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| J.W. Godward: the Eclipse of Classicism, by Vern Grosvenor Swanson, Phd |
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It's what he did best. Art is a jealous master, it saturated his life to the exclusion of avocations, friends and family. Did this obsession make him a better person? No, but it made him both a better and worse artist. Better because he gave all he had to it, worse because he closed-off life from his life, and art ultimately springs from experience. For three-quarters of a century he has received little credit for his accomplishments because they ultimately looked backward not forward. With Godward's Greco-Romans, as with the Pre-Raphaelite's- Medieval Romanticists, art looked back to another time and place. In the face of something truly new, backward glances could hardly be taken seriously. John Christian spoke eloquently to the clash of tradition and modernism:
It is doubtful that Godward had much influence from the continental school of French classicists known as néo-Grecs. They had first drawn attention in England the year after Godward's birth at the International Exhibition in London. Work by Gustave Boulanger and Jean-Léon Gérôme were just beginning to come under the spell of Pompeii, then being excavated by the Resirgimento. Tadema too was drawn in 1863 to Pompeii as were innumerable European painters, including Godward. Pompeii, it could be argued destroyed one paradigm but created another. Classicism would never be the same. It had fully moved from Neo-classicism to academic bourgeois classicism by the mid 1860's. Often Godward is cited as a 'Frederic Lord Leighton devotee', which comparison, as with Tadema goes only so far. He did not attempt to paint in the "grand manner" of Leighton's "high art." Though he was more formally classic than most painters of his day he eschewed the great themes of Classicism. Rather his work pursued a strain of the "touch of languor" or dolce far niente trend of indolent ladies common in his day. Godward was not an Aesthetic Classicist like Joseph Albert Moore either, he was far too bourgeois for that. Unlike Leighton and Moore, Godward painted more with his brush than with his brains. Though Alma-Tadema and Edward John Poynter were ready archetypes, Godward had many other models for escapism in the Victorian art world. These included the art of Wm. Reynolds-Stephens, Henry Ryland and George Lawrence Bulleid, though he pushed beyond those artists in terms of style and quality. Because his own style was distinctive enough to easily identify his work from his classical-subject contemporaries, his place in art history should be examined. Financially independent, Godward need not have painted in what seems today to be a commercially dependent manner. What he painted was directly from his soul, not something which would cowtow to the critics or pander to the public. In this Godward was not a Philistine, he didn't need the money and didn't want the praise. Godward's art was more sedate than the high-action painters of the classical subject like Eduardo E. Forti. Neither was he interested in the atmospheric values of Solomon J. Solomon or Giulio Aristide Sartorio. Nor was his work fully l'art engage [art involved in life] in a contemporary sense. In this regard, under different cultural circumstances he might have made a fine Minimalist or formal abstractionist in the 1960's or 70's. He was an anxious seeker after a classical-subject and style of painting during the mid 1880's when he was only in his twenties. Other artists did as well, during a period in which it was still an acceptable mode of expression. Some artists were able to change or expand their oeuvre beyond classical themes in the 1890's and beyond, when it became increasingly unpopular. But Godward was unable to do so. Unlike Bulleid he was stuck. Noted in the coroner's inquest report, was the diagnosis that Godward suffered from melancholia. Yet his brooding sense of disquiet never seems to pervade his canvases. Moodiness simply was not conveyed in a detectable manner. Yet one wishes that his troubled spirit would unequivocally erupt upon his canvases. But that would be too assertive for an ego which he desperately wished to mask. What we are left with is an artist who fashioned exquisite pictures inhabited by beautiful women. Whatever personal faults or traits he exhibited were extraneous to what his art had to say through his painting. His positive personality traits somehow created wonderful magic in his art without further implications. And we are the beneficiaries of this exceptional art imbued with poetic intensity. Understandably his oeuvre is the most important tool in appreciating the artist and the nature of late classical-subject in English painting. A separate genre called "Beauties," prizing female comeliness, was embedded deeply across the broad spectrum of 19th century European art. The classical side of "Beauties" painting was also popular A genius for titillation, Godward could be ranked among the best practitioners of this genre which includes such fashionable artists as; Gustave Jacquet, J. J. Tissot, Eugene de Blaas and Madrazo. These "agreeably wicked" virgins were painted for the public's delectation. During the 20th century "Beauties" genre lost its popularity to photography. Militant feminism has condemned defining women's character by their sexual nature. Thus such depiction of young females has become fallacious in contemporary society, tantamount to "bimbo painting." Of course, this has nothing to do with Godward's talent, only his artistic credibility amongst contemporary politically-correct art historians and critics. This homage to feminine beauty was not meant to be merely petitions to flattery or even feminine portraiture but rather to 'gladden the eye' of the beholder. "Beauties" painting sought to exalt women as the embodiment of mythic perfection. In his own way Godward found his