(Illus. 1: Elgiva)
Becoming a PreRaphaelite and subsequently belonging to PreRaphaelitism was very much a question of connections - like many other things in Victorian society. The essential clich˜s of the history of PreRaphaelitism consist of so-and-so meeting up with somebody else, of this person coming into the orbit of that person. The resulting clique, vividly conjured up by Andrea Rose's 1981 book Pre-Raphaelite Portraits (1) is supposed to represent a coming together of like minds and the assertion of an aesthetic, if not an ideology, which stood out from mainstream mid-Victorian thinking about art. Social mobility, then, should be said to have been as crucial a factor as intellectual independence in the evolution of PreRaphaelitism. This is taken for granted where male artists are concerned, but it comes into focus when considering the women who took up PreRaphaelitism, for social mobility and intellectual independence were both issues for mid-Victorian women. When these issues and their relationship are recognized as fundamental to an artist's PreRaphaelitism, the women artists' generally oblique or modified attachment to the style is put into perspective.
For instance, it was a truism concerning women artists of the nineteenth century, that they were more often than not related to male artists, since access to the profession was a fundamental difficulty for aspiring women. (2) PreRaphaelitism's roll-call shows this generalisation at work: Rosa Brett's brother John was an artist; Joanna Mary Boyce's brother George became a landscape painter; Emma Sandys' father became an artist during her childhood, and her brother Frederick followed him into the profession; Lucy and Cathy Madox Brown were trained up into painting by their artist father; and Evelyn Pickering's uncle was an ardent amateur. (3) But these cases remind us of the danger of assuming that women artists who were related to men in the profession became artists because they were related to these men. For, while it would be reasonable to say that of Sandys or the Browns, it would be unjustifiable in the cases of Brett, Boyce and Pickering/DeMorgan. Further, some women in PreRaphaelitism disproved the generalization about family, coming to the style in a fashion similar to any of its male followers. Anna Blunden wrote to Ruskin for advice and encouragement; Anna Mary Howitt got to know the founding PreRaphaelites and Marie Spartali the second generation through their parents' cultural circles; Jemima Blackburn was introduced to PreRaphaelitism by Ruskin whom she met through their mutual friend Henry Acland.(4) These women's eventual careers and reputations, however, demonstrate vividly why assumptions about women artists' dependence on male relatives in the same line of business flourished not only in the Victorian period but persist today.
For a woman, becoming a PreRaphaelite was hedged about with questions of opportunity which were non-issues in the lives of creative men. If her family lived in the provinces, a woman was at the mercy of various forms of conventional oppression. Even if she lived in London, social mobility and intellectual sustenance might still be problems. The PreRaphaelite aesthetic's terms were a mixed blessing: while she might have been able to do without study from the life, she needed to get out into the realm of nature. There is one particularly vivid example among the women who belong in some way to PreRaphaelitism of the unrelenting intricacy of this female struggle for social mobility and intellectual independence. She is Joanna Mary Boyce later Wells (1831-61), whose life and works are accessible to us in vivid detail because the records of her short career have been treasured by her descendants. An examination of Boyce's life and work shows that for a woman to become a PreRaphaelite was a question less of aesthetics than of woman's access to social mobility and intellectual independence. (5)
Joanna Boyce was the third of five children in a middle-class London family. Her father, a wine-merchant in his early career, established himself during her childhood as a pawn-broker, making a comfortable living which continued to support the family beyond his death until the early 1880s. After showing early artistic promise, in the summer of 1849 she became a student at Cary's art school. Her brother George, five years her senior, was concurrently attending the Academy schools to train as a painter, having given up architectural studies after three years' articles, perhaps inspired by his younger sister's enthusiasm for painting. (6) Brother and sister were keen to get to know already established artists. William and Charles Frith were only two of several whom George had met through his studies: they came to see what the two apprentice artists had done in their summer holidays. Other new friends more portentous for the future were Thomas Seddon and the Rossetti brothers, William and Gabriel.
Some months into 1850, George fell ill and from June Joanna's lot was the stereotypical one of the dutiful woman, nursing him, at home and in the sea air of Hastings. Her daughter Alice later wrote about this unlooked-for hiatus in her art studies:'Joanna, seeing that her companionship was now [November] no longer required by her brother, whose new friendships with his reviving interests in life would fill any gap made by her own absence, felt herself free again to follow her own destiny. In mid November after five months of self negation she returned to her home and again took up her studies at Cary's...she had for five long months sacrificed her own ambitions to devote herself to his care and companionship'.
