Our long-awaited visit to Richard Dorment came at a good time. We had managed to gain just enough information about the Dudley Group and later Pre-Raphaelites to begin to comprehend how diverse and complex a subject late nineteenth-century British art truly was. We hoped that our small body of background knowledge would be sufficient to enable us to have a meaningful discussion with Richard about Robert Bateman and his association with Biddulph Old Hall.
Of course, it was of crucial importance to us, in our aim of restoring Robert’s life and reputation, that a working art critic with a national reputation should have admired a Bateman painting enough not merely to endorse it but actually to buy it and hang it in his own home. The subject of the painting was a figure of growing fascination for us, and it was to be the first time we had ever seen an original Bateman, all of which combined to generate a wonderful sense of occasion.
Richard greeted us warmly and ushered us in. He was a spare, elegant figure with a generous manner and no hint of intellectual arrogance. He walked down the narrow hall and indicated the wall beside the staircase. Despite being warned about its size, we were still not quite prepared for the fabulous scale of the image nor the commanding impact of Caroline’s presence as she gazed steadily out at us from the huge canvas. From the first-floor landing we got a better view of her face and the lovely colouring of the top section of the portrait. Indeed, the colouring was the first thing to strike us. The small illustration we had seen gave no sense of the beautifully modulated tones of ochre, russet and grey that surrounded the black-clad figure, with her pale skin and almost white hair, in an iridescent glow of warmth. It was very beautiful.
Richard said that it truly came into its own when the morning light fell on it from the long window on the stairs. He described her clothes as ‘half-mourning’, a late stage in the highly structured Victorian expression of bereavement. He had published a paper specifically on the symbolic significance of Caroline’s clothes in the portrait, and promised us a copy. Brian asked Richard if he knew anything about the landscape behind her. I knew what was in his mind – at this scale, where the landscape could be clearly seen, it seemed incredibly familiar. One element was idealised – the river in the valley, which looked too wide and prominent – but the lie of the land, the contours of the hills, the scattered copses of trees and irregular little fields were almost exactly the ones we could see looking west from Biddulph towards Congleton Edge.
Richard seemed fascinated by this proposition and looked closely at that part of the painting.
‘So you think he was actually working from this place you’ve got?’
‘We’re pretty sure. Part of the ruined mansion forms the background to Reading of Love, HE Being By,’ I said.
‘Oh, the water colour, really?’
‘Yes, there the representation is absolutely exact, unmistakable. We’ve got some photographs so you can compare them.’
‘Remarkable. Well, if you’ve seen enough here we’ll go down to the garden, have a glass of wine and you can show me what you’ve brought.’
We showed him the legal document between John Bateman and his brother, Robert, giving him a life tenancy over the Old Hall. Then we showed him a picture of the initialled date stone of 1874, which he agreed was directly related to the way Robert signed his paintings. We showed him photographs of the ruins and compared them with Reading of Love, which he agreed was indisputably the setting of the painting. As the wine slipped down, we all got thoroughly engrossed and enthusiastic.
We asked him if he was aware of any significance surrounding the year 1874 on the date stone at Biddulph, which coincided so exactly with Robert’s abrupt break with the Dudley Gallery after years of regular exhibiting. Richard felt that the break with the Dudley might have been connected with a number of scandals that engulfed their mentor Edward Burne-Jones and several other artists who were seen as his followers, particularly Simeon Solomon, at about that time.
Burne-Jones had been involved in an increasingly intense extra-marital love affair with Mary Zambaco, a volatile and gifted Anglo-Greek sculptress. The affair had begun in about 1866 but had gradually become so obsessive that it led to several public incidents, usually triggered by Burne-Jones’s attempts to end the relationship. These culminated in an attempt by Mary Zambaco to commit suicide by throwing herself into the Regent’s Canal.
