Portrait of Emily Knewstub by Walter John Knewstub (1831-1906)

Portrait of Emily Knewstub ('Lily and Rose')

Walter John Knewstub (1831-1906)

1875

Watercolour heightened with white and gum arabic, signed with the artist's monogram; signed and inscribed with title on the stretcher and inscribed with the title on a label on the backboard.

17 x 13 inches, 43 x 33 cm.

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Commentary by Hilary Morgan

The model for this sensuous, Rossettian picture was Emily Renshaw, the artists wife. Knewstub met her when he was working as an assistant to Rossetti. The artist's grandson wrote:

'Walking together, Rossetti and Knewstub saw a young woman whose beauty moved them deeply; they followed her home and asked her father for his permission to call again and make portraits of her. Deeply suspicious of "artists", he consented with reluctance. My grandfather fell in love with her and, anxious to remove her from a bohemian circle around Rossetti (she was quickly acclaimed as one of the Pre-Raphaelite "stunners"), he married her before he could maintain her otherwise than precariously. The marriage seems to have been unhappy. The Knewstub parents disapproved of the marriage and disinherited their son').

The marriage to Emily also seems to have caused a breach between Knewstub and Rossetti. Rothenstein suggests that Knewstub's sense of propriety was offended when Rossetti used her head for the semi-naked figure 'Venus Verticordia' (1865, Russell-Cotes Museum, Bournemouth). Alexa Wilding's head appears in the final painting but various models were used in the preparation of the work. The other issue was that Knewstub's salary as Rossetti's assistant was not paid. Knewstub could probably tolerate this as an easy-going bachelor, but not as a married man. Certainly he began to exhibit independently from 1865.

The present watercolour can be compared directly to the luxurious half lengths of women and flowers that Rossetti produced in the 1860s. The thrown back head, half closed eye and pouting lips create an even more explicitly erotic atmosphere than Rossetti permitted himself. The costume, with its Elizabethan echoes, is based on the fashionable dress of the early 1870s (a period of costume history notable for its antiquarianism). The dress and the book suggest that this is an image of a modern girl in an erotic reverie. It is noteworthy that the rose and the lily were widely used in Victorian times to symbolise female attractiveness and purity respectively. Tennyson wrote of Maud:

'Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls...
Queen lily and rose in one.'

Rossetti uses the same flower symbolism in his poem "Jenny." It is interesting that Knewstub too has combined them in this picture of his wife.

References

Waters, Bill. Burne-Jones -- A Quest for Love: Works by Sir Edward Burne-Jones Bt and Related Works by Contemporary Artists. London: Peter Nahum, 1993. Catalogue number 42.

Cunnington, C. Willett. English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. London: Faber and Faber, 1956.

Rossetti, W. M. Rossetti Papers 1862-1870. London: Sands, 1903.

Rothenstein, John (Sir). Summers lease — Autobiography 1901-1938. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1965.

10 December 2001