As an aspiring artist but an unmarried middle-class woman, Joanna Boyce at first found that opportunities to go beyond the domestic sphere tended to come through the men she knew. Another artist of George's acquaintance, portraitist Henry Wells, trying to ingratiate himself with Joanna, got her an entr˜e to the Baring collection in February 1851. (7) In May 1851, she would have needed George to attend a soir˜e at the home of the painters Edward Matthew and Henrietta Ward: where she may have met C.R. Leslie, William Frith, Edward Ansdell, Augustus Egg, Charles Landseer and Frank Stone. (8) On 19 December that year, her father took her to Turner's funeral; her diary calls the dead man 'England's greatest artist'. Mr Boyce took his daughter to exhibitions and lectures which propriety would have prevented her attending without a chaperone, enabling her to pursue an intense programme of self-improvement. She read earnestly, her notebooks from 1851 and 1852 including quotations from Ruskin, Byron, Chaucer, Coleridge and others, notes of what she was reading (Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, Macaulay) and of what she wished yet to read.
A new stage in Joanna Boyce's art education began in February 1852, when she started at Leigh's academy, attending at least three times a week. It was probably at this time, too, that she attended a series of lectures by John Marshall on the anatomy of the human form. Wells began to urge her to go and study in Paris, as he had done, (9) and in April she and her father did go to the great city for a twelve-day holiday. There she admired the art of Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche.(10) As for current British art, she favoured the work of Millais at the London exhibitions that spring.(11) In the September family holiday in Wales, Joanna painted some vivid heads of local children, with PreRaphaelite red hair (complemented by further works in the same vein in 1853), and was introduced by George to the landscapist David Cox.(12) In December, a significant domestic development occurred when George got his own studio, although his parents wanted him still to sleep at home. While her brother may have been becoming more Bohemian, Joanna was circumscribed in her friendships by her sex, still confined to the more conservative artistic acquaintances that they had both enjoyed for several years: thus her presentation in February 1853 to William Frith of a portrait sketch.
She began another session at Leigh's, though her father's unexpected death in September 1853 set her back tremendously: 'I began painting my sketch', she wrote in November; '..unsatisfactory - idle -Have a sense of something wanting to give me energy- the dear encouraging eyes of my darling father, to whom alone I was sure of giving pleasure'. Mr Boyce had provided financially for his family's continued well-being, but the absence of his moral support left his otherwise self-confident daughter dependent on her mother's more conventional mind and her brother's erratic if sincere encouragement. The idea of returning to Paris for formal study was suggested by her two friends the Ridley sisters, returning that month from a year's musical education in the French capital.
(Illus. 2: The Artist's Family)
Wells, who felt his career was coming on as he had been noticed recently by the Queen, was still waiting on Joanna: 'Wells called to see my painting of Lizzie. Very kind in telling me what it wanted', she wrote ingenuously in March 1854.The work in hand was the female head of Elgiva (ill.1), which Mrs Boyce, Wells and George urged her to send in to the Academy. She was very reluctant to do so, citing her father's recent death as reason why not. She began attending a branch of the School of Design in April, making fitful weekly attendances. She had her own painting room at home, but her commitment was severely tested by a lack of familial encouragement, and a daughter's duty called: 'I have some thought of giving up painting altogether, my painting room and all. I have no comfort at all in it now. Nothing gave dear Papa more pleasure than for me to work at it and nothing seems to annoy Mama so much. I have been reading Anna Mary Howitt's Art Student in Munich.(13) I feel confident were I placed as she has been, and blessed with sound health and God's blessing, I could do greater things in the painting way than she has, but I feel it is my plain duty to give up all hope of improvement in painting rather than in any way neglect Mama. I have a difficult path to steer, but God will lead me'. She had reservations about Howitt's much-praised exhibit at the Portland Gallery, (14) admiring more freely the current work of William Holman Hunt; meanwhile the artists George enthused about now were almost exclusively PreRaphaelite sympathisers. Even Ruskin and his father called on George.(15) William Michael Rossetti, recalling the 1850s, placed both Joanna and George in a grouping that might be characterized as 'friends of PreRaphaelitism', sandwiching Joanna between the two men in her life: '...a large group of artists whom I knew more or less independently of any introductions. I came naturally into contact with them, owing to their being known to my brother and hence to me, or through some other casual circumstances. They are Alexander Munro, Arthur Hughes, Walter Howell Deverell, John Hancock, Bernhard Smith, Charles Allston Collins, George Price Boyce, his sister, her husband Henry Tamworth Wells, William Burges, John Leech, Kenny Meadows, Edward Lear, Robert B. Martineau, and Henry Wallis' (ill.2).(16)
Despite being drawn to contemporary French art, Joanna began to envisage studying in Dusseldorf or Munich in emulation of Howitt and their mutual friend Jane Benham, a plan which was made more feasible when Mrs Boyce revised her position after hearing Henry Wells' praise of Joanna's work: 'She would consent even to my going to Munich or Dusseldorf with a fit companion...', wrote the dutiful but frustrated daughter at the end of April. The strong-minded female company she was keeping in the spring of 1854 - Jane Benham, Bertha Farwell, Jane Todhunter and Anna Mary Howitt herself - could commiserate about the constraints on would-be independent women of their class.(17) By contrast, come the summer, George was sketching in Italy on the advice of Ruskin. (18) He wrote of his sister, mother and others joining him there, but it was the Netherlands and Belgium that Joanna saw next, accompanied by her sister Anne and brother-in-law Augustus Mordan, in September, the Boyces' annual holiday time.
