The Reaper and the Lily, by William J. Webb(e) (1830-1912[?]). c.1856-57. Oil on panel. 14 x 7 1/2 inches (35.5 x 19 cm.). Private collection. Image by kind permission of Christie's. Right click disabled; not to be downloaded.
This early work can be dated to 1856 or 1857 based on an old label attached to the reverse that lists Webb(e)'s address as Niton, Isle of Wight. Like many young artists at this time Webb)e) was influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism. He was also impacted early on by the Nazarenes, a group of German artists living in Rome in the early nineteenth century who wished to return art to the purity of the early Renaissance, particularly in religious art. Webb(e) had trained in Düsseldorf at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early 1850s under the Nazarene painter Wilhelm Schadow, who had worked with Peter von Cornelius and Johann Friedrich Overbeck in Rome. The influence of the Nazarenes can be seen in the religious symbolism inherent in this picture, an allegorical work that predates similar later works by G. F. Watts such as The Messenger or Time, Death and Judgment or Evelyn De Morgan's The Angel of Death of 1880. Webb(e)'s painting shows both the vivid and colourful brilliance and the intensely sharp focus characteristic of the first phase of Pre-Raphaelitism.
Webb(e)'s painting shows a standing angel in a white robe with a black mantle cape and hood. She is clutching white lilies, symbolic of purity in her left hand and arm. In her right hand she carries the sickle she has used to harvest them, symbolic of the scythe, although on a smaller size, often portrayed as being used by Death (The Grim Reaper) to harvest souls. When the painting sold at Christie's in 2006 John Christian felt that in this case the angel was harvesting the souls of young children: "The present picture strives to adhere to Ruskinian principles of 'truth to nature' in its extraordinary attention to detail. Its composition also surely owes something to Charles Alston Collins's Convent Thoughts, now in the Ashmolean, Oxford, while the subject was no doubt conceived to comfort those parents who had been bereaved by the high rate of infant mortality then prevalent" (68). Mortality rates were high in mid-Victorian England, largely due to infections, and infants and children were at the greatest risk. Collins's painting Convent Thoughts that Christian refers to had been shown at the Royal Academy in 1851 where it attracted considerable attention, not all of it favourable.
Bibliography
Christian, John. Victorian & Traditionalist Pictures. London: Christie's (22 November 2006): 68-69.
Created 31 May 2025