A COUNTRY SQUIRE AND HIS GOOD LADY
Judging by local records, Robert and Caroline threw themselves with some vigour into the roles of the benevolent country squire (fig. 79) and his good lady. In the early 1890s Robert was elected to the Board of Guardians that oversaw the administration of the local workhouse at Madeley and supported the poor of the parish. His contributions to some of these worthy but convoluted debates have a refreshing humanity and concern for the people under discussion. In January 1892, for example, the Board of Guardians addressed the vexed question of whether to provide the inmates of the workhouse with bread, or the flour with which to make it:
Mr Mole, relieving officer, asked the Guardians if they intended to give bread instead of flour.
Mr Bateman, ‘What do the poor want?’
The Officer, ‘The majority say bread.’
Mr Weaver said he should be of the same view, but they should take into consideration ‘that one costs 2d and the other 4d’.
The concept of consulting the recipients of charity on their preference was clearly unconventional but it won the day none the less. Robert was an active committee member on the board organising the Brossley Horticultural Show, charmingly reported in the Wellington Journal as a
near miraculous achievement in an area principally associated with smoke (!) because its busy manufactories constantly emit their Stygian fumes, in evidence of the abiding prosperity of the place . . . Therefore it must have been a delicious experience to non-residential visitors . . . that the district had been made to blossom with such brilliant abundance and give such proof of its full fruition . . .
Robert and Caroline played their part in the judging and joined in the dancing to the strains of the Coalbrookdale Band conducted by Sergeant Beardshaw. Robert was the chairman of the Brossley Wood branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and suggested scholarships for boys and girls to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.
Robert and Caroline were on friendly terms with the 4th Lord Forrester, owner of a large estate centred on Willey Hall, of which Benthall Hall formed a subsidiary manor. Lord Forrester was an elderly canon of York Minster, who therefore had much in common with Caroline. When he died in June 1894 there was a service in York Minster after which his body was taken to Much Wenlock by train. Robert played a central role in his funeral in Shropshire, as part of the committee who met the coffin at the station and then as one of the pall bearers who bore it during the funeral service at the local church.
Caroline, equally conscientiously, played her part in local life, supporting charities and local institutions, frequently by singing or accompanying concerts in aid of good causes. For example, on 5 January 1901 she presided at one of the tea tables at a concert in aid of the organ fund, chaired by Robert. After tea she accompanied the performers, along with Miss Watkins and Miss Southern, ‘their efforts being heartily appreciated’. On 22 June the same year, she and Robert hosted the Mothers’ Meeting:
On Monday, through the kindness of Mr and Mrs Bateman, the members of the Mothers’ Meeting, to the number thirty, were entertained to tea at the Hall. After a very enjoyable meal, the members, accompanied by Mr and Mrs Bateman and Mrs Terry [the Vicar’s wife], walked for some time in the artistically laid out grounds. Subsequently they returned to the Hall, when Mr Dorbree, lately a member of the original Regiment of the Imperial Light Horse, kindly gave some of his experiences while besieged at Ladysmith.
Census returns and letters from this period make clear that Caroline kept up a regular round of visits to her old friends and relations. In 1891 she was staying with two members of the Monckton family, Mary and Leonora, at Brewood Hall near Penckridge, where she had lived during her marriage to Charles Wilbraham. Her letter to her cousin, George Howard, Earl of Carlisle, in the late 1890s (see fig. 59) was written from Glyngarth Palace, the home of the Bishop of Bangor and his wife, her old friend Alice Monckton. In 1901 she was a guest at Lockinge House, the palatial home of her cousin Lady Wantage. As her letter to George Howard makes clear, she actively encouraged return visits to Benthall by her friends and family. Robert did not always accompany her on these visits, but remained at home ‘enjoying his flowers and his painting’. But there is no sense that Caroline feels socially superior or ashamed of him. She never flaunts her connections to impress others, neither does she attempt to downplay them; she is simply natural and loyal to her closest and oldest companions.
This loyalty to those near to her and identification with their interests emerge more and more clearly as core traits in Caroline’s nature. They imply a rare blend of personal serenity and innate respect for others, which had the power to resolve conflict within her relationships. She provided an encompassing sense of security to those she loved, through her ability to defer to them willingly without ever losing her dignity or gentle strength of character. This was the alchemy that transformed her marriage of convenience to Charles Wilbraham into a genuine nurturing bond between two starkly contrasted adults.