The end of the year was overshadowed by Wells' wish to marry Joanna. Her friendship with Howitt and other feminist artists made her very wary of marriage - she used terms such as 'slavery' and 'dependence' in her letters to Wells -, yet her family background of conventional respectability had, as her later attitude to George Eliot's bold domestic arrangements revealed, left its mark on her.(19) Her only sister was already married, and Wells was accepted as a friend of the family. Joanna eventually agreed to an engagement on condition that it lasted two or three years.
Joanna Boyce's debut at the Royal Academy in 1855 with Elgiva reflected an independent combination of exemplars: Scheffer, Bellini and PreRaphaelitism. The painting was praised privately by Ford Madox Brown and publicly by Ruskin, securing it wide notice.(20) Perhaps this success comforted Mrs Boyce, for September saw Joanna in Paris, with her mother and brother Bob, to arrange a term of study. She wondered to Wells at the beginning of October if 'it would do for me to call on Rosa Bonheur and see if I could study under her? -or do you think the mere study of the head under Couture would be useful?'.(21) The influence of Wells, himself the latter artist's erstwhile student, is evidenced in Joanna Boyce ending up in the studio of the juste milieu-ist Couture, not the feminist heroine Bonheur. After her mother's return home, Boyce got down to the object of her stay with enthusiasm and, later that year, had the opportunity to articulate her opinions of contemporary French art when George Jones, editor of the Saturday Review and a family friend, invited her to write up the fine art section of the Exposition Internationale. Despite her stay in Paris being curtailed by ill health, another classically female hindrance,the resulting articles were substantial and articulate.
While the possibility of editorial intervention has to be assumed, the tone, sentiment and phraseology of the articles are very much Boyce's, informed with earnest idealism and stern analysis. She plunged into her subject via her early enthusiasms, Scheffer and Delaroche. Writing for a British readership, she observed no sacred cows: 'The admiration of Ingres - one of the worst epidemics to which the Parisians have fallen a prey - is, we trust, on the wane. An execrable draftsman, a bad colorist[sic], a man with no intensity of feeling or power of imagination, how has he attracted such a crowd of worshippers? by painting blue satin or ecstatic saints?...'.(22) Troyon was compared with Bonheur: 'His cattle are not so grand as Rosa Bonheur's...But they are genuine transcripts from Nature, and for quality of light and colour in sky and landscape, he leaves Rosa Bonheur far behind'. She complimented her former teacher's exhibits, including the famous Romans of the Decadence (1847): 'to admirable colour and masterly drawing and chiaroscuro, Couture has added something even more valuable - rare poetic feeling', she enthused. Contemplation of Couture's piece de r˜sistance moved Boyce to some revealing generalisation: 'In every work of art', she declared, 'it is the principle of beauty that should prevail, however severe the lesson enforced, or however great the horror of the scene depicted; for it alone steals the way into our hearts, and prepares a place where the truth it clothes may take root and blossom.' It seems apt that another exhibit she appraised at length was Cogniet's Tintoretto painting his dead Daughter (1845): 'The rays of a single lamp fall on the corpse of a young girl, where beauty, too soon to be dethroned, reigns co-equal with the 'king of terrors '; and this is all that is now left to the painter, of the child who, in earliest womanhood, had proved herself the inheritor of his genius, the companion and sharer of his toil'.(23) In her feeling for this work, Boyce surely reveals an appreciation not only of this rare representation of a female artist but also of the profound bond between father and daughter whose loss from her own life she regretted so deeply. Again, in the face of a work that genuinely impresses her, Boyce is moved to expressions of aesthetic fundamentals: 'Colour is so essentially the painter's faculty', she avowed, 'that, in most cases, the absence of it in an artist neutralizes the effect of higher and more universal powers...[P]robably no picture really noble in thought and feeling was ever actually bad in colour, for a great and true conception has a vivifying and purifying power over all with which it comes in contact'. She rejected Delacroix, however: '[His works] strike the eye much as the sound of a gong strikes the ear...'. Finally, her verdict on Daubigny showed the limit and extent of her PreRaphaelite values: 'Daubigny's landscapes, though slovenly and unfinished, show a fine eye for colour, and the freshness of out-of-door nature'. Though reproving the artist for slovenliness, she can forgive him this flaw for the truth to nature which any PreRaphaelite would hold dear.
