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拍品专文
John William Godward clearly considered At the Fountain to be one of his best pictures, as he chose to exhibit it at the 1893 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts along with three other paintings. 1893 was the only year in which he entered more than two pictures at the Academy, and the exhibition proved to be pivotal in establishing the artist’s reputation. As Vern Swanson has noted, ‘1893 was Godward’s artistic watershed. He finally came into his own and began to produce work of maturity and sensitivity’ (V. G. Swanson, John William Godward, 1861-1922 – The Eclipse of Classicism, 1997, p. 47). At the Fountain was purchased by John Charles Tompkins of 14 York Terrace in Regent’s Park, and in May of that year Tompkins agreed to allow a photogravure of the painting to be made, the first of Godward’s oeuvre to be reproduced.
At the Fountain is one of Godward’s most successful compositions, depicting a young Roman woman at a spring where she has come to fill an amphora with water. She leans against a variegated marble pilaster and gently touches the jade beads of her necklace, lost in thought. Godward was a master of texture and color, and At the Fountain is a virtuoso display of the artist’s extraordinary ability to capture myriad varieties of texture. The contrasts of the young woman’s warm, golden flesh and the soft folds of her garments against the greys, greens and whites of the cool, hard marble background is a tour de force of textures rendered in paint.
Godward’s emerging success as an artist coincided with his discovery of a trio of models who were to epitomize his exotic depictions of femininity. Three sisters, Rose, Hetty and Lily Pettigrew, became artist’s models in 1885 when they moved to London with their brother after the death of their father, a West Country foundry worker. Their mother’s earnings as a seamstress could not support the family in London and she was told by a local art-master that the three girls could make a decent living as artists’ models. Their first patron was John Everett Millais, who all three came to adore, and they quickly became the leading models of the London art scene. It was said that they had gypsy blood, their lively and free-spirited characters suited the Bohemian atmosphere of artists’ studios where lords and ladies intermingled with artists, writers and poets. All three sisters posed naked for the photographer Lindley Sambourne and were clearly uninhibited and proud of their beauty.
It is highly likely that Rose is the model for At the Fountain. She was clearly as beautiful and popular with artists as her sisters, although she modestly described herself as ‘the ordinary little one, tiny, with bushels of very bright gold hair, a nose which started straight but changed its mind, by turning up at the tip, a rose-leaf complexion, and a cupid’s bow mouth, which most of the big sculptors have cast' (B. Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 1971, p. 114). Rose always insisted that her sister Lily was the most beautiful, but all three sisters sat for works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Millais, Frederic Leighton, William Holman Hunt, John Singer Sargent, Augustus John and Philip Wilson Steer. Rose was closest to Steer and he painted her frequently (fig. 1). Steer fell in love with Rose and intended to marry her, but following a trivial argument over a velvet coat he intended to wear at a dance the engagement was terminated and the couple never saw each other again. It is soon after the end of her relationship with Steer that Rose started posing for Godward and her mass of wavy brown har, pouting rose-bud mouth and classical profile came to dominate his paintings in the 1890s.
At the Fountain is one of Godward’s most successful compositions, depicting a young Roman woman at a spring where she has come to fill an amphora with water. She leans against a variegated marble pilaster and gently touches the jade beads of her necklace, lost in thought. Godward was a master of texture and color, and At the Fountain is a virtuoso display of the artist’s extraordinary ability to capture myriad varieties of texture. The contrasts of the young woman’s warm, golden flesh and the soft folds of her garments against the greys, greens and whites of the cool, hard marble background is a tour de force of textures rendered in paint.
Godward’s emerging success as an artist coincided with his discovery of a trio of models who were to epitomize his exotic depictions of femininity. Three sisters, Rose, Hetty and Lily Pettigrew, became artist’s models in 1885 when they moved to London with their brother after the death of their father, a West Country foundry worker. Their mother’s earnings as a seamstress could not support the family in London and she was told by a local art-master that the three girls could make a decent living as artists’ models. Their first patron was John Everett Millais, who all three came to adore, and they quickly became the leading models of the London art scene. It was said that they had gypsy blood, their lively and free-spirited characters suited the Bohemian atmosphere of artists’ studios where lords and ladies intermingled with artists, writers and poets. All three sisters posed naked for the photographer Lindley Sambourne and were clearly uninhibited and proud of their beauty.
It is highly likely that Rose is the model for At the Fountain. She was clearly as beautiful and popular with artists as her sisters, although she modestly described herself as ‘the ordinary little one, tiny, with bushels of very bright gold hair, a nose which started straight but changed its mind, by turning up at the tip, a rose-leaf complexion, and a cupid’s bow mouth, which most of the big sculptors have cast' (B. Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 1971, p. 114). Rose always insisted that her sister Lily was the most beautiful, but all three sisters sat for works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Millais, Frederic Leighton, William Holman Hunt, John Singer Sargent, Augustus John and Philip Wilson Steer. Rose was closest to Steer and he painted her frequently (fig. 1). Steer fell in love with Rose and intended to marry her, but following a trivial argument over a velvet coat he intended to wear at a dance the engagement was terminated and the couple never saw each other again. It is soon after the end of her relationship with Steer that Rose started posing for Godward and her mass of wavy brown har, pouting rose-bud mouth and classical profile came to dominate his paintings in the 1890s.