When Apples Were Golden and Songs Were Sweet but Summer Had Passed Away by John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937). c.1906. Oil on canvas. 30 1/16 x 19 1/16 inches (76.4 x 48.4 cm). Collection of Manchester Art Gallery, accession no. 1906.103. Image courtesy of Manchester Art Gallery under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivitives licence (CC BY-NC-ND).
Strudwick exhibited this painting at the New Gallery in 1906. The Manchester Art Gallery website describes this painting as a:
Melancholy autumnal scene of two women in a garden. The women have long flowing hair and pleated medieval robes. To the left a young woman, dressed in a turquoise dress laced over a white smock with a red sash around her middle and a brown cloak draped round her, stands dreamily playing a lute. She gazes off to the right. Her companion, to the right, is dressed in white, with a blue-brown sash wrapped around her middle and shoulders. She looks down at an illuminated manuscript which rests on her lap, on which there is both text and medieval musical notation. Both young women wear thonged sandals that leave their toes bare. A detailed carpet of green grass and small leafy plants lies beneath their feet with a background of fruiting apple trees. A suggestion of water is behind the trees.
Julian Treuherz, a former Keeper of Fine Arts at Manchester, feels this painting is but a feeble imitation of the work of Strudwick's mentor Edward Burne-Jones: "A diluted version of a Burne-Jones, it has all the outward hallmarks of his style: sweet, sad faces, a touch of mediaevalism, a feeling for a rich texture and detail, linear patterning in the draperies. But it lacks the compelling imaginative force which in Burne-Jones makes sense of the detail, a force which gives Burne-Jones's best work the haunting inevitability of a dream" (138-39). Véronique Gerard-Powell has identified the musical instrument the woman on the left is playing as a cittern and not a lute (181). The placement of the figures echoes that of Strudwick’s A Symphony, painted a few years earlier, as well as A Love Story of c.1890.
Bibliography
Christian, John. Burne-Jones and His Followers. Tokyo: Tokyo Shimbun, 1987, cat. 43, 112.
Gerard-Powell, Véronique. A Victorian Obsession. The Pérez Simón Collection at Leighton House Museum. London: Leighton House Museum, 2014, cat. 47, 181.
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. 34.
Treuherz, Julian. Pre-Raphaelite Paintings from the Manchester City Art Gallery. London: Lund Humphries, 1980, 138, 141 & 150.
When Apples Were Golden and Songs Were Sweet but Summer Had Passed Away. Art UK. Web. 3 October 2025.
When Apples Were Golden and Songs Were Sweet but Summer Had Passed Away. Manchester Art Gallert. Web. 3 October 2025.
Created 3 October 2025