George Jones' invitation to review the Royal Academy the following May gave Boyce an opportunity generally unknown to the female artist: to air her aesthetic in public in appraisal of the culture to which she herself was a contributor. She began in characteristically idealistic fashion, asking whether British artists had 'worked that we may be mentally and morally the better for their labours,or merely that our purses may be lighter, and our rooms furnished with pleasing pictures?'. (24) Ever the pupil of Ruskin, she went on, 'let us hope that a simple love of nature and art, an earnest striving after excellence, and, with some, at least, impatience to give forcible utterance to the multitude of thoughts within, have had their place too.' Millais, Holman Hunt and William Hunt took pride of place for the sincerity of their exhibits which, in Boyce's mind, rivalled the more pretentious creations glorying in the term 'high art'. 'The Pre-Raphaelite movement has done good, and will do more', she declared;'...they have taught us by their pictures, aided by Ruskin's words, that an artist's strength lies in a child-like sincerity, and in the shunning of pride, which is always allied to servility'. The names she noticed in passing formed a catholic collection: Frost, Pickersgill, Landseer, Dyce, Herbert, E.M. Ward, Egg, Cox, J.F. Lewis, Linnell, Mulready, Philip, Hook, Poole, Martha Mutrie, Boxall. Millais received the remains of her attention: Autumn Leaves showed 'the spell-binding power of nature', The Blind Girl 'consummate skill', while Peace Concluded,1856, though flawed was 'a noble work', and L'Enfant du Regiment 'touching', 'a gem of colour'. In her second article, Boyce moved on to Holman Hunt, but could not approve The Scapegoat as she had Millais' contributions, saying that Hunt's recent subjects 'scarcely afford a legitimate field for the painter'.(25) She had more enthusiasm for Windus' Burd Helen, its attractions as much sociological as aesthetic: 'a touching episode in the endless history of the struggle between the true and false heart in man and woman'. Noel Paton's Crimean War piece Home next attracted Boyce's approval, followed by works from Rankley, Philip, Poole and Wallis. It is notable that while the last-named's Chatterton drew some criticism from those disinclined to accept the intensity of PreRaphaelite colour, pose and sentiment, Boyce complimented Wallis on the work's 'reality'. Perhaps surprisingly, then, Hughes' April Love showed 'too much fondness for crude colour', being a mismatch between a fine conception and an awkward handling. She faulted his Eve of St.Agnes in the same terms.
Her third notice can be characterized by her comment on Faed, Pickersgill and Lejeune, 'all three men of considerable talent, but what use do they make of it?' (26) Thus also Leslie, E.M. Ward, Landseer, Frith, Abraham Solomon, Elmore, G.H. Thomas and Leighton. Indeed, Boyce was bold in confronting the shortcomings of Leighton, since he had been hailed as a genius at the 1855 Academy: 'Mr Leighton has sadly disappointed...this year', she wrote; 'The only thing which at all gives proof of latent power is the figure of Eurydice... The rest of the picture is almost too ridiculously bad to provoke criticism'. By contrast, W.S. Burton's PreRaphaelite piece now known as The Wounded Cavalier excited her interest. Among the exhibits dealt with in her closing paragraph were those of her friend Bertha Farwell, Henrietta Ward and the Mutrie sisters: in dealing with the female artists almost as an addendum, Boyce followed the conventions. Portraiture dominated the following week's report, where she was not embarrassed to compliment Henry Wells' exhibits. Overall, however, she was more enthusiastic about the landscape contributions, which she allowed Hook to head for his 'intense love of English landscape, and his power of reproducing all its freshness, homeliness, and almost more than its richness of colour'.(27) As was usual, the sculpture occupied the final notice. Generally unenthusiastic about it, Boyce echoed sentiments expressed in The Germ several years before regarding subject-matter: 'Why should our sculptors assume, as one or two of them have this year done, that naked men with classic swords and shields, or burly masses of brawn half covered with armour, could possibly call up the sympathies of the present age for deeds of valour? Are there not acts of heroism, of daring, of endurance, done in the nineteenth century, as worthy of record in undying bronze or marble as ever were the feats of arms of Cannae or Thermopylae, of Cressy or Agincourt?'(28)
(Illus. 3: Rowena)
Her own principal entry to the RA of 1856, Rowena Offering the Wassail Cup to Voltigern (ill.3), had been rejected, a slight which may have been the spur for renewed study which included sketches of the weather, skies, studies from the antique and new subjects including Milton's 'Penseroso' and figures from Shakespeare. The feminine role distracted her from her profession again in February 1857, when George was laid up and Joanna nursed him in Brighton until May. Ironically, this ill-health did not prevent George from being included in the PreRaphaelite exhibition got up by Ford Madox Brown that spring, though Joanna was not. In June, she was free to start out for Italy with Wells. The two artists were married in Rome on 9 December. Among the witnesses was the British sculptor John Gibson, (29) for visiting Britons the most famous artist in the Holy City, though an unexpected guarantor for an aspiring avant-gardist.