personal nurturing Freudian madonna. But Kestner fails to see this, when he wrote, "Viewers are given no suggestion of deeper implication; instead, women have been reduced to ciphers, their mythological potential exhausted."303 Quite the opposite is true. That his beauties exhibit no frivolous ephemerality or painful angst does not intimate they are mere mannequins in the guise of warm sumptuous bodies. His maidens often engage the spectator's consciousness through tender glances creating a psychological transcendentalism. That they are elevated in decorum does not render them incapable of compassion. In Godward's case, they somehow rested the soul of the artist himself. What we have in Godward's art is a fond desire to create an Elysian or halcyon world of beautiful unblemished women bathed in crystalline sunshine. No femme fatales nor harpies populate his "make believe" world. They were not atavistic, bestial or tellurian. Neither were his gentle, sweet beauties merely "Keepsake" ornaments or coy vixens. Godward's women have an inner strength lacking in the bon bon paintings of E. E. Semenowsky, Emile Vernon and Hans Zatska. Contrary to popular perception, Godward's women are not sentimentally anecdotal, like those of Prescott Davies or Herbert Schmaltz. Reserved, uncritical and discreet in demeanor his Patrician maidens seldom disturb their serene environment. Most of his models pose in a passive, compliant, self-sacrificing manner. They tended to be luxurious in their feminine endowments though platonic with every suitor.304 On the other hand, far from being frozen, expressionless and emotionless goddesses, they were open, sensual, innocent, youthful and above all - empathetic. From the 1870's onward into the new century, the Pall-Mall Gazette held exhibitions on "types of beauty" of which Godward was never invited to participate. Noted artists such as Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Waterhouse, Millet and Marcus Stone, participated without Godward even though he would have been a premier artist in this genre. Kestner overstates, that Henry Ryland had capitulated to this "beauty" market in his work as:
He was not, nor cared to be, a painter concerned with the metaphysical questions of mankind or the aesthetic journalism of his day. It has been said that "No beauty can exist without a tinge of melancholia." Godward's remarkably beautiful paintings are informed by his own personal afflicted soul. They were his anodyne. They seem to explore the expressive possibilities of a limited compositional format in much the same way as Joseph Albers' "Homage to a Square" did in Modernist vernacular. Yet it is reasonable to say that Albers' and Godward's oeuvre was more than just about squares and classical women basking on marble benches. In Godward we have no lofty pretensions, no moral and no assertive erudition. What for others might be a fanciful daydream, for Godward was the raisonne d'etre for his very existence. To others his vision may seem a sham or pretense but for Godward it was the very foundation for his being. Long misunderstood by many as a purveyor of prurient "soft porn" seduction, his art has been much maligned. "There can be not doubt," writes Hook and Poltimore: Like the nude in classical tunic, Godward's beauties had a veneer of respectability because of their ancient attire. They did not scandalize the Victorians, yet if they had been in contemporary rather than classical garb it would have been attacked as a moral outrage. The same lack of understanding is laid upon Godward's 1904 oil of Dolce Far Niente, now owned by Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber, by the Daily Telegraph: But beautiful women were not the only subject-matter concerns that visualized his art. The best elements of his paintings were usually the accessories, including drapery, flowers, fur and marble. These echoes of real life are the most convincing. In this we see the same criticism faced by Alma-Tadema after his 1882 Winter Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery. Tadema was strongly taken to task for his making the least important and inanimate object the most lifelike. We are not usually attracted by Godward's figurative detail. While his faces are usually painted with great consideration, the hands and feet in his pictures are often given short shrift. He paints playful kittens with tenderness but seldom employees them in his pictures. Broadening the range of subjects would have enlivened and enriched his canvases immeasurably. But he continued to paint the "same old, same old" instead of introducing more elements beyond peacock fans, flowers, variegated marbles, etc. However, in the Warhol era of art as a "reproducible item," Godward's narrow subject choices should not bring too much criticism. Godward's incessant replication of "Roman maidens basking on the marble benches" almost guarantee success with each picture. That he seems to paint the same picture over and over again is both a strength and a weakness of his art. Kestner sees it as the source of negative criticism of the artist, "This dismissal is the result of repetition of motifs."308 However, like many of the Greco-Roman subject artists of his day, Godward employed a strategy which balanced variation with predictability. Thus his art was a combination of immediately recognizable formal elements abstracted into a unique example. Paintings typical of its category had a built-in audience who were captivated by their beauty and comfortable with their escapist nature. William Sommerset Maugham was reported to have said, "Only the mediocre are always at their best." There are very few "bad Godwards" as the indictment goes. This genre may well have been invented by Alma-Tadema, but it was thoroughly exhausted by Godward. While his range was limited, Godward took it to great lengths, though sadly not to great depths. He figures as a petit maitre very much like the seventeenth century Dutch painters