Love and Adversity, by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ROI, RWS 1872-1945

Love and Adversity

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ROI, RWS 1872-1945

1900 (signed with initials)

Watercolour

52.1 x 34.3 cms

Ex-Christie's

Source: The Studio

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Formatting by George P. Landow with caption material by Pamela Gerrish Nunn and Landow. See below for commentary by Gerrish Nunn [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Internet Archive and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Commentary by Pamela Gerrish Nunn

This work from the artist’s 1901 solo exhibition at the Dowdeswell Galleries (no. 35) demonstrates vividly the striking combination of strengths and weaknesses her work was seen to possess at that time. Although Fortescue-Brickdale was already twenty-seven when she got this commission, and had been working and exhibiting for a few years, this was a precious opportunity for her to make a break-through with the gallery-going public. The show was in fact a huge success, but Love and Adversity exemplifies the chances the artist took in trying to fashion a body of work that would bear her individual mark even while it belonged to a recognised trend in end-of-century British art.

The trend was neo-pre-Raphaelitism, and critics were quick to mention Millais, Rossetti and Madox Brown in their appraisal of Fortescue-Brickdale’s work (although a more discerning eye would have made added Burne-Jones to that list), along with her contemporary (and close friend) Byam Shaw, already seen as a latter-day Pre-Raphaelite. Love and Adversity has the vivid colouring, striking compositional elements and eye for detail that identified neo-pre-Raphaelitism and made most of the exhibits in Dowdeswell’s rooms visually arresting. But it also has the dense packing of space within the pictorial field that can be difficult for the viewer to make sense of (just how steep is that path leading to the castle?); the juxtaposition of a symbolic or imaginary figure and one that is "real," which is challenging (to the artist) technically and (to the viewer) conceptually; and an allegorical burden employing both familiar and unfamiliar signs and symbols. Furthermore, the title obliges the viewer to try and extract meaning where there is no obvious narrative by which to achieve a moral.

Both "love" and "adversity" are abstract entities: are they both personified here or are they rather evoked by the characters and events presented? If the former, which figure is which? The red-robed figure at left is given an otherworldly character by a nimbus of light around its head (is it an angel?), while the bound figure whose hand it holds sympathetically wears a contemporary kind of fabric and exhibits no non-human attributes. But this reading does not tell the viewer whether one of these figures is Love and the other Adversity. Perhaps instead the heroine experiences both love and adversity, neither of which is pictured but merely conjured by the circumstances she is in. But what relation does this couple have, anyway, to the crowd of miniature beings making its way up to the top right-hand corner of the picture space, garbed as in a fairy-story or folk-tale, entering a castle-like building? And what role in realising the title is played by the flowering bush and perching bird in the foreground? Should the diligent viewer strive to identify the bush and the bird in order to extract meaning from their selection by the artist?

These were the difficulties noted by the reviewer who observed: “She has ever a tale to tell and a moral to point, sometimes an obvious one, sometimes obscure enough to make us look at our catalogue for a commentary as well as a title”. (“London Picture exhibitions," 10) And the artist was to find that often enough a patron would ask her for the explanation of the picture they had purchased. Once this combination of admiration and puzzlement became a common theme of responses to Fortescue-Brickdale’s work, it was promptly addressed by her champions, such as Edith Sichel in her widely-read essay “A Woman-painter and Symbolism”: “Miss Brickdale gives delightful proof that symbolic art, which can be the most tiresome thing in the world, can also be lovely and suggestive. It is dead when it tries to revive the dead, but it lives when it is applied to new poetic fancies. Perhaps it will be a natural form of reaction against realism, and against the painters who paint a spade so much more a spade than it really is” (114).

What became clear, as the artist went from strength to strength, was that she was intent on painting both the spade and the symbol, relishing both principal strands of Pre-Raphaelitism as it appeared from the vantage point of the century’s end. The Ruskinian idea that fine art should be serious and convey a moral, so evident in the style’s first iteration in the 1850s, combined in Fortescue-Brickdale’s adoption of Pre-Raphaelitism with the fanciful and decorative tendency so conspicuous in the Rossettian/Burne-Jonesian version that redefined the style by the 1880s. Love and Adversity typifies the always compelling but often arcane results of this endeavour.

Bibliography

“London Picture exhibitions.” Manchester Guardian. 14 June 1901: 10.

Sichel, Edith. “A Woman-painter and Symbolism.” Monthly Review 4:12 (September 1901).

Sparrow, Walter Shaw. "On Some Water-colour pictures by Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale." The Studio [London]. 23 (June 1901): 37. Internet Archive. Web. 27 February 2012.

Created 27 February 2012

Last modified (commentary added) 16 October 2022