Artistically, the trip was very productive, and Joanna returned in March with numerous sketches, several small oils and the beginnings of a major new historical work, The Children's Crusade. George suggested to the newly-weds a tripartite exhibition before the Academy, and also in June volunteered his and Joanna's work for the Liverpool Academy, which the PreRaphaelites were keen to support. This inclusion of Joanna in an exhibiting initiative made a contrast with her absence from both the Russell Place show and the exhibition 'Modern British Art' which William Michael Rossetti organised to tour American cities in late 1857 and early 1858. She showed at Liverpool in 1858 and 1859.
Having become a wife, Joanna could expect now to become a mother, though wishing to remain an artist too. With a view to establishing a family home, the Wells' acquired a house in Surrey where they might spend half the year. After the birth of her first child Sidney, Joanna was weak in the first two months of 1859, but worried while still in her sickbed about selling work, contemplating the production of potboilers to boost the family income. Domestic life made professional practice difficult: she was preparing two landscapes for the RA but 'as I rarely get half an hour undisturbed they progress slowly'. Perhaps it was also domestic responsibility that kept her away from a Royal Academy soir˜e that Henry attended in August, for women were evidently permitted because Henrietta Ward was present. Not that Mrs H.T. Wells was any less ambitious for professional success than Joanna Boyce had been: in late summer, she was corresponding with Abraham and Rebecca Solomon about exhibition and sales. Joanna was pursuing Gambart for patronage, an effort which succeeded insofar as her work was included in his Winter Exhibition at the end of the year. From here, Do I Like Butter? and The Outcast or No Joy the Blowing Season gives were placed with the PreRaphaelite enthusiast Thomas Plint. (30) The older Solomons were long-standing acquaintances shared by George and Joanna. To Abraham's and Rebecca's friendship was added that of the younger Simeon in 1858, with George mentioning 'little Simeon Solomon' in his diary for February as 'rather a nuisance'.(31) While Joanna was generally most interested in Rebecca, as a fellow female artist, Simeon became the favourite of the male PreRaphaelites. The friendship between the Boyces/Wells and the Solomons faltered in the second half of 1860 over family matters, but survived through the PreRaphaelite connection.
Joanna's life at this time was complicated not only by the conflicting roles of mother and artist but by the proprietary feelings she inspired in both her brother and her husband. George challenged her enthusiasm for her husband's work - George and Henry did not see eye to eye on artistic questions. George may well have thought that his brother-in-law was drawing Joanna's aesthetic towards the conventional. Wells' art was modern without being unconventional and to prosecute it he chased mainstream patrons, frequently members of the aristocracy and government, in no measure practising the PreRaphaelitism that George favoured, despite his own long acquaintance with the Rossettis, Brown, Seddon and others. She wrote in October in response to her brother, 'Perhaps I do really admire his things more than is good for him. You men are so easily puffed up'. Perhaps ominously, then, Henry and Joanna went to visit Leighton's studio a couple of months later, and were sufficiently pleased to arrange for him to come to dinner in the near future. (32) The wife who did not help her husband cultivate professional connections was, after all, cutting off her nose to spite her face, especially when she was also the mother of dependent children.
