The Lost Pre-Raphaelite by Nigel Daly

Author:Nigel Daly [Daly, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908524393
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

Fig. 73. The view from Biddulph Old Hall towards Congleton Edge.

This discovery was a defining moment in our relationship with Biddulph Old Hall and its involvement with the wonderful love story of Robert Bateman, the mysterious visionary artist, and Caroline Octavia, his complex and beautiful wife. Suddenly we seemed to see them everywhere, watching the setting sun slanting through the glassless windows of the ruins, climbing the tower and gazing over the plain to the Welsh Hills, and walking together past the cascades, waterfalls and still waters of their secret valley. We knew they had been there, laughing, talking and making love, as day by day the huge portrait emerged from the empty canvas in the studio. They did not so much haunt us as simply join us in the house. As they did so we became imbued with the benign intensity of their world.

We returned to the great portrait with a new interest and sought out the article by Richard Dorment published in 2002 in The New York Review of Books, which explained the significance of the clothes Caroline was wearing (see fig. 24). Dorment emphasised the extremely precise, clear execution of every detail of the painting, a pronounced characteristic of all Robert’s later work in oil after he had ceased to show at the Dudley in 1874:

Immediately striking is the almost Pre-Raphaelite obsession with minute details of dress, accessories and landscape, all the more surprising at the height of the Aesthetic Movement in England when a generally freer handling of paint had superseded the tight linear clarity found here.

He went on to note another unusual aspect of the image that is none the less characteristic of Bateman: the deliberate inclusion of visual references to historic styles of painting:

Notable too is the homage Bateman pays to the eighteenth-century grand masters, subtly evoked in his wife’s costume. This lovingly delineated dress of black silk or crepe, trimmed at the sleeves just below the elbow with flowers of lace and worn with a wrap of antique lace, fills almost half the canvas. Whoever designed it wished to suggest the kind of garments worn by women in the paintings of Gainsborough or Reynolds, just as Renaissance artists used drapery to evoke the classical world . . .

His thesis is that an appreciation of a sitter’s clothing is crucial to a proper understanding of the information being communicated, both intentionally and subliminally, to nineteenth-century viewers. In the portrait, that information falls into two distinct categories.

The first is the evocation of the grand portraits of the eighteenth century. In a detailed study of Caroline’s dress, he describes the whole ensemble as ‘sombre but also fashionable’. He notes her padded bustle, describing it as a ‘distant echo both of the mid-Victorian crinoline and of the hooped skirts worn by women in the eighteenth century’. He picks out the short train at the base of her skirt ‘such as English women wore in the 1750s’ and suggests that ‘you find velvet bands, exactly like the one she wears on her right wrist, in portraits by Reynolds and Joseph Wright of Derby’.

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