Summer Songs [Summer Hours] by John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937). 1901. Oil on canvas. 35 x 40 inches (87 x 99.5 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Sotheby's, London.
Strudwick exhibited Summer Songs at the New Gallery in 1901. It has much in common compositionally with Evensong, that he had exhibited at the same gallery three years previously, except that the setting here is out-of-doors rather than in a church. Christopher Newall considers it to be "one of the most celebrated of Strudwick's paintings and one that exemplifies the essential qualities of refinement and other-worldliness of his art." He then goes on to describe the scene:
The subject shows four beautiful female figures in a garden or courtyard. On the left stands the singer, holding a song-book. Beside her a girl is seated at an organ, the richly decorated side of which forms a vertical divide approximately at the centre of the composition. On the right is a kneeling figure, working the bellows of the organ. Seated at the side is a figure holding a book. All of the girls are wearing long flowing dresses of rich but sombre colours, while each has her hair tied back with lengths of cloth, or in one case a golden chain. Behind the figures there is an arcade, with pairs of arches separated by pilasters decorated with relief patterns in blue and gold. Below the arcade's sill, on the surface of the wall, is a painted decoration showing figures against a gold ground. On the entablature of the arcade is an inscription, the words masked by the golden fruit, leaves and branches. Through the spaces of the arches is glimpsed a wide Mediterranean landscape, with distant mountains and a line of umbrella pines. A group of three mounted knights, wearing armour and carrying pennants, are seen in the distance, but whether they are approaching the four maidens or are riding past on an unknown martial mission is not explained. [62]
The painting as so often shows the influence of Edward Burne-Jones, such as his Le Chant d'Amour of 1868-77, while the knight on the white horse in the background recalls Walter Crane's The White Knight of 1870. Gail-Nina Anderson and Joanne Wright, however, feel it was most influenced by Burne-Jones's Laus Veneris of 1873-75 in its "use of a background register, through the archways of which distant figures are glimpsed" (117).
Newall points out that this work exemplifies the Aesthetic Movement which rose to prominence in exhibitions, first at the Grosvenor Gallery, and then later at the New Gallery:
Summer Songs is without any ostensible subject, and is therefore a characteristic product of the English Aesthetic movement in the course of which since the 1860s painters had freed themselves from the need to paint subjects which might be interpreted or understood in narrative terms. Summer Songs has within it two central themes of Aestheticism, each of which conveys a sense of mood to the work and captures the imagination. The first is an allusion to a season of the year. The luxuriance of growth, the warmth of colour, and the sense of heat in the painting convey subliminally a feeling of summer as well perhaps of experience of the south. The second theme, allied to the first in the painting's title, is that of music…. As John Christian has written, "Like Burne-Jones, Strudwick loved to paint compositions in which a mood of wistful sadness is evoked by a group of female figures playing musical instruments" (The Last Romantics, 94). The two themes of Summer Songs – the season of the year and music – are allegorically linked. Each represents an imagined continuum, from which the figures will emerge in a transformed condition. The ripeness of the fruit that hangs in the branches overhead, and the scattering of dead leaves on the pavement, are reminders that summer must give way to autumn and that the effulgent bounty of one season will be succeeded by the bleakness of another. The cycle of the seasons are therefore here intended to remind the spectator of the phases of life itself. Similarly, the attention that a player or an audience might give to a piece of music, as represented in the playing of the figures, is intended as a metaphor of the span of life. Thus, Strudwick's paintings are meditations upon the passage of life and the inevitability of death, cloaked in a guise remote from mundane experience. [62, 64]
Surprisingly, despite its obvious beauty, this picture was not one of Strudwick's personal favourites. In 1934, late in his life, Strudwick wrote about it to his nephew Philip, the son of his brother Edward, when it came up for auction at Christie's: "That's one of the few advantages of having no money. I should be sorry indeed to think that Summer Songs was to be retained in the family for an indefinite number of years, for it's one of the two worst pictures I have painted. It's not worth 3/9 except for the frame and I expect that wants reguilding by this time" (qtd Kolsteren, 8). I doubt whether any modern scholars would agree with Strudwick's low opinion of this work. The painting had initially belonged to the Birkenhead collector Joseph Beausire, the chairman of the West India and Pacific Steamship Company.
Bibliography
Anderson, Gail-Nina and Joanne Wright. Heaven on Earth – The Religion of Beauty in late Victorian Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1994, cat. 67, 117.
Christian, John. The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Times. Tokyo: Isetan Museum of Art, 1985, cat. 31, 74-75.
Christian, John. The Last Romantics. The Romantic Tradition in British Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1989, cat. 46, 94.
Kolsteren, Steven. "The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies I:2 (Fall 1988): 8 &12, no. 29.
Newall, Christopher. Victorian and Edwardian Art. London: Sotheby's (December 13, 2005): lot 23, 62-67. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2005/victorian-edwardian-art-l05133/lot.23.html
Created 3 October 2025