It was PreRaphaelites that Joanna saw most of, however - those embedded in its history and those shaping its future. Millais came to dinner in February 1860; Burne-Jones showed Joanna, George and Henry round the British Museum manuscripts in April; Ruskin was introduced to her at last by George, also in April. (Perhaps even the self-absorbed George felt a pang of conscience at what more he could have done for his sister's career when, on hearing of her death hardly more than a year later, Ruskin wrote to a mutual acquaintance, Georgiana Burne-Jones: 'I am very, very sorry. I did not know her much, but I always counted upon her as a friend whom I could make, if only I had time'.)(33) True to form, however, Joanna Boyce's aesthetic was not confined by her PreRaphaelite connections: at the RA that year, her sympathy extended to Elisabeth Jerichau's Italy,(34) and she identified strongly with the eclectic Rebecca Solomon, whose fortunes were on the rise with her current Academy exhibit, Peg Woffington's Visit to Triplet.(35)
Rebecca Solomon, Joanna suspected, had fallen into the trap of allowing her male colleagues to work on her paintings. This was something that Joanna had occasion to feel deeply about, as her struggles with her work that year - complicated by the birth of a second child, her daughter Alice - led Henry to offer help not just in the form of encouraging words but by physical interference: 'That gorse-woman's skirt is almost a nightmare to me [sic], -for I feel it is only some strange accident, which prevents you painting it as well as the rest of the picture, and I also feel that in a couple of hours I could do something, which would save you further trouble, -but perhaps you view that question rightly-certainly I would not do violence to your feelings', he wrote to his wife in August 1860. (36) It was perhaps as well for Joanna's artistic integrity that Henry was staying with sitters for much of 1860! Indicating the growing interest that Joanna Boyce's work was attracting amongst their artist acquaintances, D.G. Rossetti wrote in January 1861 about the same painting: 'I am especially disappointed in not seeing your faggot picture, of which I heard so much from Watts and others. Have you it? -and for how long? -and where? -and would you show it me if I came by myself some time?' In corresponding vein, he wrote to William Allingham later in the year that 'Mrs Wells (Boyce's sister) has some first-rate things' on show at the Academy.(37)
(Illus. 4: The Bird of God)
George, an incorrigible dealer when it came to art, had always liked to buy his sister's works, so they did not sell as widely as this interest in them would lead one to expect. He had bought her first success, Elgiva and, of her RA exhibits that year, had optioned La Veneziana before the show opened. Peep-bo! was sold to a stranger,The Bird of God (ill.4) attracted 'Bigg, the dentist', and Heather-gatherer, Hindhead became Anne's.(38) George was not the only man in her life to intervene in Joanna's sales, though: Henry took it upon himself to 'manage' the commercial side of his wife's practice. Thus he wrote to George on February 5 1861, 'I will not let her sell anything for less [than 5gns.]'.
In this entrepreneurial role, Henry wrote to George again the following month: 'It has quite lately struck me that Joney, yourself and myself might most years make up a little exhibition of average interest-, and as we are so near kith and kin there would be a propriety in our clubbing together'. The show, at Henry's studio in Stratford Place, yielded George four sales though it is not clear how successful the project was for his in-laws.(39) George, with no wife to keep him at home, no children to curb his expenditure, and a creative urge that came and went, circulated more and more freely than Joanna, who now spent part of the year in the country with their two children and domestic help (who doubled as models) while Henry pursued sitters. The siblings still went out together on occasion, however, and George still took pride in Joanna's abilities: in early April, he recorded Millais' enthusiasm for his sister's pictures (40) and 'escorted' her to see James Clark Hook's paintings. His choice of verb indicates how propriety still restricted Joanna, even amongst would-be Bohemians such as her brother. Once the Academy opened, she gave an independent verdict to her friend Hennie: 'Hook's Compassed by the Inviolate Sea is the picture to our fancy then I think I should place Lewis's Turk sitting in a (?) heaven of idleness in the bazaar -(to which Holman Hunt's childish picture of a similar scene in the opposite corner of same room serves as an admirable foil -). Look at A.Hughes' exquisite baby kissing its father in the staircase room - and Hook's two other pictures'.
Giving birth for the third time as the exhibitions opened, Joanna did not live to see out the Academy of 1861. She died on 15 July of 'complications' (probably gastro-uterine fever), leaving a healthy baby, Joanna Margaret. Her sense of herself as an artist was undiminished to the last: 'She made the nurse place the glass so, that she might see herself with all the paraphernalia of a sickroom about, and so be thoroughly impressed with the aspects of an invalid in a sickroom. She was evidently thinking of turning it to account in her painting', wrote George, concerning the very day of her death. As she lay dying, the two men in her life competed to define her still: Henry asked Rossetti and George asked the sculptor Foley to come and make Joanna's likeness.
After her death, Joanna's studio was opened to visitors. Ford Madox Brown, D.G. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Augustus Egg and G.F. Watts came to see the work she had left in hand. Alexander Gilchrist suggested a memorial exhibition at the Hogarth Club - better late than never! - but this was dropped in favour of Foley's idea of inclusion in the forthcoming International Exhibition, where Joanna was represented by Do I Like Butter?, The Children's Crusade, Peep-bo!, Heather-gatherer,Hindhead and La Veneziana. Her claims as an individual artist were thus relinquished for membership of the contemporary British scene.
