Our research into the work of Robert Bateman had left us with one nagging frustration. Nowhere had we uncovered even the vaguest hint or rumour about the fate of Robert’s most acclaimed painting Saul and The Witch of Endor – The Raising of Samuel which had been hanging in his studio at Nunney Delamere at the time of his death in 1922. The painting had caused a great stir when it was exhibited in 1879, as Walter Crane made clear in his Reminiscences:
His best known picture is perhaps ‘The Witch of Endor’ which was in the Royal Academy Exhibition. It is a very weird and powerful scene of ‘The Raising of Samuel’ and is worked out with extraordinary invention and detail.
Since precisely this combination of technical virtuosity and fertile invention had ensured the survival of several of Robert’s best paintings, we felt there was a realistic chance that we might track it down.
However, endless scrutiny of sales, auctions and documented private collections had failed to yield even a single lead. In an attempt to gain some idea of what we might be looking for, we decided to investigate the only solid fact available to us – the strange compound title and the Old Testament passage it related to. Saul’s consultation of the Witch of Endor is recorded in the 28th chapter of the 1st Book of Samuel. King Saul of Israel has drawn up his forces for battle, but is heavily outnumbered by his enemies, the Philistines:
When Saul saw the host of the Philistines, he was afraid, and his heart greatly trembled. And when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.
Then, said Saul unto his servants, seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit. And his servants said unto him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor.
The difficulty was that King Saul claimed not to believe in the power of ‘familiar spirits’ and had passed a law forbidding any consultation of the mediums who contacted them, condemning them as witches perpetuating superstitions incompatible with the worship of the Lord, the true God of Israel. However, the account makes clear that his abandonment of spiritualism is not sincere.
And Saul disguised himself, and put on other raiment, and he went, and two men with him, and they came to the woman by night, and he said, ‘I pray thee, divine unto me by the familiar spirit and bring him up, whom I shall name unto thee.’
And the woman said unto him, ‘Behold thou knowest what Saul has done, how he hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards out of the land. Wherefore then layest thou a snare for my life, to cause me to die?’
Then Saul swore to her by the Lord, saying, ‘As the Lord liveth, there shall no punishment happen to thee for this thing.’
Then said the woman, ‘Whom shall I bring up to thee?’
And he said, ‘Bring me Samuel.’
The moment Samuel appears, the woman demonstrates the extent of her second sight.
And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried out in a loud voice, and the woman spoke to Saul saying, ‘Why hast thou deceived me? For thou art Saul!’
The fact that the preamble Saul and the Witch of Endor is subservient to the main title The Raising of Samuel indicates that it is the psychic’s forbidden ability to restore life from beyond the grave that Robert intended to be the subject of the painting. There is an interesting parallel here with Robert’s treatment of The Pool of Bethesda. The story of the healing pool is included in the New Testament deliberately to contrast Christ’s healing power through faith with the ancient Jewish tradition of the troubled water, which had no theological validity. To omit Christ’s intervention was essentially to de-Christianise the story and give credence to the earlier superstition, a dangerously radical and unconventional approach to sacred texts in the 1870s.
Equally provocative was the selection of the raising of Samuel as a subject, since it challenged the unique attribute of Christ – his resurrection from death and his ability to confer immortality upon those who placed their faith in him. The Witch of Endor story had always been acknowledged as doctrinally deeply problematic in both the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, since the psychic medium consulted by Saul appears to have the power to resurrect Samuel through her relationship with a familiar spirit (a spirit guide from beyond the grave) without the intervention of either the Jewish god Yahweh or Jesus. What had made Robert deliberately select these highly contentious biblical subjects? Nothing we have discovered about his life – from his illustrations for The Latin Year, to his Chairmanship of the Bosely branch of the International Bible Society, and his lifelong relationship with Caroline, a devout believer – suggested he was a religious sceptic.
I suspect that Robert’s engagement with these accounts of para-normal happenings deliberately removed from their specifically religious context was part of the wider Pre-Raphaelite return to secular para-normal myths and legends used as allegories of intense personal experience. The Beguiling of Merlin, Phyllis and Demophoon, and the many mythical guises in which Rossetti portrayed Jane Morris are a few familiar instances of this practice.
Although until the picture is found it must remain pure speculation, it is tempting to see a relationship between the subject of the painting and Robert’s personal situation in the year it was conceived and painted. In 1879 Robert was in the fifth year of his reclusive life at Biddulph. Caroline had been married to Charles Wilbraham three years earlier and lived fifty miles away in Penckridge.
