Colour notes
Peyton Skipwith enjoys an exhibition celebrating a neglected Victorian composer of poetry and music in paint
To describe Albert Moore’s oeuvre, one really needs to turn to the vocabulary of music or poetry rather than painting: words such as rhythm, harmony and tone immediately spring to mind as one stands in front of his works, which run the gamut from modest études and variations to full-blooded symphonies. He is something of an enigma in the panoply of Victorian painting: on the one hand, he appears a wholehearted Victorian embedded in the Classical world beloved of Frederic Leighton and Alma-tadema, but, on the other, he’s closer to the aesthetic sensitivity of Swinburne, Wilde and Whistler.
Despite the fact that he is well represented in our museums— there are loans here from Tate Britain, Liverpool, Manchester, Dublin, Bournemouth and other public galleries—his work is relatively little known. It’s also extraordinary that this modest, but fully representative, show is the first solo exhibition since his memorial in 1894. Sadly, there is no catalogue.
Born in York in 1841, Moore was the youngest in a family of 12, but by far the best of the three artist sons of the painter William Moore. He trained at the York School of Design and his precociousness is evident as one enters the main gallery to be faced with the slightly scary Elijah’s Sacrifice, painted in 1864. This large-scale work, suffused with apricot/orange hues, is a harbinger of things to come.
Storytelling was, however, of little interest to Moore and he quickly rejected the narrative tradition in favour of pure decoration. By the end of the decade, he had refined his visual language, as evidenced by a trio of works a little further along the same wall—azaleas (1868), A Venus
(1869) and A Garden (1870). Apart from A Venus—a slightly clunky nude, owing more to Classical sculpture than to nature— these are among the earliest of the sequence of large-scale singlefigure studies of draped models in Classical gowns that were to become one of his enduring themes.
Blossom—azaleas particularly—plays an essential role in these early aesthetic experiments, with the model providing the peg upon, and around, which he arranged the colour harmonies that were his abiding preoccupation. Two slightly later works,
Seagulls and Seashells, from the next decade, show a further development and refinement of his language of colour and form, with the figures set against dull blue-grey seas and wet sand, their raiment blowing in the wind.
Swinburne, describing Azaleas in his review of the 1868 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, put his finger on Moore’s raison
d’être, commenting not only on the melody of colour and sym- phony of form, but pronouncing that ‘one more beautiful thing is achieved, one more delight is born into the world; and its meaning is beauty; and its reason for being is to be’.
Moore was far ahead of his time in creating such autonomous works in which the subject was primarily the vehicle for the aesthetic placing of individual brushstrokes and colour notes, free of literary connotation. If he’d been born a century later, one could imagine him developing a vocabulary of pattern and harmony akin to that of Howard Hodgkin. Three small works—beads,
End of a Sofa and Two Figures— are part of a large sequence of paintings and studies he made of girls reclining on a Roman bench. He photographed at least one cartoon drawing from this series, using the prints to resolve subtle details, such as the touch of non-specific red in Two
Figures, which morphs into a coral necklace in the slightly later Beads.
For Moore, colour was the key to harmony and it was through such subtle shades of apricot, coral, tangerine and orange, usually deployed in a minor key, that he achieved his effects. However, in Midsummer (1887), he pulled out all the stops, making a fullfrontal assault on the viewers’ optical sense. The over-powering use in this work of blood-orange reds is saved from kitschiness by the tart acid green of the girls’ fans. It’s hard to believe that Leighton did not have this flamboyant work in mind when he painted
Flaming June a decade later. In striking contrast to the exuberance of Midsummer is Moore’s last work, The Love of the Winds and the Seasons, a gentle and melancholic elegy in greens, blues and gold, which he finished a few days before his premature death. ‘Albert Moore: Of Beauty and Aesthetics’ is at York Art Gallery, Exhibition Square, York, until October 1 (01904 687687; www.yorkartgallery.org.uk)
Next week: ‘Plywood: Material of the Modern World’ at the V&A