, amongst other painting genres and has lately begun to do eye miniatures. I asked him, “How do you do this? Isn’t elephant ivory [which was used for most Georgian eye miniatures] endangered?” He replied that the Russians are selling woolly mammoth – yes! woolly mammoth! – ivory and that is what he is using. Not endangered. Extinct. But not endangered.&
nbsp; I saw some samples of his work and it is very fine, indeed. Check him out here.

And do consider commissioning a lover’s eye – or two – for yourself.

The Charlotte Gunning Portrait at Chawton House by Guest Blogger Hester Davenport

The Portrait of Charlotte Gunning (1759-94)

On 15 May 1784 it was the turn of Charlotte Margaret Gunning, Maid of Honour to Queen Charlotte, to have use of the Royal Coach. Her friend Mary Hamilton called at St James’s Palace, and went with Charlotte to ‘Romney’s, the Painter’s’ where Miss Gunning was ‘to sit for her picture’. That half-length portrait now hangs in Chawton House Great Hall.

Mary Hamilton had also been employed in the royal household, to help with the education of the young princesses; she found her duties arduous, thankfully withdrawing from court after five years. Perhaps the two young women talked over the difficulties of royal service, which included their reputations as ‘learned ladies’. Both had had ‘masculine’ educations in the classical languages: according to Fanny Burney Miss Gunning was derogatively nicknamed ‘Lady Charlotte Hebrew’ for her learning.

Charlotte was the daughter of Sir Robert Gunning (1731-1816), a diplomat who was so successful in conducting the King’s business with the Empress of Russia that in 1773 he was made Knight of the Bath. His daughter’s appointment as Maid of Honour to Queen Charlotte in 1779 was no doubt a further sign of royal favour. He had two other children, his son George who would inherit the baronetcy, and another daughter Barbara. His wife had died when Charlotte was eleven-years-old, but in the 1780s he ordered portraits of himself and his three children from the society portraitist, George Romney (1734-1802).

The painting of the 25-year-old Charlotte is interesting in its apparent contradictions. The colours are muted, with the head veiled in white and the black dress severely plain, yet it is very low-cut, and the sitter looks out self-assured and even challenging. A warm glow in the sky behind suggests there is feeling and passion beneath that cool exterior. Charlotte’s hair is dressed high on her head and fashionably powdered. A hat might have been expected, but scarves, called ‘fascinators’, sometimes replaced large hats, especially for evening wear.

There were six Maids of Honour, paid £300 a year, with duties that must have been stultifyingly dull, standing in attendance at the Queen’s ‘Drawing rooms’ and other court functions (though periods of duty were rotated). Charlotte kept her position for nearly twelve years before managing to escape. It was not easy to withdraw from royal service, as both Mary Hamilton and Fanny Burney discovered, and reaching her thirtieth birthday in 1789 Charlotte must have feared a dreary life of spinsterhood. But on 6 January 1790 she achieved an honourable discharge when she married a widower, Colonel the Honourable Stephen Digby, the Queen’s Vice Chamberlain. Another of Charlotte’s friends, Mary Noel, wrote in a letter of her surprise that Sir Robert gave his consent ‘as it must be a very bad match for her if he has four children’, though she also recorded Charlotte saying that she ‘can’t live without his friendship and could not keep that without marrying him’.

For Fanny Burney the news of the forthcoming wedding was a shock: she believed that Digby had been paying her marked attention for two years and that she should have received the proposal. Her sense of betrayal was huge and she gave vent to her feelings in page after page of her journal. She never blamed Charlotte but no doubt got sly pleasure from noting the King shaking his head over ‘Poor Digby’ (because his bride was a learned lady) or recording the strange details of the wedding: that it was performed by Dr Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, in the Drawing-room of Sir Robert’s house in Northampton, with the guests sitting round on sofas and ladies’ workboxes not cleared away. The new Mrs Digby paid a visit to Miss Burney, ‘quite brilliant in smiles and spirits’ and Fanny did her the justice of saying that she believed that Miss Gunning had ‘long cherished a passionate regard’ for Colonel Digby.

Two children, Henry Robert and Isabella Margaret, were born in quick succession, but the marriage was not to be long-lasting. In June 1794 Charlotte Digby died (possibly in childbirth – the brief obituary notice in the Genteman’s Magazine gives no cause of death). She was buried in the vault of Thames Ditton church where Digby’s first wife lay: he would join his two ‘dear wives’ there in 1800.

Charlotte Gunning wrote no books, has found no place in history. But there could surely be no more suitable place for her portrait than Chawton Women’s Library, in the society of so many other ‘learned ladies’.

