Exhibitions
VICTORIAN GIANTS
National Portrait Gallery to 20th May
MURILLO: THE SELF-PORTRAITS
National Gallery to 21st May Rather more than fifty years ago, as I walked through Kilcannon Arch between Tom and Peckwater Quads in Christ Church, I passed an old gentleman who was telling his wife, ‘The Miss Liddell I knew was Alice.’
To be in that place, and but a handshake away (had I presumed) from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – then a century old – shrank time in the most thrilling fashion.
I felt the little frisson again when looking at the images of Alice in Victorian Giants, subtitled The Birth of Art Photography, which brings together portrait photographs by four of the great originals, Oscar Rejlander, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Lady Hawarden.
Rejlander, a naturalised Swede who settled in England, initially as a painter, in the 1830s, influenced the others and taught them techniques. He was one of the first to master the complicated processes of combining several negatives into one image. The most famous example – Two Ways of Life, a young man dithering between good and evil – is made up of more than thirty images. Some Victorians were shocked by the nudity, but not Victoria, who bought a copy for Albert, and herself mastered the technique. The best surviving version is here.
The four photographers not only encouraged each other’s efforts, but moved in similar circles and often shared models: both professionals and their families, and eminent friends such as Tennyson, Henry Taylor, Darwin and the Terry sisters. Cameron famously photographed Tennyson, not only as The Dirty Monk; so did Rejlander. Carroll’s studies of the child Alice (only six, by herself and, despite the legend, never naked) are his best-remembered images. He portrayed her again as a young adult, as did Cameron.
It is good to be able to see these images side by side. Carroll’s selfportraits are good. But they are a little workaday – as if he happened not to have another model just then – when seen beside Rejlander’s two studies of him, which seem to reveal more of the inner man. Hawarden’s usual models were her daughters, and Cameron often used her nieces; there are no portraits of the two women by themselves or others.
A pity, as the strong features of Cameron’s great-nieces, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, seem to have come from her. For me, the two loveliest images are her Sadness: Ellen Terry and The Mountain Nymph. I wonder whether Mrs Keene, the model for the latter and also used by Burne-jones, might not have been Mary, wife of Richard Keene, a photographer from Derby who was perhaps known to Cameron’s set.
The little show Murillo: The SelfPortraits, based on two of his paintings, next door, in the National Gallery’s Room 1, makes an admirable companion piece to the photographers. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-82) was the leading painter in Seville after the departure of Velázquez. The self-portraits – one in his thirties from the Frick, the other in his fifties from the Gallery’s collection – have never hung together since leaving his son’s possession. They are now with six of his sixteen portraits (another is nearby in Room 30) and, together, they demonstrate why he gained a Europe-wide reputation.
Two of his genre subjects, a beggar boy and two women at windows, are also there. The boy is number 74 in the Gallery’s collection, bequeathed in 1826, showing that his popularity has been consistent.