John William Godward, R.B.A. 1861-1922

Possibly Blairmans, Manchester, c. 1916;
Private collection;
Bonhams, 17 November 2004, lot 153;
London, Richard Green;
Private collection

STRUCTURE This picture is unlined and in excellent original condition CATALOGUE COMPARISON The illustration is broadly representative PAINT SURFACE The surface is in excellent condition with clean bright colouring throughout. There are no signs of craquelure and the paint surface appears to be stable. The picture is ready to hang. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT Ulatrviolet light reveals an opaque varnish but no apparent signs of retouching or restoration. FRAME This picture is contained in an ornate plaster moulded frame.
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A young Grecian maid is leaning back in her chair to review a line drawing of a bronze statue of Jupiter that she has been endeavouring to portray on a small tablet. An abalone shell serving as an ink-well, is set aside on the marble table top beside her. The roses on the table and the bronze of a naked and muscular male figure suggest that the girl's mind may also be preoccupied with amorous thoughts. Her hair is bound into a chignon with ribbons and she is dressed in a rose coloured stola (the feminine form of the ancient Roman toga) fastened at the sleeves with pearl buttons and girt at the bust and shoulders with deep purple ties. Around her waist, her toga is drawn tight with a palla (Roman shawl) of a darker hue. 

John William Godward devoted his entire career to the depiction of feminine beauty, painting favourite models again and again, in exquisite studies of beauty and colour. His greatest talent was his skill at rendering textures and fabrics and his arrangement of beautiful forms to create an aesthetic ensemble. There is never any suggestion of threat or danger, or even any importance of narrative and in many ways Godward's work is similar to that of Albert Moore and James Abbot McNeil Whistler. Godward, Moore and Whistler shared an approach to art which, in the twentieth century became increasingly prevalent. Their work was essentially without narrative or dramatic charge, decorative and consciously devoid of any suggestion of movement or emotion. The women are always content, alluring and absorbed but what or who they dream of is not explained or important.

Godward was the son of an investment clerk and born into a  conservative and respectable family living in Battersea in London. His family were not supportive of his wish to become a painter but against their wishes he is believed to have studied 'rendering and graining' alongside fellow classicist William Clarke Wontner, probably learning to paint fake marble for fireplaces and furniture. Details of more formal artistic training have not been found but it is likely that he was a student at one of the many art schools in London, or possibly in Europe. In 1887 Godward had a picture accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time, a painting intitled The Yellow Turban. It was around this time that he began renting one of the Bolton Studios in Kensington in the heart of the London artist community. Godward continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy for almost two decades but by 1905 he felt that his style of painting was no longer receiving critical acclaim and he ceased to exhibit and sold his pictures through an agent and various art dealers. Despite his withdrawal from the public eye Godward enjoyed commercial success during his lifetime and the fact that he did not have to paint to please critics and the hanging committees of art galleries meant that he was able to paint what he wanted; the lovely ladies in roman garb surrounded by beautiful objects and flowers. 

In his study of Victorian painters of classical subjects Christopher Wood described Godward's career; '... the best, and the most serious of Alma-Tadema's followers was John William Godward... All his life he devoted himself only to classical subjects, invariably involving girls in classical robes on marble terraces, but painted with a degree of technical mastery that almost rivals that of Alma-Tadema. Godward was also an admirer of Lord Leighton, and his figures do sometimes achieve a monumentality lacking in the work of most of Alma-Tademas followers.' (Chrsitopher Wood, Olympian Dreamers, Victorian Classical Painters 1860-1914, 1983, p.247) Godward's admiration of Leighton is proved by a photograph of a model in his studio standing before a fireplace behind which is a large framed print of Leighton's famous The Garden of the Hesperides in which the female figures have a similar heavy langour to the maidens painted by Godward. Another modern writer has recognised the influence of Leighton in Godward's work; 'Godward's treatment of women is completely decorative. The drapery of Leighton, the slightly monumental cast of the figures, is used for decorative purposes.' (Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny, The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting, 1989, p. 338 

An Amateur was not known when Vern Swanson wrote his book on Godward and was an important rediscovery when it came to light recently. Godward must have been pleased with this painting as he adopted a similar format a year later when he painted The Time of Roses which depicts the same model seated on the same chair bedecked with a leopard-skin and dressed in the same robes. This painting is circular and the details are altered but the composition is fundamentally the same. The style that Godward devised in the early 1880s, based upon the marble interiors of Alma-Tadema and the Aesthetic works of Albert Moore, differed little from the work he painted in his mature years. Thus the composition of An Amateur is not vastly different from Ianthe of 1888 (FIG. 1 sold in these rooms, 19 June 1984, lot 58). In his later art Godward favoured a more voluptuous type of model, chosen from the ranks of Italian professional models that were celebrated by his generation. These women add to the sensuality of the images, their warm luxurious flesh contrasting with the cool marble and bronze of the backgrounds. Although Godward's paintings are broadly similar to the pictures of Alma-Tadema and his followers, his women have the more voluptuous beauty of Lord Leighton's sibyls. Despite the influences that Godward no doubt absorbed, his art had a distinctive style of his own and though he was once regarded as little more than a follower of Tadema, a lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonne of his work and a wider understanding of his style has ensured that his place is now established as an artist of much merit. Godward's vision of the antique age was of a golden utopia, a world of marble palace terraces by the ocean where the sun is warm enough to persuade courtesans and priestesses to cast off their togas for bathing or walk with a musical instrument or a flower in their hand in diaphanous gowns, surrounded by flowers and azure water. His interiors bring to life the ruins of Pompeii with their cool marble walls and drapes richly embroidered with gold thread. Regrettably the perfect world that Godward created for his art was not matched by the world in which he lived and bouts of depression eventually led to the artist to take his own life.

The subject of a female artist creating an image of Classical male beauty is a reflection of the theme of Pygmalion, the artist who created a vision of womanhood that was brought to life by his desire for her. This subject was one that was depicted by many Victorian artists, including Ernest Normand (Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport) and Edward Burne-Jones who painted a series depicting the various episodes around 1878 (Birmingham City Art Gallery).

The bronze figure in An Amateur is based upon a 2nd century Roman copy after a Greek original, found by Albanian peasants at Labovo (modern Liboni) near Paramythia, Epirus in north-west Greece. It is likely that it was from a Roman household shrine and was discovered among several dozen other figures. The figure probably originally held a sceptre in his left hand and a thunderbolt in his right.  It was bequeathed to the British Museum in 1824 following the death of the numismatist and antiquary Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) who considered that the figure's anatomy was 'in perfect unison with the ideal grandeur and sublimity of the character.' Godward also admired the balance of this figure and may have owned a copy of the bronze, as the same figure appears again in 1916 when he painted Rich Gifts Wax Poor When Lovers are Unkind. As Godward was living in Rome from the summer of 1911 it is likely that the statue of Jupiter in An Amateur was based upon a modern copy.

An Amatuer was painted at Godward's studio at the Villa Strohl Fern in Rome. A story told within the Godward family explains his reason for quitting London and moving to Rome; 'He left in a rush, running off with his Italian model to Italy... His mother never forgave him for this breach of conduct. He shocked the family by living with his model.' (Vern Swanson, John William Godward, The Eclipse of Classicism, 1997, p. 96)