However, if our investigations are correct, a critical development had taken place in the middle of 1879 with the arrival back in England from India of Henry Burke. Robert could hardly have failed to meet the five-year-old boy who was ostensibly his nephew. How would Caroline have reacted to Henry’s return and the near certainty that Robert had seen him? Did the compulsion to have news of her child drive her to take the one step absolutely forbidden by everyone who had taken part in the plot to save her from disgrace – did she make contact with Robert, perhaps through an intermediary (the term ‘familiar spirit’ is derived from the Latin familiaris, ‘a trusted household servant’)? If so, did he perceive her message as an almost miraculous invocation from the one person with the power to release him from his desolate isolation and draw him back into the living world that had forgotten him?
Responding to that contact would have presented Robert with an agonising dilemma. He would have felt compelled to acknowledge the risks Caroline had taken and maintain communication. However, if through desperation he acted rashly, he risked destabilising her marriage and exposing the whole complex web of deception surrounding her pregnancy to outside scrutiny. This had the potential to condemn not only themselves and their families but, crucially, their son to lifelong disgrace and ostracism. We wondered if Robert had hidden his encoded reply within the subject and symbolism of Heloise and Abelard – the only other known painting executed by him in the critical year of 1879?
Not long after this tantalising possibility had occurred to us, we unexpectedly stumbled upon the title Saul and the Witch of Endor while following up chance information on another lost painting. In 2006 Yale University Press had published a comprehensive list of all the oil paintings by artists born before 1870 held in British and Irish public collections. We were told it listed a small Bateman painting, The Appleton Thorn, in a gallery in Warrington (fig. 121). When we visited the gallery to see it, the curator told us that the Yale volume listed a second Bateman, but he could not remember the title. We acquired a copy of the book and were stunned when we read the relevant entry:
Fig. 121. Robert Bateman, The Appleton Thorn, 1880, oil on panel, Warrington Museum and Art Gallery.
Stoke on Trent. The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Saul and the Witch of Endor. List 1997, inv no 151 1954.
The curator at the Stoke Museum at first confirmed that they had the painting, then rang back to say she had been mistaken and that their painting was not by Robert, but by a Samuel Bateman. We went to view it and, sure enough, it was by Samuel Bateman, an oil, approximately 3′ 6″ × 2′ 6″, of very mediocre quality, entitled On the Bosky Backwater (of the Thames near Henley). A little investigation soon established that Samuel Bateman had been employed as a scenery painter at the Theatre Royal in Hanley, which explained the presence of the painting at the Stoke Museum. It was clearly inscribed on the reverse with the title and a note confirming that it had ‘no Inventory Number’.
The Museum insisted that this was the only Bateman they held, and they considered the matter closed. We found this unconvincing, since neither the artist’s name, nor the title, nor the absence of an inventory number tallied with our information from an impeccable source.
So we decided to undertake a programme of extremely dull research through the minutes of the Council’s Libraries, Museums and Gymnasiums Committee for key years such as 1954 the (the inventory number date given by Yale), 1931–33 (when Nunney Delamere was sold and its contents dispersed) and 1922–3 (the time of Robert’s death). Unfortunately, we began with the 1950s and 1930s, so had almost lost the will to live by the time we discovered the following minute, No. 156, for the committee meeting of 2 October 1922:
The Chief Curator reported that by the Will of the late Mr R. Bateman a large picture had been left to the Corporation, and had been removed to the Hanley Museum upon instruction of the Mayor, Alderman Samuel Sproston.
It was Resolved – That the picture be accepted and that the thanks of the Committee be tendered to the Trustees of the deceased gentleman.
So Saul and The Witch of Endor had not been discarded or destroyed. It was willed to the Hanley Museum and Art Gallery in 1922, presumably as part of the private memorandum attached to Robert’s Will. It was clearly there in 1954 when it was re-inventorised under its original title and artist’s name.
Faced with this evidence, the museum surprisingly revealed that they knew it was a large painting and, in fact, had precise information about its size, which was 6′ 6″ × 5′. So clearly they must have known that the painting they had shown us, only a quarter of that size, was not Saul and the Witch of Endor by Robert Bateman.
