St. Cecilia by John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937). c.1896. Oil on panel. 13 1/4 x 11 inches (33.6 x 27.9 cm). Collection of Sudley House, Liverpool, accession no. WAG 306. Image courtesy of Sudley House, Museums of Liverpool, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
This painting was commissioned by George Holt in March 1895 as a companion piece for D.G. Rossetti's Two Mothers. St. Cecilia was exhibited at the Autumn Exhibition of Modern Pictures held in Liverpool at the Walker Art Gallery in 1896, no. 1009, and then at the New Gallery in 1897, no. 78. Holt's fellow collector and Liverpool neighbour, William Imrie, owned an earlier quite different version of St. Cecilia from 1882. An even later version entitled Evensong [St. Cecilia] of 1897 was shown at the New Gallery in 1898.
In the painting of St. Cecilia at Sudley House the saint is shown standing, wearing a blue gown with a golden mantle or mantelet, and playing the organ. Blue is generally the colour the Virgin Mary wears signifying her piety and purity and Strudwick perhaps chose blue for St. Cecilia's gown for the same reason. Cecilia has both white and red roses in her hair, with white roses perhaps again chosen for symbolic and not just decorative purposes. The white roses again symbolize innocence and purity while the red roses perhaps symbolize the blood shed during her martyrdom. To the left of St. Cecilia is an angel holding a rosary in her hands and with her red wings spread out. A rugged mountainous Italianate landscape can be seen in the background.
Gail-Nina Anderson and Joanne Wright once again noted the influence of early Italian painting on this work by Strudwick:
His most typical work is characterized by expressionless maidens, whose quiet melancholy permits them to do nothing more active than make doleful music while wearing vaguely Botticellian robes which fall into an admirably artless arrangement of well-defined folds. These might be considered insipid were it not for Strudwick's overriding concern with visually articulating every surface in these anodyne visions of maidenly heaven. Inlays, embroideries, tucks and folds enliven the scene, creating something close to the conviction, that, rather than producing a pastiche of any single Renaissance artist, Strudwick redraws the Renaissance on his own terms. [117]
The painting was not finished until after George Holt's death in 1896. In a letter from Strudwick to Mrs. Holt of July 27, 1896 he explained how he had chosen to portray St. Cecilia playing earth's and not heaven's music:
St Cecilia is generally represented looking up to convey the impression that her music is more of heaven than of earth. I have made her looking down. I have done so because I think earth's sweetest music is not an echo of heaven's music at all but something quite different, with a sweetness all of its own. I don't think Angels would have left heaven to hear St. Cecilia if she had only faintly echoed Heaven's songs. They came because she played earth's music as sweetly as it can be played. I have made my angel sad-faced because there's always a strain of sadness in our mortal songs, and most perhaps when they are played the best. [qtd. in Morris 445]
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
The painting was not widely reviewed when it was shown at the New Gallery in 1897. Even F.G. Stephens, for once, ignored the painting and spared Strudwick's work his scathing criticism. The critic of The Artist praised the picture's decorative effects: "We come to the St. Cecilia of Mr. J. M. Strudwick. This artist disdains to aim at realism, but prefers to give us a well-studied scheme of colour and decoration that in a room may serve as a spot of calm repose for the eye (275). A reviewer for The Magazine of Art found this to be a typical work of the artist: "Apart from Mr. Strudwick, with his St. Cecilia, executed in his well-known manner, there is the little school of modern mediaevalists, who appeared to have taken their cue from the recent Salons" (140).
Bibliography
Anderson, Gail-Nina and Joanne Wright. Heaven on Earth – The Religion of Beauty in late Victorian Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1994, cat. 66, 117.
"Current Art. The New Gallery." The Magazine of Art XX (1897): 135-140.
Kolsteren, Steven. "The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies I:2 (Fall 1988): 11-12, no. 23.
Morris, Edward. Victorian & Edwardian Paintings in the Walker Art Gallery & at Sudley House. London: HMSO Publications, 1996. 445-46.
"The New Gallery." The ArtistXIX (1897): 274-78.
St. Cecilia." Art UK. Web. 1 October 2025.
St. Cecilia. Liverpool Museums. Web. 1 October 2025.
Created 1 October 2025