The same unshakeable loyalty to Robert had brought about not only their eventual union but the gradual fulfilment of his potential as an artist. Later it enabled them to move to Benthall Hall, assume a lifestyle that quietly dissolved the social disparity between them, and integrated him into her world. If the price of embracing Caroline’s gift for creating deep, loving relationships was the loss of distracted intensity in his paintings, caused by his loneliness without her, who can blame Robert for paying it?
We went to Benthall again to study the Pixie Garden. This charming confection of informal paths, weaving their way across a mounded site by way of steps and stone-edged beds, has been sensitively restored by The National Trust and constitutes a real embellishment to the setting of Benthall Hall. Our interest in it was heightened by the fact that we clearly had a smaller prototype of it outside our back door at Biddulph. This garden constituted the most successful artistic achievement by Robert that we had been able to discover during his years at Benthall. We did not doubt that he had continued to work on his flower paintings, which were by common consent executed with an almost oriental delicacy. They were, however, lost and have never been recorded as on public exhibition.
The catalogue of the New Gallery, which opened in 1888 and supplanted the Grosvenor after its closure in 1890, showed only one contribution from Robert, At Romsey Abbey, dated 1899, despite the fact that Burne-Jones, Crane and most of his former soul-mates transferred there in the early 1890s. Eventually, we were forced to admit that without the dynamic narrative of their thwarted passion for each other, the story of Robert and Caroline’s life at Benthall Hall had lost its compulsive intensity. Almost none of Robert’s paintings, and certainly not the important ones for which he is remembered, date from these halcyon days after 1890.
The fulfilment that Caroline enabled Robert to achieve encompassed both his hunger to be fully accepted as a gentleman, and his ambition to be a recognised artist whose work was exhibited alongside the idolised modern masters of his day. This process had begun almost immediately after Caroline’s widowhood in December 1879. By 1881, Robert had switched from exhibiting at the Royal Academy to the Grosvenor which, at that moment, was at the very peak of its cultural influence. One of the most striking consequences of the cult the gallery generated around its leading artists was that their work reached previously unimaginable prices, particularly when it was perceived as conforming to the refined ideals of the Aesthetic Movement. From its beginnings at the opening of the Grosvenor in 1876, this cult continued to grow. It dominated the art market throughout the 1880s, despite the difficulties that beset the gallery itself in the last years of the decade and its eventual closure in 1890.
An indication of the sensational prices for ‘Aesthetic’ art was provided by the sale of the collection of Frederick Leyland, a wealthy ship owner, in 1892. A group of ‘Illustrations of Boccaccio’ by Botticelli, one of the most venerated of fifteenth-century Italian masters, achieved the then staggering sum of £1,300. But this was made to seem trifling in comparison to Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin, which achieved £3,600 guineas later the same day, with the bidding opening at £1,000 guineas.
Although Burne-Jones’s position was unique as the acknowledged figurehead of all the purveyors of legendary romance, work by other artists who drew inspiration from broadly comparable sources also saw a dramatic and sustained rise in value throughout the 1880s and early 1890s. This was particularly true of figures such as Walter Crane, who had a history of association with Burne-Jones. By chance we had recently stumbled across evidence of long-term artistic links between Burne-Jones and Robert. We had been shown a small, sinister watercolour of Little Red Riding Hood at Mells, a lyrically beautiful manor house in Somerset. It was initialled RB and dated 1866 (fig. 80). The picture was fascinating to us because the architectural setting for the figure was Biddulph Old Hall, and we had never before had any documentary evidence of Robert using it as a home or studio before 1874. Also, the date and its location strongly suggested that the painting was bought by William Graham for his nine-year-old daughter Katherine, who grew up to marry Sir John Horner, the owner of Mells. This probability was effectively confirmed when the current owner of Mells (Katherine’s great-grandson) took the picture down in order to show us the back, which had ‘R. Bateman’ written in chalk, in what he knew to be Katherine Graham’s handwriting (fig. 81). Not only was William Graham a friend and patron of Burne-Jones, but the artist had developed a romantic fixation with Katherine that began when he first met her as a little girl in 1865 and lasted all through his life. The close relationship between Burne-Jones and the Grahams was publicly acknowledged throughout the artistic community.
