Beryn and Syrophanes Playing Chess. John Lucas Tupper.1851, plaster relief, 54 x 69.5 x 5 cm, Dennis T. Lanigan collection. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
The sculpture Beryn and Syrophanes Playing Chess by John Lucas Tupper was long thought lost and probably destroyed until its recent rediscovery (Lanigan, PRS Review, 47). The relief had been unsuccessfully submitted for the Royal Academy exhibition in 1851, likely because it was considered too primitive or too original by the selection committee. After Tupper's relief was rejected by the Royal Academy he placed it at St George's Chess Club, which was to be host to the first international chess tournament that same year.
In May 1851 William Michael Rossetti recorded in his diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
We saw Tupper's bas-relief, which the Academy rejected. It is illustrative of The Merchant's Second Tale, by (or ascribed to) Chaucer, and represents the chess playing between the merchant and the old man he meets in the strange city. It is at the extremest edge of P.R. Bism, most conscientiously copied from nature, and with good character. The P.R.B. principle of uncompromising truth to what is before you is carried out to the full, but with some want of consideration of the requirements peculiar to the particular form of art adopted. According to all R.A. ideas it is a perfect sculpturesque heresy, whose rejection - especially seeing that it is the introductory sample of the P.R.B. system in sculpture - cannot be much wondered at, though certainly most unjustifiable. [Rossetti, Letters and Diaries, 305]
In this work Tupper appears to have taken John Ruskin's love of Gothic sculpture to the extreme. Ruskin, in a letter of October 18, 1858 to G. F. Watts commenting on artists within the circle of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, admitted that "he had encouraged the stiffness and quaintness and intensity as opposed to classical grace and tranquility" in their work (qtd. in Watts 172-73). Tupper's sculpture is certtainly consistent with the ideals of the young members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 when they examined a volume of prints by Carlo Lasinio after the early frescoes at the Campo in Pisa. As William Holman Hunt recorded:
The innocent spirit which had directed the invention of the painter was traced point after point with emulation by each of us who were the workers, with the determination that a kindred simplicity should regulate our own ambition, and we insisted that the naïve traits of frank expression and unaffected grace were what had made Italian art so essentially vigourous and progressive, until the showy followers of Michael Angelo had grafted their Dead Sea fruit on to the vital tree just when it was bearing its choicest autumnal ripeness for the reawakened world. [130-131]
Tupper's sculpture is reminiscent of the low-relief sculptures by Quattrocento artists like Donatello and Desiderio da Settignano with its angular limbs and the flat modeling of the drapery. The "two dimensionality" of Tupper's relief may also have been influenced by illustrations of people playing chess found in medieval manuscripts. Certainly members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates were known to have had an interest in such manuscripts at this time period.
Details of the sculpture.
It may also be of significance with regard to the handling of this sculpture that its subject was inspired by a medieval text. The Tale of Beryn or The Merchant's Second Tale is a spurious fifteenth-century addition to Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales by an unknown author, who was likely a monk associated with the cathedral shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. The story in emulation of Chaucer tells the tale of Beryn, a young man from an aristocratic family in imperial Rome who was the son of Faunus, a wealthy senator, and his wife Agea. Beryn's parents do not discipline him sufficiently as a child. He grows up spoiled and is allowed to gamble as much as he wants and to associate with bad company. Unfortunately Beryn frequently gambles away all of his possessions. When Agea dies Faunus swears to never marry again, but after three years he marries the shrewish Rame. Beryn, now eighteen, has continued with his gambling habits and his new stepmother dislikes him and disapproves of his vices. She makes Faunus talk to Beryn about correcting his ways. Beryn fights with his father but eventually recognizes the truth of his misconduct. He decides to leave Rome to become a merchant and to seek his fortune in Egypt. He sets sale with five ships full of merchandise that he hopes to sell for a profit. Prior to arriving his ships are blown off course to an unknown land. Here Beryn decides to gamble on a game of chess that he loses to Syrophanes, Prior to the game Beryn had been tricked into swearing an oath implying that he would have to drink all the saltwater in the sea if Syrophanes beats him. After Beryn loses Syrophanes claims that Beryn is now legally bound to carry out his promise. Syrophanes decides to take Beryn to court where Beryn's expectation is of an amicable settlement of their dispute. In this strange land, however, all the inhabitants are thieves and tricksters who prey on unwary travellers and where the law is decided via lawsuits and where a clever lie is considered more valuable than the truth. Despite the obvious absurdity of Syrophanes's claim, the court resolution leads to a complete loss of Beryn's possessions. A lame beggar named Geoffrey comes to Beryn's aid, however, and shows him how to manipulate the legal system and win his case by telling better lies than those being used against him. This time the court rules in Beryn's favour and the possessions that he lost gambling are returned to him. Beryn makes a tidy profit from his cargo and attains the wisdom of adulthood.