The obituaries emanating from the PreRaphaelite circle were especially complimentary. W.M. Rossetti, writing in Fraser's Magazine about the London exhibitions of 1861, found pretext for mentioning her in relation to the Academy - 'the best painter that ever handled a brush with a female hand, and a truly deplorable loss in her early death' - and the Society of Female Artists (with whom she had never exhibited) - 'the only woman we know in England who showed a really striking faculty,- greater, even, in our judgment,than that of Rosa Bonheur, though not used on so bold a scale'. (41) She was, as the documentation of her life shows, not simply a PreRaphaelite but a woman striving to make her own art out of the major trends of her day, domestic and foreign. Her resulting independence from mainstream painting as from PreRaphaelitism (42) was recognized on all sides. As Gilchrist wrote in his obituary, she took from the work of Ruskin, Millais, Rossetti and Hunt the spirit rather than the letter of PreRaphaelitism, and, indeed, the characteristics which distinguished her from a thorough-going PreRaphaelite are not hard to discern. They stem from the influence of contemporary French artists, the Venetians promoted by Ruskin and the ambitions of her circle of women friends.(43)
As so often in the history of PreRaphaelitism, it is William Michael Rossetti who provides the ultimate verdict. 'All the artists whom I best knew and valued deplored her death as a real loss to art', he wrote in 1906; 'they had looked upon her as the leading hope for painting in the hands of a woman'.(44) Yet had William Michael consulted his sister, another ambivalent PreRaphaelite, he might have seen that his apparently handsome conclusion was still inadequate. What Joanna Mary Boyce's life and work attest to most vividly is the struggle for social mobility and intellectual independence that must come before art, if art is to shape culture in the way that PreRaphaelitism is commonly allowed to have done. This struggle dogged the female artist in the orbit of PreRaphaelitism's challenge; and, when male PreRaphaelites are praised as iconoclasts, trend-setters or free-thinkers, it should be remembered by what comparative privilege they attained such positions.
1. Rose, A. (1981), Pre-Raphaelite Portraits, Oxford: Oxford Illustrated Press.
2. On Victorian women artists in general, see the present author's (1987), Victorian Women Artists, London: The Women's Press.
3. Rosa Brett 1829-82, John Brett 1830-1902, Joanna Boyce Wells 1831-61, George Price Boyce 1826-97, Emma Sandys 1843-77, Anthony Sands 1806-83, Frederick Sandys 1829-1904, Lucy Madox Brown 1843-94, Evelyn Pickering DeMorgan 1855-1919. See Marsh, J. and Nunn, P.G. (1989), Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, London: Virago.
4. Anna Blunden Martino 1829-1915, Anna Mary Howitt Watts 1824-84, Marie Spartali Stillmann 1843-1927, Jemima Blackburn Wedderburn 1823-1909. See ibid.
5. Unless otherwise noted, the information about Boyce's life given here comes from her descendants' private papers, which I have had the privilege of consulting for my previous work on Boyce and which I am grateful to be able to use again. For this, I am glad to acknowledge once more all the members of the Boyce family who have facilitated my research, especially Anne Christopherson.
6. For George Price Boyce's life and work, see Surtees, V. (ed. 1980), The Diaries of George Price Boyce, Norwich: Real World Press and Newall, C. and Egerton, J. (1987), George Price Boyce, London: Tate Gallery. Of the other siblings, Anne married but did not develop any career; Matthias became a solicitor; and Bob died in early adulthood in 1859.
7. The Baring family, known as financiers and politicians, had built up a picture collection during the first half of the century. It was known particularly for the Dutch paintings acquired by Sir Thomas Baring.
8. Edward Matthew Ward was a popular Academy painter, late of the Clique. Henrietta Ward became the most prominent female artist in Britain: see the present author's (1978), 'The case history of a woman artist:Henrietta Ward', Art History, 1 (3), September, p.293-308.
9. Wells had attended Thomas Couture's atelier for six months in 1850.
10. Ary Scheffer 1795-1858, Paul Delaroche 1797-1856. The popularity of the former with mid-Victorians is indicated by Mrs Grote's eponymous memoir of 1860.
11. Millais attracted attention at the 1852 Royal Academy with Ophelia, A Huguenot and Mrs Coventry Patmore.
12. David Cox (1783-1859 ) was particularly known for his paintings from Welsh landscape
13. Howitt, A.M. (1853, reissued 1880), An Art-Student in Munich, London: De La Rue.
14. This was Margaret returning from the Fountain, which had attracted notice not only through its merits but because it was rumoured to have been refused from the British Institution, an exhibition generally considered to observe a low standard of excellence. The painting's whereabouts are now unknown.
15. Since Joanna did not meet Ruskin too, this visit was probably to George's studio and not the Boyce home; see Surtees, p.13.
