Our visit to Richard Dorment to see Caroline’s portrait was fast approaching. To get the most out of the meeting we wanted to gain an understanding of the Dudley Group. This was not initially as easy as we imagined. We were looking for detailed factual knowledge, rather than generalised references in books devoted to Pre-Raphaelitism. Eventually, however, we tracked down an essay by Dennis Lanigan published in 2000, ‘The Dudley Gallery: Water Colour Drawings, Exhibitions 1865–1882’. This clarified the role of the gallery and the context that had led to its opening in 1865.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, there had been a growing demand among artists to break the monopoly of the Royal Academy Exhibitions over the display of their work, if it was to be seriously considered by the critics and the art-buying public. Not only was the RA’s selection process in the hands of established artists of an older generation, whose tastes were, by definition, extremely conservative and opposed to experimentation or innovation, the exhibitions relied almost exclusively on oil paintings so drawings or water colours were excluded.
This had led to the founding of, first, the Old Water Colour Society in 1815, and later the New Water Colour Society in 1832. Both of these ran annual exhibitions but restricted the works shown to members of their societies, entry to which again tended to be controlled by committees of establishment figures in their field. The revolutionary changes brought about by the emergence of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers in the late 1840s and ’50s finally led to the opening of the Dudley Gallery in April 1865. It had a liberal exhibition policy and no membership requirement, so could display work by many artists, particularly young ones, who would otherwise not have been able to establish themselves.
The gallery was an instant success, and it continued in this format until 1883 when it came under new management and became The Dudley Gallery Art Society.
From the outset the gallery acquired a distinct character and notoriety:
The Dudley Gallery quickly became the main forum for the younger generation of artists associated with the early Aesthetic Movement, and it would remain so until the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. Works in the characteristic ‘L’art pour l’art’ Dudley style rejected sentiment and morality as subjects and did not attempt to tell a story. These artists were more interested in the love of beauty. Even when some narrative content was retained the emphasis was primarily on achieving a harmonious arrangement of forms, colours and tones with the decorative effect of the work being predominant. Critics dubbed the more characteristic exhibitors in the Dudley style the ‘Poetry-Without-Grammar School’. This term – commenting on the beauty of the works, whilst lamenting their obvious technical shortcomings – was first used by a reviewer for the Westminster Review in 1869 . . .
The ‘Poetry-Without-Grammar School’ is generally thought of today to have consisted of a group of young artists centred on Robert Bateman and Walter Crane, which also included Edward Clifford, Henry Ellis Wooldridge, Alfred Sacheverell Coke, Edward Henry Fahey and Theodore Blake Wirgman. In reality, however, the group of artists that could be included under this term, based on work they submitted, was much wider. The reviewer for the Westminster Review acknowledged this when he also discussed such artists as Lucy Madox Brown, A. B. Donaldson, Marie Spartali, Simeon Solomon and Alice and Helen Thorneycroft . . .
The art of the young Burne-Jones was particularly influential for the ‘Poetry-Without-Grammar School’. His early work was also criticised for its technical faults and his guidance was recognised early on.
. . . Conservative critics from such periodicals as The Art Journal, the Saturday Review and the Illustrated London News were to continue in their denunciations of the early Aesthetic Movement until it became more respectable following the success of the Grosvenor Gallery.
More than a century later the artists of the ‘Dudley School’ have featured prominently in such exhibitions as The Last Romantics shown at the Barbican Gallery in 1989 and The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910 shown at Tate Britain in 1997.
We felt a frisson of excitement at seeing Robert Bateman identified as a leading member of a group of young artists who clearly set out to revolutionise the artistic world of their day.
Attached to Dennis Lanigan’s essay was a list of exhibitors and their works. These he defined as artists who epitomised the ‘Dudley’ style and therefore were similarly associated with Bateman and his group. Among these was E. R. Hughes who, although younger, came to be closely associated with both Simeon Solomon and Robert, who is documented as a witness at Hughes’s wedding in 1883.
In 1866, Robert exhibited at the Dudley for the first time. His painting Past and Present was accompanied by an intriguing verse concerned with the emotional appeal of ruinous old buildings, in contrast to the soullessness of new ones:
As the love-sculpted towers of ancient days,
Though crumbling and defaced, the heart will thrill,
While all unmoved on modern pile we gaze,
The soulless offspring of a heartless skill.