In 1857 a critic (L.L.), writing in the American publication The Crayon, stated: "John L. Tupper, a contributor to this journal, has adopted in a modified form some of the Pre-Raphaelite principles, and carried out his convictions in several sculptures, which exhibit great care and profound scientific knowledge, of a kind which is seldom brought to the aid of Art" (363). Tupper felt that the fundamental constituents of art were accurate drawing, proportion and perspective. In his sculpture of Beryn and Syrophanes Playing Chess he has carried early Pre-Raphaelite principles to the extreme. Like his colleagues amongst the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Tupper refused to accept the prevailing conventions of his time. With his sculpture's jarring stiffness, awkward gestures, and a lack of the grace normally seen in the neo-classical sculptures of the period, it is hardly surprising that this work was rejected by the Royal Academy.
For this work to be truly considered a defining work of Pre-Raphaelite sculpture, or as W. M. Rossetti termed it "the introductory sample of the P.R.B. system in sculpture", it would have to be the three-dimensional equivalent of the characteristics that marked the paintings and drawings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its early years from 1848-1851. Early Pre-Raphaelite drawings by the P.R.B., in their naïve awkward and angular "medieval style", can definitely be compared to Tupper's sculpture of Beryn and Syrophanes Playing Chess. Alastair Grieve has commented about these early drawings: "But the shared style of severe outline, mannered gestures, intense exchange of glance, controversial subjects in disguise, did not persist after 1850-51" (43). It may therefore be pertinent that Tupper's sculpture dates to 1851. The relief certainly shows features in common with these early drawings, including its detailed severe outline and its stiff awkward gestures, probably even more than it shows similarities with early Pre-Raphaelite paintings. In terms of paintings Tupper's sculpture has much in common with early Pre-Raphaelite portraits, such as J. E. Millais's Eliza Wyatt and Her Daughter of c.1850. Even early subject works such as Millais's Lorenzo and Isabella of 1848-1849 and Christ in the House of His Parents of 1849-1850 or William Holman Hunt's A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids of 1849 contain some of the awkward gestures and anguished intense expressions that are present, but even more pronounced in the early P.R.B. drawings. Tupper was therefore executing in sculpture what members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were doing in drawing and painting with regard to "truth to nature" in the early days of the movement.
Related Material
Bibliography
Coombs, James H., Anne M. Scott, George P. Landow and Arnold A Sanders Eds. A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship: The Correspondence of William Holman Hunt and John Lucas Tupper. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1996. xvii.
Grieve, Alastair: "Style and Content in Pre-Raphaelite Drawings 1848-50." In Leslie Parris Ed. Pre-Raphaelite Papers. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1984. 23-43.
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. London: MacMillan and Co. Ltd., Vol. I, 1906.
Kapoor, Sushma: "John L. Tupper, to 1863: 'King of the Cadaverals', The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies IV, No. 2 (May 1984): 78.
Lanigan, Dennis T. "John Lucas Tupper's Beryn and Syrophanes Playing Chess, a rediscovery: sculpture at the extremest edge of P.R.Bism," PRS Review XXIX (Spring 2021): 47-53.
Rossetti, William Michael Ed. Praeraphaelite Letters and Diaries. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1900.
Read, Benedict: "Was there Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture?" in Leslie Parris, ed. Pre-Raphaelite Papers. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1984. 97, 99 & 100.
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Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. Vol. I. New York: Scribner's, 1906. 160.
"The Two Pre-Raphaelitisms (Concluded)." The Crayon IV, No. 12 (December 1857): 361-63.
Watts, Mary Seton: George Frederic Watts: The Annals of An Artist's Life. Vol. I. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912.
Last modified 24 April 2024