"Thou art unto them as a very lovely song..." by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ROI, RWS 1872-1945

"Thou art unto them as a very lovely song..."

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ROI, RWS 1872-1945

After the Original Water-colour in the Collection of Miss Evans

1899-1901 signed with monogram

Dimensions unknown

Present whereabouts unknown

Source: Sparrow 127 (but wrongly titled there as "He married a Wife")

The scene inside the church or chapel is full of drama: the forcefully gesticulating minister, leaning over the edge of the pulpit, the woman fingering her necklace with a meditative expression, the man in the foreground looking wryly thoughtful, and the man behind them with his gaze bent on the woman and his hand, it seems, somehow between them.... It looks as if there is trouble ahead. Knowing the proper title is helpful here: see commentary below. [Mouse over the text for links.]

Commentary by Pamela Gerrish Nunn

This work, debuting in the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Dowdeswell Galleries in 1901 (no. 12), has, with its Florentine air, something about it of the character of Robert Browning’s poetry. But, although Browning was to be an explicit source for Fortescue-Brickdale a few years hence, the roots of this work lay in the Bible. (It was miscaptioned in Walter Shaw Sparrow’s Women Artists of the World (1905) as He married a Wife, a mistake obscuring the work’s source). The context of its title is the book of Ezekiel (33.32), in which the prophet speaks about those who profess an interest in the word of God with little sincerity:

They come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before me as my people, and they hear thy words, but they will not do them: for with their mouth they show much love, but their heart goeth after their covetousness. And lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that has a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not.

Thus the three richly-dressed individuals in the foreground have come to church but sit idly in their pew paying little attention to the impassioned preaching of the friar in the pulpit.

This composition not only reiterates the artist’s earnest, almost sententious preoccupation with illustrating a moral, but also makes use of two elements that were to be staples of her repertoire thenceforth: ancient architecture and historical costume. She expended great effort and time finding and sketching examples of both ecclesiastical and secular buildings that would provide appropriate settings for her scenes, while she also studied at length costume from different periods of the past, often from the art of the past. To judge from certain similarities in dress that occur from work to work, she probably kept a store of garments for her models’ use. The richness of costume here, along with the poses of these three individuals, indicates the habitual comfort of their way of life, which is cleverly emphasised by the figures being bunched in the foreground while the sermon forms but a background, literally, to their private thoughts.

Formatting and brief description before the commentary by Jacqueline Banerjee. Caption material by Banerjee and Nunn. [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

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 29 December 2018

Last modified (commentary added) 16 October 2022