Too Late by Herbert Gustave Schmalz (1856-1935). 1886. Oil on canvas. 158cm x 262cm. Collection: Bendigo Art Gallery, Australia. Accession no. 1890.18. Purchased in 1891. Photo credit: Ian Hill. Reproduced here with kind permission. [Click on all the images to enlarge them.]
This was one of the works selected for special attention by art critic Henry Blackburn (1830-1897), editor of the important annual series, Academy Notes:
Among the younger painters whose work is of great interest and promise we should mention Mr. Herbert Schmalz. No picture this year excited more interest during its progress than “Too Late" a large and carefully thought-out picture, exhibiting great power on the part of the painter. The solemn grouping of the figures round the body of the bride, the management of color in the morning light, and the painting of the interior and accessories of the palace of a Norse chieftain on a very large canvas, went far to make a great success. But the figure of the returning warrior, who arrives to find his young wife dead, is less successful than the rest of the picture. [33-34]
Details. Left: The lifeless bride and those mourning at her head. Right: The warrior, shield in hand, on his unsuspecting approach, with the ship's prow rising in the background and another figure just visible.
Certainly, the warrior is only dimly seen in his approach to the entrance on the far right, so it is left to the viewer to imagine the shock that awaits him. It is a sad, not to say morbid, subject, and would likely have had more appeal to Schmalz's contemporaries, brought up on the sad demise of Dickens's Little Nell, and the many paintings of dead or sleeping women, than it does now. Yet the scale and detail of the death-bed scene, with the lilies strewn on the beautiful lifeless bride, the straw-covered floor, and the mourners in their various attitudes of grief, all bathed in gloom, do create an evocative atmosphere. Schmalz seemed to relish painting helpless, victimised women, perhaps most strikingly and disturbingly in his later Love is Blind, shown in 1898, in which a blindfolded woman crawls towards a satyr (see Dakers 216). But in Too Late, the woman's suffering is over, and it is the man's turn to grieve. The moment of discovery and regret is his alone.
Links to Related Material
- Béatrice Laurent's Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth. [Review by Laurent Bury]
- Women as Subject in Victorian Art — Representations of Women (sitemap)
Bibliography
Blackburn, Henry, ed. English Art in 1884. New York: Appleton, 1885. Internet Archive. Web. 31 August 2024.
Dakers, Caroline. The Holland Park Circle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Too Late. Bendigo Art Gallery, Australia. Web. 31 August 2024. https://collection.bendigoartgallery.com.au/objects/87
Created 31 August 2024