A Bowl of Roses by Herbert Gustave Schmalz (1856-1935; note that the painting was signed with the surname Carmichael, which Schmalz adopted after the First World War. It was from the name of his maternal grandfather, James William Carmichael, a marine painter). 1925. Oil on canvas. Collection: Leighton House Museum. Accession no. LH0127, presented by Mrs Margaret Turner, 1936. Reproduced here with the kind permission of Leighton House, RBKC (Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea). Thank you also to Shirley Nicholson for pointing out Schmalz's new signature here.
Flowers figured largely in Victorian painting. They provided rich scope for detail and vibrant colours, and many had their own widely known symbolic resonance. Painters involved with both Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism found good reasons to include them in their compositions. Examples are Rossetti's La Ghirlandata (1873), with its prominent roses and honeysuckles, and Albert Moore's Azaleas (1868), which looks as if it could have been painted much later in the century than it actually was. According to Lionel Lambert, flowers were "indispensable" to Moore, who felt quite unable to work unless he had flowers in his studio (294).
Nevertheless, paintings that exclusively featured flowers were generally the province of women artists. Lady botanists like Margaret Dickinson devoted themselves to the depiction of wildflowers; others, like Maud Naftel, turned to cultivated flowers. In both cases, their subjects were uncontroversial, and the models could be brought into and tackled in the domestic space. Such artists generally worked in watercolours. Male artists who liked painting still-lifes, inspired by the Dutch artists of the seventeenth century, tended to feature flowers as part of a larger composition. An example here is Edward Ladell (1821-1886), a typical title being just Still Life, and one painting showing not only a flower-head but buds, leaves, grapes, berries, two halves of a peach, a glass of wine, and an ornamental casket.
Schmalz's reputation seems to rest on his large-scale religious paintings. But he did paint other subjects, notably historical ones, and portraits. Indeed, as Austin Chester long ago pointed out, "[t]here are two, if not three painters in Mr.Schmalz, for ... his range is wide" (710). It became wider rather than narrower as time passed. A Bowl of Roses represents one of his forays into still-life, still with his characteristic earnestness and elaboration of detail, but to rather more colourful and cheering effect than some of his better known canvases.
Bibliography
Chester, Austin. "The Art of Mr. Herbert Schmalz." The Windsor Magazine (1895): 701-15. Internet Archive, from a copy in the University of Michigan Library. Web. 1 September 2024.
Lambourne, Lionel. Victorian Painting. London and New York: Phaidon, 1999.
Wood, Christopher. Victorian Painters. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1995. See pp. 88-89.
Created 1 September 2024