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Echo
Edward Reginald Frampton
Before 1918
Tempera on canvas; signed
36 ½ x 30 inches
Provenance: Robert Johnston; his widow Hilda, and thence by descent
Courtesy of the Maas Gallery London
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The New Gallery, where this picture was shown in 1909, was dubbed ‘the last ditch of the Pre-Raphaelites’ by the Dundee Courier. Echo hung amongst pictures by Southall, Anning Bell and Cayley Robinson (also painters in tempera), Evelyn de Morgan and Charles Shannon.
Waterhouse had used the legend of Echo and Narcissus, as told by Ovid, six years before for the Royal Academy; his lush treatment of the subject depicted the beautiful Echo ignored by Narcissus, who stares instead at his own reflection, self-infatuated. Frampton’s thoughtful and bleaker treatment, on the other hand, shows us Echo alone, luminous in a shadowy mountainous landscape. Narcissus has wasted away, gazing one last time at his reflection and saying to himself ‘Oh marvellous boy, I loved you in vain, farewell,’ whereupon Echo, who had been a chatterbox and was cursed by Juno only to repeat the last words of other people’s sentences, chorused ‘Farewell’. Her tense body, barely clothed in a diaphanous robe, delicately painted, expresses powerfully the exquisite yearning which her voice cannot. The cut narcissi in her lap will fade away, like their namesake, with Echo herself, until all is silence, but the forget-me-nots growing at her feet will bloom again.
Frampton was the son of a stained glass designer, and was brought up in Brighton, where he was a school friend of Aubrey Beardsley. He trained at Westminster School of Art, and worked for a period in his father’s studio. Frampton acknowledged two great influences: Burne-Jones - whose work at the famous New Gallery Exhibition of 1898-99 ‘struck Reginald Frampton with the force of a very revelation, opening his eyes to the supreme possibilities of the human form in decoration’ (Aylmer Vallance, The Studio, December 1918, p 67) - and Puvis de Chavannes, a pioneer of the tempera revival. The medieval origins and innovative modern technique of his work were considered by The Studio magazine:
In picture panels he occasionally uses a tempera background, though he does not actually employ an egg medium. Neither again does he use tube pigments with oil, but powder colours with beeswax, with a spirit vehicle, preferably of petroleum, with copal or shellac. His method is to paint the whole composition in monochrome to begin with, the ultimate colours being applied but lightly, and more in the nature of glazes than anything else. Moreover, he prefers to employ his pigments unblended and not in any continuous expanse, but rather in a series of minute strokes, say of blue, for example, with pure rose- pink touches inserted between the blue when a mauve effect is desired - a process barely distinguishable from that of the ultra-modern Pointillistes. Thus strangely do extremes meet, and the old order, changing, gives place to the new’ (‘The Paintings of Reginald Frampton, R.O.I.’, 1919, p 76).
Rudolf Dircks, writing for The Art Journal, described Frampton as ‘an artist working very much in the spirit and method of the early Christian painters. Nothing is more outside the quick competitive temper of the prevailing modern spirit, and nothing is more in harmony with the spiritual beauty of the world of romance, imagination and symbolism in which Mr. Frampton’s art lives’ (1907, p 295).
Vallance, Aymer. “The Paintings of Reginald Frampton, R.O.I.” International Studio. 66 (1919): 66-76. Hathi Digital Library Trust internet version of a copy in the Cornell University Library. Web. 22 June 2022.
Last modified 22 June 2022