Plucking Mandrakes [Three Women Plucking Mandrakes] (1870) by Robert Bateman (1842–1922). Watercolour and gouache on paper; 12¼ x 18 inches (31.2 x 45.8 cm). Wellcome Collection, London, accession no. 44691i.
This strange subject, which was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1870, no. 194, features three women, possibly witches, using cords to pull up a mandrake plant growing near the foot of a gallows. Christopher Newall explained the subject in detail when the work was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1997:
A group of women are shown attempting to pull mandrakes from the ground. The mandrake or devil’s apple, known to botanists as Mandragora officinarum, is a plant of the potato family, the fleshy tubers of which often resemble a human figure. Mandrakes grow in the countries of southern Europe, and since ancient times have been the object of superstition. They are supposed to resist being plucked, and when they are pulled from the ground, they are reputed to give a scream that will frighten the hearer to death. For this reason, those who attempt to harvest mandrakes (and they have been valued as a putative cure for barrenness and as a means of inducing abortion) resort to elaborate systems of lines and pulleys, as seen in the present watercolour. According to the traditions of folk magic, the mandrake grows at a place where a criminal, or one whose mother had committed crimes while he was in her womb, or conversely one who had been unjustly condemned, has been hanged. The plant is supposed to germinate from semen or urine, voided by the dying man, or, according to other sources, from decomposing flesh. [121]
Bateman would have been aware of mandrakes and their supposed properties because of his interest in botany and horticulture.
The Painting’s Reception
Plucking Mandrakes is the perfect example of the type of works by Bateman that Walter Crane considered “very weird and powerful” (98). When this work was shown at the Dudley Gallery it was extensively reviewed by the critics, likely because of its eccentricity. The Architect commented in general on works by the Poetry Without Grammar School shown that year, which he referred to as the Burne-Jones School of Art: “Mr. Bateman’s ‘Plucking Mandrakes’ (194) and Mr. Wolridge’s [sic] ‘Meeting again in Elysium’ (378), are subjects to which it may be inferred that nature is inapplicable, and so may account for the absence of any study of her which both drawings evince” (64). The critic of The Art Journal, who reviewed Plucking Mandrakes extensively, praised its poetry:
Such a style may be sat down as an anachronism; yet, beset as we are by the meanest naturalism, we hail with delight a manner which, though by many deemed mistaken, carries the mind into the regions of the imagination. Robert Bateman is a kindred spirit: ‘Plucking Mandrakes’ (194) recalls descriptions, in the works of Sir Thomas Browne, which recount how the mandrake shrieks when drawn from its roots. There is evidently much mystery in the process as depicted by Mr. Bateman, and this picture in its forms, action, color, removed as they are from common life and ordinary experience, are significant of something beyond the usual course of nature. Though not wholly satisfactory, we hail with gladness the advent of an art which reverts to historic associations, and carries the mind back to olden styles, when painting was twin sister of poetry. [87]
In contrast, The Saturday Review ridiculed the work of Bateman along with others of the new school featured at the Dudley:
No Gallery is so entertaining; the painters in pleasing themselves amuse the public, and even when they mean to be serious they provoke at their expense a smile. The interest of the collection is in its eccentricity; nowhere else can we meet with such ultra-manifestations of medievalism, of morbid sentiment merging into maudlin, of imagination without the control of reason, of fervid colour without form, of composition without perspective, of singular conceptions far removed from nature. But the new school, though mannered, is not monotonous; great indeed is the variety which here meets the eye in the abnormal creations of Mr. Simeon Solomon, Mr. Bateman, Mr. Walter Crane, Mr. Wooldridge, Mr. Napier Henry, Mr. Clifford, and Miss Madox Brown…This mannered school is, as we have said, copiously represented in the Dudley Gallery. ‘Plucking Mandrakes’ (194), by Mr. Bateman, has mystery in meaning and shadowy depth in color. [316-17]
Bibliography
“The Dudley Gallery.” The Architect III (February 5, 1870): 64.
“Dudley Gallery.” The Art Journal New Series IX (1870): 86-88.
Crane. Walter. An Artist’s Reminiscences. London: Methuen & Co., 1907.
Newall, Christopher. “Three Women Plucking Mandrakes.” In Wilton, Andrew and Robert Upstone Eds. The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts. Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910. London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1997, cat. 18, 121-22.
“Spring Exhibitions.” The Saturday Review XXIX (March 5, 1870): 316-17.
Last modified 17 February 2023