Flying Fish

Herbert James Draper, 1864-1920

1910

Oil on canvas, signed

37 x 24 inches, 94 x 61 cm.

Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1910, Summer Exhibition, number 480

[See commentary by Hilary Morgan below]

Peter Nahum Ltd, London has most generously given its permission to use in the Victorian Web information, images, and text from its catalogues, and this generosity has led to the creation of hundreds of the site's most valuable documents on painting, drawing, and sculpture. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with Peter Nahum Ltd.

Readers should consult the website of Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries to obtain information about recent exhibitions and to order their catalogues. [GPL]

Commentary by Hilary Morgan

Flying Fish was Draper's only subject picture in the Academy of 1910, although he also showed a portrait of H. Cosmo Bonser. Simpler and, above all, smaller than the works by which he made his name, it was ignored by the critics, although their silence is also a sign that this type of academic, imaginative painting was rapidly becoming unfashionable. Reviews in 1910, where not curtailed by reports of the death of Edward VII a week after the opening of the Academy, were dominated by assessments of Sargent's influence on British portraiture and by praise of 'impressionistic' artists such as Edward Stott and of the breezy realism of Laura Knight. Even the Studio, which devoted a full page to a colour reproduction of a drawing for this figure in its article on the Royal Academy exhibition, failed to mention the painting in the review itself.

Yet, although the painting is simple, it epitormizes Draper's artistic concerns. From the period of his early success with the Lament for Icarus (Royal Academy 1898, Tate Gallery, London) he had frequently represented mythological or fantasy subjects with a marine setting and usually chosen themes with a strong erotic charge. The conception of the figure here might be compared with that of the Sirens grappling with Ulysses' boat in 'Ulysses and the Sirens' which Draper showed at the previous Royal Academy exhibition (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries). The artist seems to be working out a personal fascination with the problem of representing the female figure in rapid movement through the waves. Draper's draughtsmanship, shown here to full advantage, is fluent and dynamic. His conception of the figure owes much to French examples and to the training he received in Paris.

The subject should also be seen in the context of the Europe-wide fin de siècle fascination with mermaids and sea nymphs. In the visual arts this resulted in images as diverse as Burne-Jones's only Royal Academy exhibit, the Depths of the Sea (1886, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Bocklin's robust frolicking mermaids. In Britain such subjects were most frequent in Edwardian painting, recurring often in the work of, among others, Draper and Waterhouse, whose Royal Academy Diploma painting was The Mermaid (Royal Academy of Arts, London 1910). Such images form a powerful part of the fin de siecle mythology of the femme fatale. The mermaid, living a natural and untrammelled life within the sea, appeared to have a sensuality as forceful and potentially as destructive as the sea itself. In Burne-Jones's painting, the mermaid is dragging a drowned sailor into the depths. In the present painting (unlike Draper's 'Uysses') the sinister element is latent, but the mermaid's power is suggested by the spontaneous and eager way in which she snatches at the flying fish.

References

London, Barbican Art Gallery, 1989. The Last Romantics. Number 136.

Morgan, Hilary and Nahum, Peter. Burne-Jones, The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Century. London: Peter Nahum, 1989. Catalogue number 164.

---

Victorian
Web

Artists

Herbert J.
Draper

Paintings

Next

Last modified 27 May 2007