Alfred Sacheverell Coke

Sale: Christie's, London, 26 March 1982, lot 50

Sale: Christie's, London, 2 November 1990, lot 304

Private collection

Alfred Sacheverell Coke was one of the generation of young artists who were profoundly influenced by the flourishing of the Aesthetic movement of the 1860s led by Edward Burne-Jones, Albert Moore, Simeon Solomon, Edward Poynter, Lord Leighton and Gabriel Rossetti. Rather than being inspired by the pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy, these artists looked to the more revolutionary pictures shown at the Old Water-colour Society, the Dudley, Grosvenor and New Gallery – exhibition venues that encouraged a new taste for poetic, decorative pictures combining elements of Orientalism, Medievalism, Classicism and Aestheticism.

Coke’s work is very rare and large examples such as Peacocks are seldom sold at auction. An early watercolour dated 1869, Eros and Ganymede (Victoria & Albert Museum) demonstrates the influence of Burne-Jones and Solomon on Coke. Peacocks is more comparable with the work of Lord Leighton, who painted Girl Feeding Peacocks in 1862 (private collection) which may have inspired Coke’s picture. Leighton also painted peacock feathers in his famous painting Pavonia of 1856 (Christie's, London, 30 June 2016, lot 19).

The size and shape of Peacocks suggests that it might have been part of a decorative scheme for a fashionable interior. In the second half of the Nineteenth Century peafowl and their feathers became ubiquitous symbols for the Aesthetic Movement in paintings, ceramics, wallpapers, book illustrations and metalwork. The motif of peacocks was famously the inspiration for Whistler’s interior designed for the London home of the shipping magnate and art collector Frederick Leyland created three years after Coke's picture. The other two champions of Aesthetic design, Walter Crane and Albert Moore, also painted decorations prominently featuring peacocks. In the same year that Coke painted Peacocks, Moore painted a beautiful frieze of peacocks for the home of Mr A. F. Lehmann at 15 Berkeley Square in London. Crane used the peacock many times in his designs for wall-papers and fabrics, book illustrations and easel paintings - an example of the later which is similar in subject to the present picture is the small watercolour Bluebeard and Gloriana, Peacocks on the Terrace at Rode Hall, Cheshire painted two years earlier in 1871 (private collection). Coke and Crane collaborated on several projects, including a series of tableaux vivants presented in the 1880s. Crane wrote of Coke; 'Another comrade was A. Sacheverell Coke, whom in the opinion of one literary man, at least, has confided to me, was "the best of us" as an artist. He had much facility of design, and sought his subjects in classical mythology, mostly derived rather from the point of view of the early Venetian school as to treatment and colour. (An Artist's Reminiscences, London, 1907, p. 88).

There are subtle references to ancient Rome in Peacocks – the girl’s toga and the painted frescoes of depicting triremes. The peacocks themselves refer to the Goddess Juno, who took the thousand eyes of the giant Argus and made them into the feathers of the bird that was sacred to her and pulled her chariot across the sky.