So these, though dying, live in all our hearts,
This lives but in the eye, although it live,
From these in death the sweetness scarce departs,
Even strong life to this no charm can give.
Despite the laboured quality of the wording, one could scarcely select a clearer expression of the romantic appeal of ruinous buildings. We could not help wondering what the painting Past and Present would have shown. The possibility that it might have shown Biddulph with its ‘love-sculpted tower of ancient days’ and crumbling cannon-defaced walls was tantalising – but even without the painting, the poem gave an unmistakable pointer to how appealing Robert and his group would have found the Old Hall.
Of the other artists mentioned as being part of Robert’s immediate circle, only his friends Walter Crane and Edward Clifford had paintings in the Dudley that year, but of the wider Dudley group A. B. Donaldson and Simeon Solomon were represented. What a glamorous figure Robert must have struck, especially to people of his own age – an exhibited artist, just twenty-four, with his tall, spare figure and Grecian good looks, part of a fast-forming group of talented artistic rebels, endorsed by the fashionable new London gallery at the heart of artistic controversy.
From 1866, Robert exhibited every year except one until 1874. Then, to our surprise, he stopped dead and never showed at the Dudley again. This was baffling as, at thirty-two, he was a young man, very probably at the height of his powers. We wondered what effect his departure would have had on the others in his group. Strangely, Simeon Solomon, who had been specifically linked with Robert in the 1870 Art Journal review of Plucking Mandrakes, also exhibited every year, often three or more pictures, until 1872 when he abruptly ceased and never showed again. Their friend E. R. Hughes also stopped exhibiting after 1874 and did not resume until 1880.
Robert’s friend Walter Crane continued exactly as one would expect, exhibiting two or more paintings regularly every year until 1881, shortly before the Dudley closed. Apart from Crane, however, most of the other members of the group ceased to exhibit regularly at the Dudley after 1874. The only other exception appeared to be Edward Clifford, who exhibited every year from 1866 onwards, but there did seem to be a strange anomaly. Up to 1874 the titles of his pictures suggest they are in the romantic ‘Dudley’ style: Head of an Angel, Some Have Entertained Angels Unawares, Meadows of Asphodel and the like. Suddenly, in 1875, he exhibited a straightforward portrait, The Earl of Tankerville, and from then on he painted only portraits, usually of aristocrats.
While we were trying to see if there was any discernible pattern in all this, something struck us about the date 1874, which marked the end of Robert’s association with the Dudley. This was the date on the carved stone built into the wing of the Old Hall, which Robert was said to have used as a studio. It seemed that Robert had undertaken sufficiently radical alterations at Biddulph to merit marking them with a signed and dated stone at the exact moment he ended his association with the Dudley after eight years of regular exhibiting. It suggested a sudden change in his circumstances, resulting in a closer relationship with the Old Hall which necessitated adapting it for his unique requirements.
As we now realised, these adaptations were very likely to have been the creation of a good-sized studio. The dates on several of his known paintings, including The Pool of Bethesda and Heloise and Abelard, confirm that he continued to produce important work after 1874. This raised the intriguing possibility that some of his best work might have been produced in his new studio at Biddulph.
We returned to our study of the lists of exhibits attached to Dennis Lanigan’s article with a new zest, hoping to find some hint of the events that had caused Robert to abandon the Dudley. However, they confined themselves to dates, titles, exhibition numbers and prices at the annual exhibitions. Depressingly, of the sixteen paintings exhibited by Robert between 1866 and 1874, only one, Plucking Mandrakes of 1870, was known to have survived. This stylish work gives a tantalising hint of the possible quality of the missing fifteen. We realised we were basing the assumption they were lost on the fact that they were not mentioned or illustrated in either of the Apollo articles. But it was over twenty years since Kavanagh’s piece – had others been discovered since then?
We tried searching by title on the internet but got no response – it seemed that they were completely forgotten. With some trepidation we rang Julian Hartnoll and asked him if he knew of any other Bateman paintings. He mentioned only one: Reading of Love, HE Being By. It had turned up in 2000 and was sold by Christie’s for about £16,000 or £17,000. Brian and I were intrigued that this particular painting had been found as it was the very last one on the list before Bateman disappeared from the Dudley in 1874. Would the image itself, when we saw it, contain some coded message or clue to the sudden change in the pattern of Robert’s life?
