Laura of Avignon/ Petrarch's Laura at Avignon by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, R.W.S., signed within a cartouche l.r.: E F Brickdale. Watercolour with bodycolour, 36 x 25 cms/14 x 10”, in a frame designed by the artist herself. Ex-Sotheby's.
This work attracted little attention when it was shown at the Royal Watercolour Society’s 1913 summer exhibition (no. 28), but it is a prime example of the finely-worked pseudo-portraits from history and literature which Brickdale did so well. Their success led to them being showcased in the series of illustrations she later made for colour-plate gift-books such as The Golden Book of Famous Women (Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), which incidentally included this same heroine in Petrarch and Laura at Avignon, a much less dramatic composition than the one under discussion here.
Laura was (and is) well known as the object of the Italian poet Petrarch’s love poems, produced between 1327, when he supposedly first caught sight of her, and 1348, when she died. She is shown here carrying a posy of anemones, which, although often said to mean ‘forsaken’ in the language of flowers, were identified in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the creation of the goddess of love, Aphrodite. As befits the narrative tradition in which she was the unwitting focus of Petrarch’s love (which remained unreciprocated), Laura’s eyes are downcast, modestly refusing to acknowledge the viewer who gazes upon her. We find her in Avignon, not far from the papal palace that dominates the riverside town, as proved by the spectacular view that lies beyond her of the hilltop village Villeneuve-les-Avignon directly across the Rhône to the town’s north-west.
Since Laura’s identity has never been confirmed, the artist can use his or her imagination in conjuring up this legendary beauty’s image. (It is said that the Avignon artist Simone Martini made her portrait for his friend Petrarch, but such a painting has never been located.) It looks as if Fortescue-Brickdale was inspired in this by the work she was doing during 1912 on the book by Michael Fairless, The Gathering of Brother Hilarius (Duckworth and co, 1913): for this commission she produced eight watercolour illustrations, and in watercolours 6 and 7 marked connections with Laura of Avignon can be observed. The female model is the same, sporting the same hairstyle and, in drawing no. 6, the same necklace of coloured beads; in drawing no. 7, the figures are similarly set against a background of a distant countryside (Tuscan, in this case) under a pleasant sky.
The reasons why an artist picks a specific subject are always intriguing, and in this case it may be relevant to note that the location of Avignon was called for in Fortescue-Brickdale’s Saint Bénézet (1910-11), the image of a local shepherd who inspired the bridge spanning the Rhône here which now bears his name. The artist could have visited the historic provençal town for background research in May 1910, when it is known she made a trip to Europe, and may well have been reminded at that point of its other legends, amongst which the famous poet and his muse were even more prominent then than now. Various publications of the time including Petrarch, poet and humanist by Maud Jerrold (Dent, 1910), Avignon by Thomas Okey, in Dent's Medieval Towns series (Dent, 1911), and Richard LeGalliene's The Loves of the Poets (Baker & Taylor, 1911) attest to this. In another manifestation of the character’s appeal at that point, in mid-1911 the prestigious London art dealer Agnew’s acquired a painting by the relatively obscure Italian painter Girolamo di Benvenuto: known now simply as Portrait of a Young Woman (National Gallery of Art, Washington), it was sold then as Petrarch’s Laura. At the same time, an amusing fact from a very different cultural quarter is the popularity in the years 1911-13 of a racehorse called Laura, whose son Petrarch was also coming to prominence on the track – could this have caught the fancy of Fortescue-Brickdale the keen racegoer? Such an instance of her leisure activities inspiring her professional work – unexpected, perhaps, but by no means impossible - could serve as a reminder that one of the reasons we value artists is that they can spin gold from straw.
Links to related material
- The First Meeeting of Laura and Petrcrch
- A Female Perspective in Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata" (discusses Petrarch's Laura)
- Charles Dickens in Avignon (with photgraphs of the briedge)
Created 24 October 2022