These incidents were compounded by a considerable artistic scandal that broke in 1870. Burne-Jones exhibited a painting entitled Phyllis and Demophoon at the Old Water Colour Society, the gallery where Bateman, Crane and others had been so influenced by his work. It was very badly received by the critics, who regarded it as expressing moral degeneracy in the nude depiction of the male figure Demophoon. The highly conservative president of the society, Frederick Taylor, asked Burne-Jones to amend the painting, but he refused. He insisted on removing it from the exhibition and proffered his resignation, which the society accepted (fig. 34).
The public and critics had been equally outraged by the minimally draped female figure of Phyllis, who clasped her naked companion about the chest in a clinging embrace and whose head was a clearly identifiable portrait of Mary Zambaco. This was an affront to mid-Victorian morality and crystallised the perception of Burne-Jones and his followers as unhealthy, decadent mavericks. According to the critic of the Illustrated London News, the painting was ‘something which, like the amatory poetry of Swinburne, might be loathsome were it not for its fantastic unreality’.
Fig. 34. Edward Burne-Jones, Phyllis and Demophoon, 1870, body colour and watercolour on composite layers of paper on canvas, 93.8 × 47.5 cm, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.
This debacle had a huge impact on Burne-Jones. For the first time he joined his disciples by exhibiting three paintings at the Dudley Gallery in 1872–3. After that he ceased to exhibit completely and entered what he himself described as ‘the desolate years’, in which he was completely ignored and almost forgotten. He continued to work obsessively in private, supported by one or two loyal patrons, and in these secluded years developed the highly individual vision and technique that burst into public recognition in 1876 at the new Grosvenor Gallery, a glamorous custom-built institution dedicated to the promotion of advanced art.
As Richard described the hostility that had engulfed the figure who had inspired the Dudley Group’s revolutionary new art, it was not difficult to imagine the traumatic impact it must have had on his disciples. Mockery and vilification of their subject matter and execution was bad enough, but to be accused of moral degeneracy must have made life extremely uncomfortable. We wondered what Robert’s parents would have thought of their son’s associates. His father, James Bateman, was a highly respected botanist, who regularly addressed the Royal Horticultural Society and had published a seminal treatise on orchids; he was also well known as a lay reader, and had published a collection of sermons of a particularly low-church Puritanical character. Robert’s devoted mother was also noted for her piety, which was clearly expressed in a letter written to her middle son, Rowland, when he decided to dedicate his life to church missionary work:
Treasure of my heart! And apple of my eye! It will be a gratification to you to know that this time twenty-one years ago I was beseeching the Gracious Giver of all good things to accept to his special service my newborn babe . . .
Robert and the Dudley Group must have been under enormous pressure. The decision of Burne-Jones, their acknowledged leader, to choose this moment to go into a life of artistic hibernation may have had some bearing on Robert’s near-simultaneous disappearance from the Dudley and retreat to Biddulph. We were discussing this when Richard said cryptically,
‘And then, of course, at almost exactly that moment there was the disaster of poor Simeon Solomon.’
All we knew about Solomon was that he had been linked with Bateman and Crane in The Art Journal in 1870, in an article discussing Plucking Mandrakes:
These Dudley people are proverbially peculiar. Thus it would be hard to find talent associated with greater eccentricity than in the clever but abnormal creations of Walter Crane, Robert Bateman and Simeon Solomon.
After continuously exhibiting some 26 paintings between 1865 and 1871 Solomon, like Bateman, suddenly disappeared from the list at the Dudley Gallery and was never mentioned again.
Richard continued intriguingly, ‘I know he stopped exhibiting a year or two before. I think he was abroad – in Rome if I remember rightly – but I think his actual crisis was very near your date.’
‘His crisis?’
‘Yes, poor chap, he got into a fearful mess. Unfortunately it wasn’t women, this time it was men – which in Victorian London was catastrophically beyond the pale.’
Brian and I stared at him, conscious of the wine beginning to numb the outer edges of our conciousness. We thought we knew what he was saying, but we weren’t quite sure and were afraid of making an absurd faux pas. I tried a tentative foray:
‘Was he – arrested or something?’