We discovered that their handlist had the words ‘Longton Case’ beside the title, but no one knew the meaning or significance of this. We made a painstaking study of the movements of the paintings of the Hanley Museum since its demolition and the incorporation of its collection into the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in 1954. Eventually, the Potteries Museum allowed us to audit their handlist, card index and store. The word ‘Case’ was written on the complete batch of new cards issued in 1954 to cover the old Hanley Museum collection. A case number was then added by hand, unless the paintings were already on display elsewhere, in which case just the location was recorded. The most common sites were the five separate Town Halls that collectively made up the City of Stoke on Trent. On the cards these were indicated by a single word – e.g. Stoke, Hanley, Longton.
So Saul and the Witch of Endor had formed part of a collection of paintings in Longton Town Hall until Stoke City Council ordered its demolition in the 1970s. When work began and the roof had been removed, the population of Longton rebelled. They issued the City Council with a legal challenge, which forced them to abandon the demolition and restore the building to good repair. Once this work was complete, many of the portraits of local worthies were again required to grace the fabulously pompous entrance hall and staircase of the Town Hall. However, the huge reception room on the first floor, the Albert Hall, had by this time become a popular venue for pop concerts, etc. Vast Victorian paintings inspired by Old Testament reincarnations were not thought to contribute anything positive to the atmosphere of liberated youth culture that the organisers were after.
As far as we were able to discover, Robert’s painting languished in a council store in the basement of the old housing department until it was demolished. Since then, Saul and the Witch of Endor, along with a few other large subject paintings from the Town Halls, have been lost. Despite exhaustive research, we could find no official evidence of Robert’s painting being either sold or discarded, although instances of both these processes are recorded in the Council minutes.
We could not rid ourselves of the conviction that Saul and the Witch of Endor was leaning against the wall of a forgotten store room, along with an important group of interwar posters by Frank Brangwyn, which were also missing. So we persuaded the Stoke daily, The Sentinel, to publish a full-page article, illustrated by a Victorian photograph of Robert Bateman, describing our search for the lost painting.
At the end of the piece the paper gave our contact details and appealed for any information to be sent either to the paper or to us. We had a few responses, but nothing decisive. Then one evening, at about 6.30 p.m., I was finishing off in the office before joining Brian and some friends for a drink when the phone rang. I answered, and was met with a long silence.
Then a voice with a strong Stoke accent said, ‘You’re looking for a painting?’
I had been thinking of something else and did not instantly understand what he meant, and answered fatuously, ‘Am I?’
In the silence that followed I finally caught up and confirmed that I was indeed searching for a painting and quickly ran through the details.
After another silence, the voice said, ‘What’s in it?’
To my eternal shame I managed again to miss the point completely!
Of course, he wanted to know what reward he could expect for its return, so did not react favourably to my patient explanation that since the painting was lost we did not have any information about exactly what it portrayed, beyond the title.
During the next protracted silence I managed to summon up enough nous to say how anxious I and others were to trace the painting, and how valuable to us any information leading to its rediscovery would be. When he did not respond, I added that although the extent of our anxiety had not yet been quantified in pounds sterling, I felt certain that negotiation was likely to be eminently worth his while.
Then he said, ‘I’ve got a van.’
Again, I didn’t know how to respond. By now I was so agitated and terrified of messing up again that I remained silent until he said, ‘Do you know Chemical Lane, near Bradwall Wood?’
Of course I didn’t. I thought of saying yes and giving myself time to find out, but plumped instead for, ‘Not really, but I’m sure I could find it,’ in the hope that he might give clearer directions.
Our conversation drifted into yet another long silence, which I eventually broke by tentatively asking whether he intended to go there in his van. At this point he hung up.
I ran to find Brian, who remembered that Chemical Lane was on the northern outskirts of Stoke; we passed the end of it when we were heading for the M6. Forty minutes later we were there. The setting was like a cliché from a John Le Carré novel. Huge potholes filled with water, the railway line running down one side behind barbed-wire fencing, sporadic yellow lights, drab warehouses and seedy offices behind padlocked gates – all this combined to exude an Iron Curtain menace that really unnerved us.
The prospect of getting out of the car filled us with fear, but we did drive slowly up and down the whole length of the road four times. There were no vans, and only one man in overalls padlocking the gates of a transport depot. We decided against trying to engage him in a conversation about Pre-Raphaelite art.
The sad dénouement to this tale is that despite several further visits to Chemical Lane we have never heard from my friend on the telephone again. Whether anything will come of it only time will tell, but I do feel instinctively that the man I spoke to had some information about the picture, which suggests that it may have been spirited away rather than discarded during the chaotic destruction and rebuilding of Stoke on Trent in the late twentieth century. If this is true, I believe that Robert and Caroline will lead us to it, when the time is right.