Permission to reprint this article, which first ran in The Female Spectator, was kindly granted by that publication and Chawton House Library.

Your Lover's Eye

Through artist Victoria Carlin, the tradition of painting lover’s eyes survives in the 21st century. Recently, guest blogger Jo Manning did a series of posts on lover’s eyes for us and explained their history and the story behind these cherished keepsakes. Today, the cost of purchasing these antique eyes is astronomical, but through Victoria’s brush, you can now have a portrait done of your own, or your lover’s, eye at an affordable price, thus the tradition endures.

Victoria studied at the School for Visual Arts and the Student’s Art League of New York. Additionally, she studied at Jerusalem’s Betzalel Academy of Art. Victoria eads painting workshops in Italy, England, Canada and the United States. Victoria’s talents and reputation as a serious fine artist has brought her numerous and prestigious commissions for portraits of both private and public figures. Victoria’s work hangs locally as well as internationally in Israel, Ireland and Ecuador.

After much success in the world of fine art, Victoria has now followed her passion – blending her superb talent with a rich heritage of romanticism – making her exquisite pieces available to everyone, as the perfect gift for that special loved one.

As Victoria recently explained –

“I first became aware of lover’s eye when I saw one in either France or England. I fell instantly in love. I have worked as a commissioned portrait artist for the past 17 years. My goal as a fine artist is to communicate on a two dimensional canvas not only how that person looks, but who they are, the visual essence of the person. I found that if one were able to paint the feeling of the eyes in the portrait, then the commission was a success… that the soul, that life spark was in the painting of the eye.

“In today’s modern world, people no longer commission an artist to paint a portrait of their love ones. Once one is exposed to the world of honoring, remembering and showing love through portraiture, most people would love to have one. Sadly for many the cost is beyond their budget.

“This made me realize that a relatively small amount of money, which would otherwise be spent on gifts such as flowers, lingerie or jewelery, one could commission an artist create a fine art painting of that person’s eye – a lover’s eye.”

Victoria knows how much a lover’s eye can mean to someone as a momento because she has a very special story of her own regarding these keepsakes –

“My fiance and I had been high school sweethearts who parted and went on to create big lives with children and careers. Then, the stars re-aligned and we discovered that we were both single again. I had been dating someone else and was about to send him my own lover’s eye when Ron stepped back into my life and I just knew then that the other guy was not meant to receive this keepsake. It became very personal, as though I were sending a part of me. . . Ron was so touched by my lover’s eye its now on his desk front center and is, he says, one of his most precious things.”

Victoria has been commissioned to paint several children’s eyes and her eyes have become popular as wedding day gifts. You can find more examples of Victoria’s work and read more about her at her website, My Lover’s Eye.

An Exhibition of Royal Photographers

The Princess Royal and Princess Alice, Balmoral 1856 by Fenton

A new exhibition entitled Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron: Early British Photographs from the Royal Collection, will be on display at The Arts and Crafts House, Blackwell, Cumbria until April 27 2011.

Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were photography enthusiasts who kept voluminous photo albums containing pictures of their own family, as well as “art” photographs of models, people and places. At her death in 1901, Queen Victoria’s collection numbered an estimated 20,000 photographs. In December of 1853, the Royal Couple attended the inaugural exhibition of the Photographic Society. Roger Fenton, founder of the Society, of which Prince Albert later became a patron, personally showed them the exhibits and was invited to Windsor Castle to photograph the royal children, the beginnings of a large collection of photos he’d take of the family. Coincidentally or not, after Prince Albert’s death in 1861, Fenton sold his photo equipuipment and gave up photography to retrun to the practice of law and relative obscurity.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, by Fenton, June 30, 1854

Julia Margaret Cameron (self portrait)

Queen Victoria first saw the work of Julia Margaret Cameron after Albert’s death at Colnaghi’s photo gallery in London and began collecting her work. Born in 1815, Cameron took up photography in 1863, when her daugther gave her a camera. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. A few of her artistic photographs are show here –

The Kiss of Peace 1869

“Sadness” featurning Ellen Terry

For further information on photos of the royal family . . .

Yale Center for British Art

Victoria here. I cannot imagine a place I would rather be (on the U.S. side of the pond, anyway) then the Yale Center for British Art. Think of yourself surrounded by wonderful works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Stubbs, and many more, not to mention the current exhibition Thomas Lawrence Regency Power and Brilliance. Here are Diane Gaston (l) and me, keeping company with George IV. The bust, in white marble, was sculpted by Sir Francis Chantrey (1781-1841) in the year 1827. To quote the label behind my head: “George IV was greedy, spoiled, manipulative, lecherous, foolish, extravagant, and stubborn. But in his heyday during the Regency period, the king was, perhaps more than any of his Hanoverian predecessors, a bold, daring and brilliant patron of the visual arts and of architecture.”