‘Oh, absolutely. Twice, actually. It was an utter disaster. He was ruined – completely ruined. He ended up destitute, an alcoholic living in St Giles’s Workhouse. Appalling waste of talent.’
‘Did he stop painting altogether?’
‘Actually, no, not completely. But his work changed. Nearly all his late work is drawing – very hallucinogenic, obsessed with night, dreams, sleep, death and such like, haunting heads mostly with closed eyes, troubled, trance-like intensity. You need to know about him. There is a very good book about him that’s come out recently called Love Revealed. The title’s taken from an extraordinary prose poem he published not long before his disgrace.’
We mentioned the Art Journal article of 1870 linking Solomon with Crane and Bateman, and asked Richard whether he agreed that they formed a group.
‘That’s interesting. Because in his Reminiscences Walter Crane identifies himself with Bateman both as a personal friend and as part of an identified artistic clique, the two are always thought of together. But if you take the actual evidence of their known work, Solomon and Bateman show a stronger artistic empathy with one another, through the disturbing intensity of their images, than they do with the comparatively pretty and ephemeral early creations of Walter Crane.’
We asked Richard if he thought that might explain the anomaly that Crane alone, of the prominent members of the ‘Poetry-Without-Grammar School’, continued to exhibit annually right through the critical 1873–4 hiatus that marked the end of Burne-Jones’s, Solomon’s and Bateman’s relationship with the Dudley Gallery. By this time, we had all become engrossed in the strange coincidence of the desertion of the gallery, at almost the same moment, by several of the leading figures of this circle. Richard sounded a note of caution, warning that there need not have been a single underlying cause for all these disparate events. But he felt, intuitively, that the causes for the change, in the cases of Solomon and Burne-Jones, had almost certainly sprung from events in their personal lives. He had no idea what had caused Bateman to follow a similar pattern – to his knowledge, there was no scandal or hiatus associated with his name at this time, or indeed at any other.
He did, however, proffer a possible explanation for Crane’s bucking the trend. He was abroad throughout the crucial period, having married in late 1871. He and his new bride set out on an extended honeymoon tour of Italy, from which they did not return until the late summer of 1873. It seemed plausible that he had therefore avoided being contaminated by the suspicion and moral odium that became attached to other prominent members of the Dudley Group. Certainly, after referring to both Solomon and Bateman as friends in the early part of his autobiography, Crane never mentions Solomon again after his return from Italy and makes only a passing allusion to Bateman as a founding member of the Society of Artists in Tempera in 1901, some thirty years later. He may have continued to exhibit at the Dudley, but he did not renew his friendship with the group of artists he had identified with before his marriage.
If the cause of this lay in the irregular personal lives of some of them, it seemed a little surprising that Robert should have chosen to disappear and remain single for a further ten years, when he could have followed Crane’s example and demonstrated his good character by marrying and settling down. It seemed especially odd since romantic love appeared to be the very subject dominating his mind and imagination at precisely this point in his life.
Richard was wonderfully good-natured in the face of our obsessional interest in the minutiae of every hypothesis. From his fund of information on nineteenth-century art he contributed facts and illumination on practically every point we raised. He was the perfect tutor to our intellectual curiosity. He insisted on accuracy, rigour and rationality, while continually encouraging us to research every nuance of what we were discovering, to extract the truth about the obscure figures we were pursuing and to increase the understanding of their work.
As we shook hands in the hall, we took a last glance up at the overwhelming presence of Caroline Octavia on the staircase. We were struck again by her disconcerting, still composure mingled with an unmistakable aura of controlled sadness. We walked away into the relaxed euphoria of a radiant summer evening in Little Venice, full of excitement and curiosity about the morbidly intense concoction of blissful hallucination and personal despair that we had glimpsed in the back alleys of the Victorian art world that Richard Dorment had begun to reveal to us.