When we rang Christie’s, we became embroiled in what we had come to think of as a classic ‘Bateman’ conversation. A confident young lady insisted that there was no record of a painting of that title being sold by Christie’s around 2000, or at any other time. She said that if it was a water colour it was just possible it had been sold at South Kensington. We humbly asked if she could check South Kensington for us. After a pause in which she repeated the name continually under her breath as if frightened of forgetting it, she suddenly cried,
‘Good Heavens, yes. It is here. Sold at Kensington on 28 November 2000. Lot No. 43, Reading of Love, HE Being By. Robert Bateman. Pencil and water colour heightened with body colour, 10 × 13.5 inches . . . It’s just come up. Jeepers! That’s a funny one! What do you want me to do with it?’
We asked her to email an image of it to us and send a hard copy in the post, which she agreed to do. As we waited by the computer screen we could not help feeling a little perplexed and uncertain about what we were about to see. The title was so peculiar. We could not quite imagine how these words would be transported into a visual image. To be truthful, the personification of spiritual attributes, such as mercy, valour or love, into suitably clad, symbolic winged figures was one of the staple ingredients of high Victorian art that we found particularly difficult to digest.
When suddenly the image began to work its way up the computer screen our fears were a little assuaged (fig. 32). The foreground showed three statuesque ladies in relaxed flowing garments of medieval character, one reading, the other two apparently transported into a state of almost trance-like rapture by what they were hearing. They were grouped by a small formal pond or well, on the far side of which sat Cupid in the form of an adolescent boy sporting a cream loincloth and wings. He is sitting, hands clasped round his knees, his quiver of arrows lying beside him, absorbed by the reading of his female companion. Immediately behind the figures are simple white rose bushes and wonderfully gnarled and shaped trees, all contained within an enclosure of architectural stone walls suggesting a secluded medieval garden. In the centre background are a man and a woman, looking through an unglazed window.
As the details of the background gradually became clear, we were galvanised. There, framing the whole foreground subject of the painting, was an exact depiction of a portion of the ruins at Biddulph. The detail of the walls were so painstakingly rendered that we could identify not only the precise location, but every individual door opening, glassless window and circular aperture of the original (fig. 33).
At first, we thought Bateman had omitted one detail, a circular stone opening low down within the plinth, but when we looked closely it was indicated faintly, as if it was filled in. As it was now empty and much more visible, we thought it must simply have been opened up since 1873 when Robert painted the picture, but when we went out to look at it later that day, we found a beautifully masoned circular stone plug lying in the long grass immediately below the opening.
The discovery of this picture, with its indisputable depiction of Biddulph, marked a thrilling development in our search for Robert Bateman. The painting demonstrated the intensity of Robert’s emotional response to the Old Hall. It is clear that, to him, the place spoke of another world of heightened complex perceptions, beyond the commonplace round of day-to-day experience. This was generated by the sheer age of the structure, which carried evidence of the past into the present. However, that general sense of history was amplified by the gaunt ruins, which bore silent witness to violent struggle and high emotion, now spent and still. All these elements are used in Reading of Love to intensify the impact of this hypnotic image. It is an attempt to allow the viewer to experience the sensation of a world transformed by the presence of love into an earthly paradise. The ruins, while heightening the sense of separation from the prosaic, loveless outside world, subtly reference the attendant fears and intimations of mortality that such profound emotions generate.
Fig. 33. Love among the ruins – the setting of Reading of Love as it is today.
The accompanying notes from Christie’s gave no indication that the painting’s background had any particular relevance, except as ‘an architectonic design element partially paralleled in The Pool of Bethesda by the same artist’. Surely this painting on the subject of love, set in his own surroundings, was a highly personal statement by Robert. Could anyone not experiencing the delirium of an obsessional love affair have conceived such a distracted fantasy?
The subject was the potency of reading accounts of love when one was experiencing it first hand. Was there a clue here, in the last picture he was ever to exhibit at the Dudley Gallery, to events in Robert’s life that may have led him to make such a marked change? Was the painting set in Biddulph because the chain of events that led to his leaving the Dudley took place there – and was love, in one form or another, at the heart of it? As a talented, good-looking artist of thirty-two, he may well have been in love, but that alone would not have caused him to cease showing his work. Reading of Love contains no hint of heartbreak or thwarted love which might have led to a crisis. All the figures seem transported into a thoughtful but blissful reverie; there are no tears or anger or suffering.