The interior of the YCBA is very comfortable and welcoming. I like a museum where there are lots of seats where one can sit and look at the pictures — and this gallery has the added advantage of windows to the outside. The picture in the center is by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), a work with the kind of realistic detail he later eschewed. It is titled Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-boat from Rotterdam Becalmed painted in 1818. I love almost everything by Turner but this particularly engages me.

Here is another view of the galleries, photos attributed to Richard Caspole. Although I wouldn’t mind being the only patron for a few hours, I must say the place has never been empty when I visited. The building was designed by was Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), once a professor of architecture at Yale, and a leading American mid-century architect. The YCBA is immediately across the street from the Yale Art Gallery, also designed by Kahn, now undergoing renovations.

My report on that collection will have to await a future trip to New Haven, which is actually on my agenda for 2012. That is, if I can tear myself away from the YCBA.

This lovely portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds shows Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton, later Duchess of Argyll (1758-60). Reynolds (1723-92) was renowned for his portraits of British society ladies, sometimes even depicted with their husbands. He and Thomas Gainsborough competed for prominence and commissions for many years in London. The subject of this painting was one of the famous Irish Gunning sisters, renowned for their beauty in mid 18th c. London. Both married peers of the realm, though the elder sister, Maria, Countess of Coventry (1732-1760), died very young. Elizabeth was the mother of three children from her first marriage and five from her second. Four of her sons were dukes.

The YCBA has an excellent collection of works by George Stubbs (1724-1806). This picture of Pumpkin with a Stable-lad was one of the first purchases of British art made by Paul Mellon (1907-1999), whose collection is the nucleus of the YCBA. Mellon was particularly fond of sporting pictures and of Stubbs in particular. His father, Andrew Mellon, his uncle and grandfather were the scions of the Mellon Bank and one of America’s greatest fortunes. Andrew and Paul Mellon were responsible for the creation of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. and gave the Andrew Mellon collection as its most important bequest.

Stubbs was a favorite painter of Paul Mellon, from his racing horses (which reflected Mello
n’s interest in horseracing) to his exotic animals to his dramatically violent pictures of beasts attacking horses. The view to the left, Zebra, dates from 1762–63. Again, the photo is from the YCBA by Richard Caspole. As Zebra was the name of my former publisher, I have a special fondness for the little fellow.

Equally beautiful but shockingly violent is the 1762 painting Lion Attacking a Horse, one of several such views Stubbs painted after supposedly witnessing a similar event while traveling abroad. I guess it makes the scene even more upsetting to us to note that the horse looks much like Trigger.

Paul Mellon graduated from Yale University and was the major benefactor for the YCBA, both the building and the collection.

Continuing the horsey theme with a more mellow view, this painting by Edward Landseer (1802-1873) depicts The Favourites, the property of H.R.H. Prince George of Cambridge, as seen in 1834-5. Landseer had a way with animals, didn’t he?
A love for horses and British art are probably the only qualities I share with the late Paul Mellon, but I certainly appreciate his taste and his philanthropy. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA, has also benefited from the Mellon’s donations of British Sporting Art.

At right is Eagle, A Celebrated Stallion, by James Ward (1769-1859) painted in 1809.
According to the YCBA, the picture “exhibits Ward’s remarkable ability to create an accurate physical portrayal of a particular animal. He also evokes a transcendent romantic type suggesting the latent power of the barely tamed creature is full of drive, dash, and tension…” As you may have guess, I am a bit horse-crazy myself. Though, looking at these magnificent specimens, who isn’t?

Finally, here are two paintings of London by the renowned Venetian master Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto (1697–1768). Before Diane and I visited Yale in early March, we spent the first day of the month with our pals Julie and Carol at Washington’s National Gallery to see the exhibition Canaletto and His Rivals, about which I will post soon. Canaletto was a great favorite of traveling British aristocrats and he came to London for a few years and painted many local scenes. Though I must say I wonder if the boats on the Thames looked quite so much like the gondolas and barges of his home town.

St Paul’s Cathedral by Canaletto, at right. The Italian artist lived in London from 1746 to 1755 and painted many views of England, probably none more magnificently than this. The cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in a nearly-Italian baroque style, had been finished in 1710, after its predecessor had been destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. It must have looked much more familiar to the Venetian Canaletto than other, gothic-style London churches.

Coming soon, a visit to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library…and more Canaletto from Washington, D.C.