Clearly, Robert had also been part of the circle surrounding this important Pre-Raphaelite patron from its beginning. Whereas in those days the Burne-Jones/Graham connection would have been seen as a liability, by the time Robert had established his name at the Grosvenor Gallery in the early 1880s he must have reaped huge financial advantage from his loyalty to the formerly despised artistic genius, who was now being credited with the most beautiful and profound expressions of the anti-materialist longings of that contradictory age. Those rewards can only have increased once Burne-Jones became an establishment figure with a peerage in England and the Legion d’Honneur in France.
Fig. 80. Robert Bateman, Little Red Riding Hood, 1866, watercolour, private collection.
Fig. 81. Katherine Graham’s writing on the reverse confirms that the painting had belonged to her.
This transformation of his earning power must have lain at the heart of Robert and Caroline’s ability to establish themselves in the comfort of Benthall Hall. In these circumstances, it is difficult to understand his decision to stop exhibiting, which meant forfeiting the income that had underpinned the move. However, this is less strange than it appears, for two important reasons.
First, the opening of the New Gallery in 1888 was deliberately intended to supplant the Grosvenor Gallery, which had got into serious financial difficulties after the collapse of the marriage of its founder, Sir Coutts Lindsay, and his wealthy wife Blanche. She withdrew her financial support for the venture after separating from her husband. Sir Coutts’s subsequent commercialisation of the Gallery had upset not only many of the leading exhibitors, but his two co-directors, Charles Halle and Comyns Carr. The dispute eventually became public knowledge after Halle and Carr published their differences with Sir Coutts Lindsay in The Times on 2 November 1887. They resigned in order to found the New Gallery, which opened the following year, taking Burne-Jones and many of the leading artists with them. The rupture was bitter and artists were forced to take sides.
This presented Robert and Caroline with a dilemma. Her cousin, Harriet, was married to Sir Coutts Lindsay’s brother Lord Wantage. So, as family, it was virtually impossible for them to defect to the New Gallery, even after the closure of the Grosvenor in 1890. At the very least, they needed to let a year or two elapse before disloyally patronising Halle and Carr’s institution, the opening of which had led directly to the Grosvenor’s collapse. This, in itself, might have proved no more than a temporary difficulty had it not been for a far more important, but initially almost imperceptible, change in taste, deep in the bedrock of artistic criticism and evaluation. A new movement emerged that sought to capture the fleeting vividness of immediate first-hand experience. By its very nature it had no place for indirect sources of inspiration such as legends, myths and poems. This new art had its genesis in France and soon became known as Impressionism.
The speed with which Impressionism supplanted the taste for even the most venerated British artists was extraordinary. Burne-Jones, for example, despite the huge sum his Beguiling of Merlin had commanded in 1892, found his work being returned unsold from the major galleries by 1895. From then on the decline gathered momentum so that by 1898, the last year of his life, he was recorded complaining to Thomas Rooke, his studio assistant:
This is the third year now that my things haven’t sold. We shall have to finish Avalon [The Sleep of King Arthur] and Car of Love without any expectation of selling them.
He was utterly baffled that the critics ascribed greater significance to what he saw as semi-abstracted, superficial sketches than to his refined, mystical images. The exquisitely finished surface texture of his work was specifically contrived to entrance the viewer and stimulate a contemplative response, challenging the banality and ugliness of the work-a-day Victorian world. His wife Georgina wrote after his death:
The doctrine of the excellence of unfinished work was necessarily repugnant to Edward, who was at first incredulous as to its being seriously held by anyone; but as what is called the ‘Impressionist’ school gained ground it became one of the most disheartening thoughts of his life.
How Robert Bateman must have shared and identified with this bewildered anguish. Within a period of three or four years, the artistic ideals to which he had dedicated his creative energy all his life were increasingly ridiculed as representing a parochial byway, doomed to extinction, while the central tradition of painting thrust exuberantly forward into its modernist future. Little wonder that he withdrew into the sanctuary of his tranquil life at Benthall Hall with Caroline, and ceased even to identify himself as an artist. To do so would have exposed him to incomprehensible disputes with galleries and art critics who regarded his work as irrelevant.
