Youth and the Lady, by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ROI, RWS (1872-1945), 1900, signed with monogram. Watercolour 27.4 x 46 cms. Whereabouts unknown.
According to the caption, "Reproduced from the original water-colour, by kind permission of Charles Dowdeswell, Esq., the owner of the picture and its copyright." Source: Sparrow 73. Here "the Lady" is desperately pursuing laughing "Youth," who is tripping quickly and lightly out of a garden gate. "Youth" has wings like peacock feathers, and leaves a trail of rose petals which are still being shed from her bouquet, or rather (it seems) from the hem of her bright pink dress. Though some nearly invisible link connects the two figures, and the "Lady" herself is elegantly and richly dressed, with her Pre-Raphaelite hair flowing, the pursuit may be in vain. Ralph Peacock writes, in a brief introductory essay to Sparrow's book, that "Miss Eleanor Brickdale works, or plays, always with an idea. And the idea she is not satisfied to leave until it has taken on for other eyes a most cunning and beautiful bodily shape, in line, in form, in colour — above all in line. She is probably, without knowing it, as good an antithesis as may be found of the Impressionist, so-called" (72).
Commentary by Pamela Gerrish Nunn
This sophisticated composition featured in the artist’s first solo exhibition at Dowdeswell’s in 1901 (no. 5) and again in the show’s second iteration in 1902 (no. 7). A young woman pursues a figure, half child half angel in appearance, across the picture-space, her long red hair streaming behind her and her sumptuous gown billowing out as she hastens, hand outstretched, to detain the fleeing spirit already almost gone from the garden in which we find them.
A garden setting was a favourite of the artist’s at this time, and it not only allowed her to give full rein to her Pre-Raphaelite love of natural detail but it was also richly suggestive for the late-Victorian viewer: the garden of Eden, the hortus inclusus, the magical garden which delimited many a folkloric heroine’s residence, could all be implied. It also allowed an artist to deploy the language of flowers if they so wished, and here roses and lilies are identifiable, suggesting romantic passion on the one hand and Marian virtue on the other. The figure of Youth carries both these flowers, which both grow in this garden that we assume is the Lady’s domain.
Although she may reside here, a narrative of captivity is untenable as this garden not only has a gate through which Youth is about to slip from the lady’s grasp but another point of ingress/access in the far right of the background. Indeed, this may be a garden of the imagination (the green ground looking more like a carpet than the living grass of a lawn), and the chase that we witness one of those dreams recognised in the emerging science of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 1899, abridged in English in 1901 as On Dreams), in which something existentially vital eludes the frantic pursuer. The Lady’s implied panic – such energetic haste! - perhaps derives from the sudden threat of loss of something which she had theretofore taken quite for granted.
The idea that ladies, or women in general, might fear the loss of youth was not an invention of Fortescue-Brickdale’s own, of course, but a hackneyed staple of femininity’s repertoire, closely linked with the cliché of vanity, which had given many artists a subject over the years. Fortescue-Brickdale herself had exhibited a composition called Time and the Maiden at the Royal Academy of 1899, with much the same message. And a more subtle and richer play on female vanity could be seen in no. 36 in the 1901 exhibition, The Gilded Apple, in which the same model as in the present work is tempted by baubles to neglect her own safety, while in The Reward (no. 39), the moral is created by the female figure’s preoccupation with her own mirrored image blinding her to the tragedy unfolding just a few feet away.
It is disappointing for the 21st-century viewer to find a female artist employing these demeaning tropes - as one reviewer observed in The Queen, “In her efforts at a kind of Hogarthian teaching and her exposures of human folly and weakness, Miss Fortescue-Brickdale by no means spares her own sex” (46) - but in Fortescue-Brickdale’s defence it can be pointed out that she was heavily influenced in her bid to establish her name by her friend and colleague, John Byam Shaw, an opinionated fellow and anti-suffragist who employed a number of signally negative images of women in his own allegories. Furthermore the widespread tolerance of this sexist tradition is indicated when we see that Edith Sichel – an independent-minded woman who would not think herself lacking in gumption – had only this to say of this work in her review of the exhibition: “There is a great deal of wit in her work, and she has given us something like an epigram in her picture of Youth and the Lady: of the fantastic lady, with dishevelled golden hair, flying breathless (flowers and greensward behind her) after Youth, the fay – Youth, who flies even faster, till he [sic] almost recedes beyond the frame” (105).
As seen, Youth and the Lady was given some prominence by its inclusion as a colour plate in Walter Shaw Sparrow’s Women Painters of the World of 1905, but at that stage it was still in the hands of the artist’s dealer, Charles Dowdeswell. No archive of the Dowdeswell brothers’ business has survived, and the work’s subsequent provenance is at present unknown.
Links to related material
Image scan, formatting and initial comment by Jacqueline Banerjee. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Project Gutenberg and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Peacock, Ralph. "Modern British Women painters." Women Painters of the World: From the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day. Ed. Walter Shaw Sparrow. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905. 65-72. Project Gutenberg (but also available through the Internet Archive, which gives page numbers). Web. 28 December 2018.
The Queen, 20 July 1901.
Sichel, Edith. “A Woman-Painter and Symbolism.” The Monthly Review 4, 12 (September 1901): 105.
Sparrow, Walter Shaw, ed. Women Painters of the World: From the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905. Project Gutenberg (but also available through the Internet Archive, which gives page numbers). Web. 28 December 2018.
Created 28 December 2018
Commentary added 14 October 2022