Victorian & Edwardian Paintings at Sotheby’s (London)

A good friend and scholar once told me that an expert was only as good as the number of paintings he or she had seen. With that in mind, he suggested that I attend every possible auction in London.Hundreds of paintings are sold at auction each week in London.

Each Sunday, I visit auction previews at Sotheby’s, Christie’s (King Street and South Kensington), and Bohnams. It is a wonderful education.

This week, Sotheby’s is holding it’s annual Summer auction of Victorian & Edwardian (i.e. late nineteenth and early twentieth-century) Paintings. Below are a few of the works on view online and in person until July 15.

Lot 37: John William Waterhouse, R.A., R.I. (1849-1917) Tristam and Isolde (1916)
Oil on canvas. 41 1/2 BY 31 1/2 IN.

Would that I owned such a painting! This was the jewel of the show and, at £500,000 to £1,000,000, the most expensive.

If you are like me, you grew up with Waterhouse’s paintings of Arthurian and mythological characters. Seeing one in a museum in my native Utah was unheard of. My experience was limited to books.

Since moving to London, I have seen many of Waterhouse’s works, both in museums and at auction houses. Each time, I feel like a child again.

I have never been disappointed by a Waterhouse painting. His characters seem fully-realized and familiar in that they are in harmony with my own imagination. Above all, he is a storyteller.

In this painting, Waterhouse paints Tristam–somtimes spelled “Tristan”–and Isolde, characters that first appeared in the twelfth century, but were made famous by Sir Thomas Mallory’s L’Morte d’Arthur. The story has strong parallels with Romeo and Juliette. (Many believe that Shakespeare adapted the story for his play.)

In it, Tristam (on the left) is the heir to an English Throne, and Isolde (on the right) is the Queen of Ireland. A case of mistaken identity leads the two to fall in love without knowledge of the politics of their kingdoms, which are at war. Tristam and Isolde eventually die young in a doomed attempt to patch together the hatred that surrounds them.

When the story of Tristam and Isolde was made into an opera by Richard Wagner in 1865, it became a popular subject for painting and literature in Europe. The opera was first performed in England in 1882 and subsequently painted by the English painters Rossetti and Millais.

Waterhouse’s version is wonderful in it’s simplicity. While elements of the story–the castle of Cornwall, the boat carrying the lovers to their doom, a bottle and cup of poisoned wine–are all present, the figures of Tristam and Isolde dominate the painting.

Many nineteenth-century painters were able to create translucent and realistic skin, but few ware able marry that ability to making sharp and realistic features. As a result, many paintings from the period and in this auction, seem vague or out of focus. Waterhouse was able to both capture realistic skin and specificity of features and, in so doing, surpass the the ability of a photograph by making the skin seem to glow and the figures alive. Isolde seems so full of nervous energy that is is difficult to not look her in the eye.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M., R.A. (1836-1912) A Roman Artist, The Art of Drawing. Watercolor and bodycolor on paper. 12 BY 11 1/4 IN. Lot 34.

This is one of several paintings done by Alma-Tadema to represent painters in the ancient world. Alma-Tadema’s paintings conjured the ancient world at a time when the British Empire regarded itself as the new Rome. This was painted during a period of Alma-Tadema’s own rise in prestige. Therefore, it is possible he was trying to make a statement about his–and other artists’–role in the Empire

Artists in Rome and Greece were highly regarded. In this work, the painter depicted in a expensively decorated studio: exotic tiger skin on the mosaic floor, paint brushes in a large, Grecian urn, fluted columns on the wall.

We know that there were many Roman painters. Some of their works survive in frescoes and recorded descriptions, but we know little about the actual painting methods and materials they used. It is interesting to see Alma-Tadema’s own interpretation of an artist working on a imaginatively stretched canvas without an easel.