who choose to paint a single subject. Willem Kalf painted orange peels, Gerard TerBorch painted silk, Jan Van Huysum painted flowers and Adrian Brouwer painted taverns, etc. Godward, too, choose to paint a single subject and thus he became the quintessential 'Classical Beauties' painter. Some believe that in the depiction of marble and flowers he may have surpassed Tadema. And in drapery he superseded Lord Leighton himself. While this may be true in a distinct pictorial sense, in the tout ensemble Godward fails to thoroughly nourish as a painter nor satisfy as a great artist. Sustenance, however, is garnered from the beauty, peace and femininity of his art. Historiographically he is a "Little Master" whose reputation is not compromised by his art. While Godward was indebted to Alma-Tadema he had quite an original aesthetic direction. Other artists did, in fact, imitate him, undoubtedly attracted by his technical skills, singular vision and salable solution. As Tadema once said to a man who criticized William Quiller-Orchardson for copying Sir Lawrence, "Those who follow shall see nothing but the master's back." 309 Usually the acquisition of clones establishes an artist as the leader of a school. Unfortunately for Godward, the Classical school was about to close. | |
  Jean-Léon Gérôme Anacréon, Bacchus and Cupid Oil on canvas, 1848 134 x 203 cm Musée des Augustins, Toulouse               William Quiller-Orchardson On Board HMS Bellerophon Oil on canvas, 1880 164.9 x 248.6 cm Tate Gallery | |
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The above eulogy may lead one to believe that Godward was a great painter. He was not. He never achieved the breathtaking perfection of finish of work by William Adolphe Bouguereau, nor the monumental power of Lord Leighton, or expressiveness of pigment that Jules Bastian-LePage created. Godward developed a strategy of academic painting short-hand which would allow him to be prolific, while seeming to be fully finished. The executive finish and pigmentation was more implied than applied, mere surface manipulation, with its ensuing poverty of surface. Godward's oil An Offering to the Gods of 1894 is only known through a letter from the artist's dealer, Thomas McLean. He notes that the painting was purchased from Godward for £80.310 While not a bad price, this is considerably less than what Alma-Tadema would receive even for a small drawing. Then again, Godward produced more in his oeuvre than Tadema. The higher numbers of pictures led to a certain aesthetic cost accounting. While the central details are usually painted beyond reproach, subtleties such as fingers and toes, and distant temples seem awkward and amateurish. While it was written of an earlier painting, Oman Jean's words still rang true: The question of how Godward created his pictures is difficult to fully assess. Unlike the slightly earlier Olympian classicists, such as Alma-Tadema and Leighton, we do not possess any large-scale unfinished works. Thus we are unable to see the process of his painting. These would have given us insight into the manner of John William's painting techniques. The author possesses an unfinished small landscape study which might offer a clue in this respect. The picture is an Italian scene with a red flowering almond tree. The trunk of one tree is unfinished with the white ground showing, while the rest of the picture is loosely complete. It is difficult to ascertain his working method from this example, except to say that he probably did very little preliminary drawing in charcoal or pencil. Before the picture was cleaned some graphite marks were visible proving that he quickly sketched the basic design. He also did not draw strongly with the brush in dark pigment either. It's as if the painting was nearly completed in one area before the artist moves on to the next. Thus blank white areas exist, side by side, with areas which are relatively complete. Its like an artist starting at the upper left portion of the canvas and working down to the lower right, except in this case it would be in discreet areas throughout the canvas surface. Godward's paintings are finished along the way, rather than being kept in a state of general flux as long as possible. His paintings are realized quite early and then finished-up with very few corrections. There are few "happy accidents" in his work, but each brush stroke was calculated to finish the painting, not necessarily to enrich it. There was little of the torrent and tempest of "fine frenzy" of artistic passion found in many of his contemporaries. This would be a death-knell to most artists, but Godward's consummate skill was able to overcome the poverty of his working method, though not quell invidious reproach. The process of creating a Godward picture begins with a number of pencil drawings in a sketch-pad, directly from the living model. They pose in various ways and the artists draws them in the quickest of manners, usually in a contour line drawing. Later Godward would pick and choose which poses he believes have the most potential. Then in the same sketch-book he would do a more 'finished' drawing, which is to say, he would draw the picture within a sketched-in framed border as closely to the final conception as possible. Two small 4 by 7 inch sketch books have survived, dating from 1904-05 and the other from 1912-13. These demonstrate the two kinds of drawing that Godward did. In both instances neither type of drawing could be considered very detailed or calculated to impress the viewer. Rather they have a certain, work-a-day quality to them. It is probably certain that this is the artist's working method through most of his career, for he notes in one sketch-pad, to refer to an 1889 drawing he has. John William then does an oil study on wood panel, usually between 4 to 6 inches or 8 to 10 inches in size. These would roughly reflect the size of his sketch-pad. These were fully conceived from a living model, but still remain