The secret of how Robert made the financial transition from working artist to gentleman of private means lay in the years that preceded the reversal of taste that overtook the art world between 1890 and 1910. Although Burne-Jones had lived to see the ignominy of his work returning unsold, he none the less died an extremely wealthy man, worth £53,493 9s 7d (equal to some £5.5 million in present values). He had earned steadily all his working life through his designs for Morris & Co. as well as his painting, yet this had provided only enough for him to live a comfortable middle-class life, until his dramatic explosion into the fashionable art world at the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877.
After he established himself at the Grosvenor in 1881, Robert must have shared in the demand for evocative, quasi-mystical, romantic pictures and the high prices they commanded. Of course, neither his celebrity nor his output were comparable to Burne-Jones’s, but once Robert got important work exhibited alongside him and the other leading figures at the Grosvenor, he would have begun to benefit by association. If over a period of about fifteen years Burne-Jones became, in present values, a multi-millionaire, it seems highly likely that Robert acquired enough money to take a lease on a rural manor house and invest sufficient capital to live quietly off the income for many years.
If one adds to this the remnants of Caroline’s inheritance from Charles Wilbraham and some allowance from her family, the possibility of sustaining an upper-class lifestyle over several years seems highly plausible. Despite this, we were curious to know whether Caroline or Robert had been helped by either of their families to acquire Benthall Hall, or sustain their life there, after Robert had ceased to exhibit as a professional artist.
The 8th Earl of Carlisle died on 23 March 1889, the year before Robert and Caroline moved to Benthall. He was an elderly bachelor with no direct descendents. We wondered if he had made bequests to the Dean’s children, his first cousins, after the title and great estates had passed to his only nephew, George Howard. However, when we researched his affairs there was no mention of Caroline. We wondered if the death of Robert’s father James in 1897 had brought him an inheritance. We bought a copy of James’s will from the probate office and were shocked when we received it. The whole document consisted of a single short paragraph which made no reference to any of his four children or his grandchildren or wider family. It simply left everything to his second wife (his first wife’s former lady’s maid) and appointed her sole executrix. In view of the vast fortune that James Bateman had been bequeathed by his father and grandfather, his will is worth quoting in full:
The will of me, James Bateman, of Worthing, Esquire. I give and bequeath to my wife, Ann Bateman, all my furniture and articles of household or personal use and ornaments, together with all my money and all my personal estate and effects whatsoever and I appoint her Executrix of my will in witness whereof I hereto set my hand this thirteenth day of April One Thousand Eight Hundred and Ninety Six.
The accompanying sheet recording his death on 27 November 1897, and registering the granting of probate on 23 February 1898, completed the tragic story of James Bateman’s decline. At the foot of the page against a section reading ‘Gross value of Personal Estate’, it records the figure of £273 18s 11d. Immediately below this, the space designated ‘Net value of Personal Estate’ had the printed ‘£’ sign crossed out and the single word ‘Nil’ written in ink.
That terse word confirmed the collapse of the fortunes of the Bateman family. It finally exposed the fallacy that Robert Bateman was a gifted artistic dabbler with a secure social position underpinned by his family’s huge wealth in mineral extraction, industrial production and landholdings. His father’s will made clear that if Robert had married a glamorous figure from the heart of the aristocratic establishment and settled down to a contented life in a sublime English manor house as a country gentleman of private means, he had done so without the support of his progressively impoverished parents. They had been unable to make any contribution to his prosperity, even after their deaths.
Our quest to rescue from obscurity every retrievable fact about the life and work of Robert Bateman, the elusive Pre-Raphaelite artist we had unearthed deep within the historical records of our derelict home, seemed to be coming to its natural conclusion. Despite the implacable forces that were to condemn his work to obscurity, so that not a single painting by him was known to exist by the middle of the twentieth century, the continuance of his happy marriage and his contented adjustment into the role of comfortable country gentleman signalled the end of the dynamic conflicts of his early life and the beginning of the ‘happy ever after‘ phase that defines the end of so many good stories.
Only two areas of Robert’s story remained to be followed up. The first was to visit Robert and Caroline’s last home at Nunney in Somerset, and the second was to make a concerted effort to see if we could discover the whereabouts of any of the lost paintings and drawings, particularly the ones that had remained with him to the end of his life and may have been passed down privately within his or Caroline’s families.
