Evensong [St. Cecilia] by John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937). 1897. Oil on canvas. 36 x 36 inches (91.5 x 91.5 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Kultura.art.
Strudwick exhibited Evensong, his largest and most elaborate version of St. Cecilia, at the New Gallery in 1898. Evening prayer, often called Evensong, is a distinctly Anglican service where followers come to church to worship in the late afternoon or early evening. It is a blend of Vespers and Compline first developed in the sixteenth century by Thomas Cranmer. An organist would normally play music both before and after the service. Strudwick's picture features the saint dressed in a green dress with a red apron tied around her waist and wearing a matching red cap, but without her usual halo. She is seated on a decorated marble bench in a church, playing an ostentatiously decorated organ, and looking at an illuminated manuscript containing the music for the song she is performing. Two young damsels to the right, one dressed in red and the other in blue, sing along to the music while another to the left in a purple gown and matching cap pumps the organ. Additional young women are seen in the background looking at hymn books and giving what John Christian refers to as a "mood of wistful sadness…the picture has an unusual intensity, capturing the spirit and decorative effect that Strudwick was always seeking without the cloying sweetness and finicky detail that sometimes made him tiresome" (94). This painting has much in common with Strudwick's Summer Songs, a work that he would later exhibit at the New Gallery in 1901.
Evensong was not a common subject for Victorian painters although Edward Robert Hughes exhibited a watercolour entitled Evensong of a quite different composition at the Dudley Gallery in 1871, no. 530. Henry Stacy Marks exhibited his version of Evensong featuring an elderly pious woman in church at the Old Watercolour Society, also in 1871, no. 10. Henry Mark Anthony exhibited an Evensong at the Royal Academy in 1873, no. 662, but this was purely a landscape study of All Saints Church, Chingford.
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
Strudwick's painting was not extensively reviewed, likely because by this time it was becoming very "old-fashioned." F.G. Stephens, as usual, disliked Strudwick's submission: "Much too smooth, more polished than finished, and, though laboured, not so thoroughly studied as we like, Mr. Strudwick's Evensong (75) a sort of St. Cecilia seated at an organ, companions of undeniable prettiness about her, does not excite any keen admiration either as a work of art or as a piece of sentiment" (603).
Bibliography
Christian, John. The Last Romantics. The Romantic Tradition in British Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1989, cat. 46, 94.
Evensong, St Cecilia. Kultura. Web. 2 October 2025.
Kolsteren, Steven. "The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies I:2 (Fall 1988): 12, no. 27.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. The New Gallery." The Athenaeum No. 3680 (7 May 1898): 603-05.
Created 2 October 2025