imprecise and quite brushy. It is assumed that by 1890 Godward painted oil studies for all his major compositions.312 These would not be changed drastically when doing the final oil painting. Usually only a prop here-and-there would be altered. The finished oil would be painted from life as well, using the oil study as a guide for posing a live model. The chef d'oeuvre would not be a slavish copy of the oil sketch, but rather a fresh work closely along the lines of the study. Because his canvases usually dealt with a single figure changes in composition were seldom necessary. Usually changes would be made only to some architectural detail, prop or gown. By working directly from a live female model, dressed and posed in accordance with the planned study, all Godward needed to do was to paint as sensitively as he could the subject before him. This was a straight forward method, almost a still-life painting strategy. He carefully 'worked' each area of his canvas. He did not work au premier coup but rather more tediously. It did, however, offer him the fullest opportunity to paint the interplay and subtleties of colour, form and light, shape and design for which we best know him. Again in a Joseph Albers, "variations off a theme" mentality, Godward presented a limited set of options and exacted from them the maximum amount of nuance and inventiveness. Godward was one of the pettie maistres of drapery painting. He worked from the living model, dressing and posing her in the manner he wished to depict the figure. He is known to have been strenuous on his models. This might have meant that they were required to posed at long intervals. This would allow the folds of drapery to drop into hollow curves with the most sensuous result. Like Ryland, Godward adopted Alma-Tadema's and later Lord Leighton's drapery strategy of using thin fabric and "twisting them into a sort of rope, which gives the textile a number of minute folds, thus breaking up the surfact pleasantly and yet not destryoing the breadth of design."313 This approach was first used by Tadema while he worked with the fabric designers at Liberty's of London. When painting the figure, especially diaphanously dressed women, he would first paint the nude form beneath. It would not be a highly finished nude but rather vaguely painted, then allowed to dry thoroughly. At this point, in a technique all his own, Godward would drag thinned paint across the female form with a stiffened or hardened bristle brush. The Artist magazine of June 1900 notes, "Mr. Godward's large nude, The Toilet is destined for the New Gallery." Yet we see that while the painting has shear transparent coa vestis drapery, it is not fully nude. The Artist then illustrates a nude study for the painting which reveals that Godward probably intended it to be a nude in the first place but changed his mind. It might also be an indication of Godward's modus operandi of painting the figure nude then covering her with a chiffon garment. He would then paint, in a squeegee manner undoubtedly learned from his knowledge of graining, the drapery on the figure. This allowed some places to receive thicker opaque pigmentation and other places a thinner more transparent layer. Perhaps his brush was "pinked" or combed to allow for various amounts of pigmentation. The result was a marvelously fresh, with delicate and detailed rendering of drapery, ingeniously all Godward. Godward's personal contribution to the art of painting would lay in this technical advancement. While building on the merits of other artists, in this one area he contributed something new to his craft. Though a small step and one not followed-up upon by his peers or successors, nevertheless it was distinctive enough to separate him from his progenators. The brand names of Godward's paints, thinners and mediums are unknown, though Windsor-Newton products were popular in that day and a number of his canvases have this imprint on them. His pigmentation is generally thin, without much impasto build-up. It was usually applied in a shorthand style indicative of illustrators. For this reason his paintings tend to last the ravages of time very well. Instead of enriching his paint surfaces, Godward's pigmentation sometimes seems stingy and under-nourished. If his pigment were thicker, richer and less formulaic, perhaps his place in art historical criticism would certainly be upgraded. His surfaces cannot withstand close scrutiny like those of his contemporaries such as John William Waterhouse, Herbert Draper and Sir Frank Dicksee. The distinct possibility that Godward was self-taught or studied on an informal basis rests in the type and quality of his drawings and pigmentation. His draftsmanship does not have the fluidity typical of those artists receiving full academic training. In the drawings remaining to us, stiff outline contours remain just above the "tracing" memorandum level. This is typical in self-taught artists who were not obliged to draw precisely, then from the plaster cast, or dash-off innumerable gesture studies, then execute highly finished drawings from the live model. Godward's later pigmentation betrays an isolated artist not entirely familiar with more painterly art trends of his day. Though his later brush-work would display a deft touch of paint handling, the pigment itself never succeeded beyond the mere rendering or marble graining level. His marbling techniques created with a bristle fitch or angled cutter brush were remarkable but under-nourishing. He was an artist who came to his painting style early and then, while growing subtly within his craft, never deviated from his youthful manner.314 Again, the lack of concern for process and medium are attributes more typical of artists receiving little professional training or of commercially taught artists. These conspired to place him on the 'lesser' road, thus limiting his reputation but not our appreciation. | |
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