16. Rossetti, W.M. (1906), Some Reminiscences, London: Brown Langham , vol.1, p.145-6.
17. Jane Benham later Hay, exh. RA, SFA, Liverpool 1848-71 and went to live in Florence c.1861; Bertha Farwell, exh. RA, BI 1856-61; Jane Todhunter (perhaps later Montgomery), exh. SFA 1857-8. George wrote to Joanna in November 1854, 'I am glad to hear that you and Miss Farwell have sororized so well'.
18. See Surtees, p.119-21.
19. It can be noted that neither Benham nor Howitt refused to marry. Joanna Boyce later disowned her own initial reluctance to marry (see below p.18) and in a letter of 1860 judged Eliot's work by her relationship with George Lewes: 'Can an evil tree bear good fruit?..'.
20. See entry for 22 May 1855, Surtees, V. (ed. 1981), The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, New Haven: Yale University Press, p.138; and 'Academy Notes 1855, supplement' in Cook, E.T. and Wedderburn, A. (eds 1903-12), The Works of John Ruskin, London: George Allen ,vol.14, p.31.
21. Rosa Bonheur (1822-99), though French was the most talked-about female artist in Britain during the 1850s and early 60s. She would have been much discussed in the feminist circle of Howitt, Benham and others. Thomas Couture (1815-79) tried to practise a 'juste milieu' that accommodated both academicism and Realism.
22. 'Remarks on Some of the French Pictures at the Paris Exhibition 1855', Saturday Review, 1 December 1855, p.80.
23. 'Remarks on Some of the French Pictures at the Late Paris Exposition', Saturday Review, 29 December 1855, p.153.
24. 'The Royal Academy', Saturday Review, 10 May 1856, p.31
25. 'The Royal Academy', Saturday Review, 17 May 1856, p.57
26. 'The Royal Academy', Saturday Review, 24 May , p.79
27. 'The Royal Academy', Saturday Review, 31 May 1856, p.104
28. 'The Royal Academy', Saturday Review, 7 June 1856, p.123
29. John Gibson (1790-1866), known as a stern adherent of the classical tradition, had lived in Rome since 1817.
30. The former work is now in the Boyce family and the latter destroyed.
31. 'Little Simeon Solomon called and stayed a long while and jawed and bored us considerably' (13 February 1858); Surtees (1980), p.21. On the Solomon siblings, see Solomon:a family of painters, Geffrye Museum London, 1985.
32. However, neither was George the out-and-out progressive he chided Joanna for failing to be: in April 1862, he and Arthur Hughes joined the throngs visiting the dealer Flatou's exhibition of Frith's Railway Station. Not surprisingly, though, he was 'Disappointed.' (30 April 1862; Surtees (1980), p.34)
33. 20 July 1861; Cook & Wedderburn, vol.36, p.374
34. Elisabeth Jerichau n˜e Baumann (1825-81), variously said to have been born in Poland and Denmark, was married to a Danish sculptor and trained in Dusseldorf and Rome; exh. RA 1858-69.
35. Whereabouts now unknown; a reduced replica is in a British private collection.
36. The work in question was Heathergatherer, Hindhead, exhibited at the Academy in 1861 and now in the Boyce family collection. After Joanna's death, Henry thought of completing some of her unfinished works - a plan which did not come to ruition.
37. 10 May 1861; Doughty, O. and Wahl, J.R. (eds 1965), The Letters of D.G. Rossetti, Oxford: Blackwells, vol.2, p.400.
38. Peep-bo! has been destroyed, but Bird of God remains in the Boyce family. Despite her brother's avid collecting of pictures, Joanna's acquisitions seem to have been few. One documented instance was when, during her tour of Italy, she agreed to buy through George, who had an interest in its companion, a Millais study related to Autumn Leaves.
39. 8 April 1856; Surtees (1980) ,p.33
40. It was Henry who got a commission out Millais' visit, however, for his wife Effie's portrait.
41. Fraser's Magazine, November 1861, p.580/1
42. The Critic, 27 July 1861, p.109
43. Scheffer's Saints Augustine and Monica (NG,London), Couture's The Patrician (NG,Scotland) and The Tragedienne (Gemeentemuseum,Hague) may have informed Elgiva. The Outcast and Heathergatherer recall the works of Millet. There are numerous works by Bellini, Giorgione and Titian which could have influenced Rowena and La Veneziana.
44. Rossetti (1906), p.154
Illustrations:
1. Joanna Boyce, Elgiva (1855). Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo the author.
2. H.T. Wells, Portraits (1862). Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo the artist's family.
3. Joanna Boyce, Rowena offering the cup to Voltigern (1856). Oil on canvas. Destroyed. Photo the artist's family.
4. Joanna Boyce, Bird of God (1861). Oil on cardboard. Private collection. Photo
the author.
and reproduction in any form is strictly forbidden.
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