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Lot Essay
An elegant woman is passing a hat shop and her eye is caught by the new designs on display in the window. It is an everyday occurrence that in George Henry's The Milliner's Window holds our attention. The woman looks intently. The window, at first a jumble of shapes, focuses around a single head wearing a boater. It may be only a reflection; it may be a mannequin.
A brilliant star at the beginning of the 1890s, Henry eclipsed other leading Glasgow Boys. His Galloway Landscape (Glasgow Museums), shown at the annual Institute of the Fine Arts exhibition was more imaginative recreation than photographic record and it established a new way of thinking about fields, trees and rushing streams.1 Later in the same year it was followed by an even more audacious work, painted jointly with Edward Atkinson Hornel, The Druids bringing in the Mistletoe (Glasgow Museums). Here a group of ancient Britons, studiously researched, process down a hillside in richly ornamented cloaks.2 Henry, it seemed, brought fresh air to every genre he touched.
There was however one important area that remained, and this was the treatment of 'modernity', expressed in portraiture, fashion and life in the streets. In this regard, as Fowle and others have pointed out, the Glasgow Boys oscillated between Whistler and Degas as their principal influences, to some extent reflecting the modern art available in contemporary exhibitions and Glasgow dealerships. As he and Hornel grappled with the difficulties of a second joint composition, The Star in the East, 1891 (Glasgow Museums), Henry was drawn to the modern world, and at this point Whistler, whose portrait of Thomas Carlyle had just been purchased by Glasgow Corporation, was in the ascendency. The Glasgow dealer, Alexander Reid, had no less than three Whistlers in stock, one of which was the stunning portrait of Maud Franklin, Arrangement in Black and Brown, The Fur Jacket, 1876 (Worcester Art Museum, Mass).4 It seems likely that The Feather Boa was in part inspired by this picture.5
However as he painted his 'women of fashion' in the studio, Henry regarded the figure from a standing position, and observed the distortion contingent upon a close encounter.6 Looking up and down from head to toe, the young woman's feet fall away to a point beneath her skirt and the perspective on the floor plane is steep. The same effect occurs in The Milliner's Window where the pavement with its zigzag slabs occupies a significant portion of the composition. Such devices were obvious in Degas' Au Café (l'Absinthe), briefly in a Scottish collection during the crucial year, 1892-3, and shown in the inaugural Grafton Gallery exhibition where Henry and the other Glasgow Boys made up the single most powerful phalanx.7 Although he was shortly to set sail for Japan, Henry must have been aware of the controversy which raged around Degas' canvas.8
And then there is the woman whose striking silhouette suggests that Henry was au fait with Japanese prints - particularly those by the ubiquitous Kunisada - long before he set sail. After his visit to Japan this sense of the drama of shapes was greatly enhanced and the glimpse of a tiered, black caped jacket passing a milliner's shop, might momentarily suggest a naturalistic version of Beardsley's celebrated The Black Cape, 1894, one of his illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salomé. No one but Henry could catch these visual sparks.
But there the comparison ends, for Henry's street life has more in common with the modistes of Degas, the boulevards of Jean Béraud or the London street scenes of Anders Zorn, than Herod's Wildean throne room. Indeed Fruiterer, 1894 suggests that after his return, Henry was keen to re-engage with la vie moderne rather than trade solely on his recent adventures. Nevertheless the signage of the fruit stall accentuates the plane of the picture and the flat treatment of the red and green capes along with a large pot of chrysanthemums, indicate that Japonisme was alive and well in the 'wynds' and 'closes' of the west of Scotland.
There was yet one daring composition still in mind - one provided by the glimpse of a woman looking at hats. It might easily come from Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames or Proust's Du Coté de chez Swann. It is a page torn from life.
1 Roger Billcliffe et al, Pioneering Painters, 2010, exhibition catalogue, Glasgow Museums, p. 66-7.
2 ibid, pp. 68-70.
3 Frances Fowle, Van Gogh's Twin, The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid, 1854-1928, 2010, National Galleries of Scotland, pp. 39-53.
4 ibid, p. 78.
5 A watercolour of the same title is illustrated in The Studio, vol ix, 1896, p. 141.
6 For a Henry typical Lady of Fashion, 1894 see Billcliffe et al, 2010, p. 145.
7 Arthur Kay, Treasure Trove in Art, 1939, Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, pp. 27-30; Ronald Pickvance, 'L'Absinthe in England', Apollo vol lxxxvii, May 1963, pp. 395-8; Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson, Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec, London and Paris, 1870-1910, 2005, exhibition catalogue, Tate Publishing, pp. 90-2.
8 For a fuller account see William Buchanan, Mr Henry and Mr Hornel visit Japan, 1978, exhibition catalogue, Scottish Arts Council.
A brilliant star at the beginning of the 1890s, Henry eclipsed other leading Glasgow Boys. His Galloway Landscape (Glasgow Museums), shown at the annual Institute of the Fine Arts exhibition was more imaginative recreation than photographic record and it established a new way of thinking about fields, trees and rushing streams.
There was however one important area that remained, and this was the treatment of 'modernity', expressed in portraiture, fashion and life in the streets. In this regard, as Fowle and others have pointed out, the Glasgow Boys oscillated between Whistler and Degas as their principal influences, to some extent reflecting the modern art available in contemporary exhibitions and Glasgow dealerships. As he and Hornel grappled with the difficulties of a second joint composition, The Star in the East, 1891 (Glasgow Museums), Henry was drawn to the modern world, and at this point Whistler, whose portrait of Thomas Carlyle had just been purchased by Glasgow Corporation, was in the ascendency. The Glasgow dealer, Alexander Reid, had no less than three Whistlers in stock, one of which was the stunning portrait of Maud Franklin, Arrangement in Black and Brown, The Fur Jacket, 1876 (Worcester Art Museum, Mass).
However as he painted his 'women of fashion' in the studio, Henry regarded the figure from a standing position, and observed the distortion contingent upon a close encounter.
And then there is the woman whose striking silhouette suggests that Henry was au fait with Japanese prints - particularly those by the ubiquitous Kunisada - long before he set sail. After his visit to Japan this sense of the drama of shapes was greatly enhanced and the glimpse of a tiered, black caped jacket passing a milliner's shop, might momentarily suggest a naturalistic version of Beardsley's celebrated The Black Cape, 1894, one of his illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salomé. No one but Henry could catch these visual sparks.
But there the comparison ends, for Henry's street life has more in common with the modistes of Degas, the boulevards of Jean Béraud or the London street scenes of Anders Zorn, than Herod's Wildean throne room. Indeed Fruiterer, 1894 suggests that after his return, Henry was keen to re-engage with la vie moderne rather than trade solely on his recent adventures. Nevertheless the signage of the fruit stall accentuates the plane of the picture and the flat treatment of the red and green capes along with a large pot of chrysanthemums, indicate that Japonisme was alive and well in the 'wynds' and 'closes' of the west of Scotland.
There was yet one daring composition still in mind - one provided by the glimpse of a woman looking at hats. It might easily come from Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames or Proust's Du Coté de chez Swann. It is a page torn from life.