We went back to Dennis Lanigan’s list of pictures exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, and were struck by a pattern we had not noticed before. In Robert’s last two years at the Dudley he exhibited three paintings. In 1874, his last year, he showed On The Way and Reading of Love, but in 1873 he showed only one, Paolo and Francesca. Accompanying the main title of this picture was a quotation from Dante:
Reading one day we were, for pleasure’s sake,
The Tale of Lancelot – how him Love thralled.
Alone we were, and no suspicion near.
Oft times the book did make our eyes to meet –
Our faces faded at the words we read,
But was one point alone that overcame!
So two of Robert’s last three paintings were not only on the theme of love, but depicted an almost identical incident: people reading accounts of love with which they identify so closely that they are overcome by the strength of their feelings. The verse from Dante raised the possibility that Robert was inspired by a personal identification with the incident depicted. The two protagonists are in a private, secluded place – they seem to have had to contrive this secretly, for if it were known it would be the subject of ‘suspicion’. The sense of trembling intimacy, part fear, part suppressed desire, at the very moment of declaration is wonderfully caught.
The book they are reading provides the catalyst for the acknowledgement of their pent-up feelings, by describing, in perfect words, the tumultuous emotions they are themselves experiencing at that very moment. The tension builds as their eyes meet more and more frequently, and their faces ‘fade at the words we read’, until a point is reached when their ability to contain their pretence of reading ‘for pleasure’s sake’ is overcome and their own feelings take over.
Paolo and Francesca is a blood-soaked tale of star-crossed lovers, in which Paolo woos Francesca on behalf of his brother Giovanni, who is in love with her but has not the looks nor charm to woo her himself. Giovanni marries Francesca, but she and Paolo have fallen in love. It is not a platonic relationship. They are discovered together consummating their love and Paolo is stabbed and killed. The subject was beloved of many artists, particularly romantic ones, but it is much more usual for the moments of high drama to be portrayed – the couple being burst in on, or the weeping Francesca mourning over the corpse of her murdered lover.
Bateman’s selection of this particular segment of the story, and his return to the subject so soon afterwards in Reading of Love, suggest that it is specifically the process of mutual love being revealed through the act of reading of love with which he identifies. The two pictures coming so close together, at the moment he abandoned the Dudley Gallery and adapted Biddulph Old Hall, suggested that they may have had some highly personal meaning for Robert, possibly centred on a real incident.
Of Robert’s two paintings shown in 1874, only one was priced. On The Way had a price of £25 shown in brackets, but Reading of Love was not priced, indicating that it was not for sale. In the previous year Paolo and Francesca was similarly listed without a selling price. We had not before seen much significance in the original prices of the paintings, other than as a way of trying to assess their relative importance at the time. Now we went carefully through the whole list of Robert’s paintings starting from 1866 to see which had been priced and which had not. We found to our surprise that every single painting had been exhibited with a price, except Reading of Love and Paolo and Francesca. This reinforced the thematic link between them and the sense that they held some deep significance for Robert, something perhaps that made them too personal to sell.
So at the moment he ceased to exhibit at the Dudley, Robert was executing highly personal paintings on the theme of love. Surely this held the answer to the riddle of why he had stopped exhibiting and adapted Biddulph. Presumably his dream world was invaded by barbaric complications of some kind – for there is no sign, either in his life or in his paintings, of the sublime creature who had inspired these poetic visions. Did she spurn him? The Dante poem suggests not – these lovers are mutually infatuated. Or was she out of reach? Was there a public scandal in the best Victorian tradition, which forced him to disappear from view and hide at Biddulph? Apparently not, as for the next few years he exhibited at the eminently respectable Royal Academy, showing The Pool of Bethesda there in 1876. He also remained single, because he was free to marry nine years later.
On the other hand there can be no dispute about the radical change in the style, subject and execution of his paintings in the short period between Reading of Love and Pool of Bethesda. The soft focus of the water colour with its flowing, almost molten forms and delicate colour harmonies is replaced two years later by a rigidly disciplined, angular composition in oil which conveys its painful subject with unflinching clarity and minimal colour. The love poems and palpitations have been banished, to be replaced by a sterner, more substantial world that encompasses pain and struggle.
One thing was clear: Robert was remaining true to his reclusive reputation. The more we discovered about him the more perplexing were the puzzles he set us. And yet with every new glimpse into the hypnotic world of his imagination the more compulsively we became absorbed in his story.
