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 he serene beauty and astonishing technical execution of John William Godward's paintings contradict the fact that this important artist has received virtually no critical acclaim or art historical recognition. Melancholy, kindly, reclusive, handsome, talented and shy, John William Godward's life is a mystery, a censored book, self-protected and sealed by his family. Unlike the great Olympian classicists before him, he preferred anonymity and privacy.1
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Godward became the climactic figure of English classical subject painting as this genre shriveled under the destructive blaze of the 20th Century avant-garde. He was the best of the last of the great European painters to straightforwardly portray classical Greece and Rome. Herein lies his significance to art history. With him and his colleagues, we see the nightfall of 500 years of classical subject painting in Western art.
In Godward's work we see the final summation of half a millennium of classical antique influence on Western painting. Next to Christianity it was by far the greatest outside influence on European painting. It vanished during Godward's generation - killed by contemporary nihilistic philosophies.
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While pointed references to classicism continued, even unto today, the idealistic rhetoric accompanying it has died. During a period of rapidly declining interest in Greco-Roman antiquity, artists from the 19th Century courageously continued against all odds in this field for the first third of the 20th Century.
Godward was one of the greatest practitioners of the classical ideal. His art represents the summation of this incredibly important paradigm; a microcosm for all classicists during a period aptly called "the twilight of the gods." It was lost in the hostile environment of the early 20th Century.
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This neglect has continued until now, when private collectors have begun to include him in their collections at prices rivaling those of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Art historians are now beginning to reevaluate upward both Godward and his post-Olympian contemporaries.
The reason for this upsurge in appreciation is the realization that the quality of his work compares favorably with other late 19th and early 20th Century painters. Over a remarkably consistent career of almost 40 years, he had created a vital niche for his art.
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Since he is often dismissed by biased modernists as an Alma-Tadema clone, a "too late" classicist, a "potboiler" or merely the painter of an insipid world of languorous women on marble benches, no serious study of his art has been undertaken. All of these judgments, in the light of historical distance, can be seen as unjustly prejudiced. And because we are a society that honors "firsts" rather than "lasts," few art historians have examined the demise of classical-subject painting, of which Godward is the chief exemplar. To date no more than four paragraphs have been published on this artist. This article will rectify that by introducing Godward to a larger audience.
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John William Godward
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The artist was born into the most boringly respectable family of insurance and bank clerks. Godward's personal life, by artistic standards, seems equally sedate. The eldest of the five children of John and Sarah Godward, he was born on the 9th of August in 1861 in Battersea on the Thames. During his youth, the family moved across the river to Fulham in Chelsea, and finally to Wimbeldon in Surrey just south of London.
Destined by his authoritarian parents to become an insurance clerk, Godward escaped by taking architectural rendering classes from W.H. Wontner, and perhaps a few night classes from local art schools. Wontner's son, William Clarke Wontner (1857-1930), a few years older than Godward and further along in his artistic career, also mentored the young man. Later, however, Godward would reciprocate by being a major influence on Wontner's art.
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In 1887 the artist had progressed far enough to exhibit at the Royal Academy. That year he moved from his parents' house to live and work at the Bolton Studios in Chelsea. There he worked with Thomas Kennington, Henry Ryland, George Lawrence Bullied and others who often painted classical subjects. By 1891 he had his own studio at St. Leonard's Studio. Then in 1895 he purchased a larger estate at No. 410 Fulham Road.
Godward became a short-lived member of the Royal Institute of British Artists during James McNeill Whistler's presidency. He participated in exhibitions at the Royal Academy until 1905 and the New Gallery until 1908. He then completely dropped out of English society for the rest of his life. Godward's family felt that his career was a spot on the family's reputation. He was sustained in his career by a powerful art dealing firm, Messrs. Thomas McLean of Haymarket Street and by their successors, Messrs. Eugene Cremetti.
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In Godward's work we see the final summation of half a millennium of classical antique influence on Western painting.
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Throughout his career, Godward's paintings typically portrayed beautiful Greek or Roman maidens in diaphanous tunics against a marble background. Often a blue sky and sea, violet mountains, green poplar trees and red oleander or flowering almond blossoms added more color to his already vivid but harmonious paintings.
But as Godward's art matured, the taste for such works was slowly dying. Already shy and quiet by nature, he became increasingly withdrawn from society as his art fell out of fashion. He traveled to Italy in 1904 and by 1912 moved permanently. The family believed he was lured there by an Italian model he often used in his paintings.
"Running off" with his model shocked the family, who had never really forgiven him for becoming an artist in the first place and for painting nudes in the second.
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He could see that modernism had already infiltrated the London art scene and that Rome was more conducive to his work.
Once in Rome he took a studio at the Villa Strohl-Fern near the Gardens of the Villa Borghese. In these exclusive studios he painted many of his finer pictures. The war years were spent in Italy, and he did not return to London until 1920. His health began to fail and his affliction of post-influenza, melancholia, insomnia and dyspepsia got much worse. He returned to his home at No. 410 Fulham Road and moved into the garden studio, since his brother Charles Arthur had been living in the main house.
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John William Godward
A Red, Red Rose
1920, oil on canvas,
52 x 29 inches
John William Godward
Souvenir
1920, oil on canvas,
35 x 47 inches
John William Godward
A Quiet Pet
1906, oil on canvas,
20 x 30 inches
John William Godward
On the Balcony
1911, oil on canvas,
32 x 16 inches
John William Godward
'With Violets Wreathed and Robe of Saffron Hue...'
1902
John William Godward
Ionian Dancing Girl
1902
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