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10 - Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portrait Painter of Distinction
- Edited by Katie J. T. Herrington, University of York
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- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 08 May 2024
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- 28 May 2024, pp 309-336
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FROM THE BEGINNING OF his artistic career, Henry Tanworth Wells was a successful painter who produced commissions in both miniature and chalk. Leo R. Schidlof, an expert in miniature painting, deemed him to be ‘a very good miniaturist’. Miniatures originated as a discrete art form in Britain and France in the sixteenth century, and were derived from techniques employed in illuminated manuscripts in the preceding centuries. Miniature painting was regarded as a gentleman's art. In the nineteenth century, many women became amateurs, but in professional circles it remained a male dominated field. By the eighteenth century, portrait miniatures were popular across Europe as, in the pre-photographic period, they provided portable likenesses that were, by virtue of their scale, personal objects. It was a highly popular mid-nineteenth-century genre. Portrait miniatures were Wells's mainstay, although he also produced subject paintings in miniature. Only a handful of his miniatures survive today, a common problem with miniaturists of this period, and there is very little in the letters and diaries that form part of The Boyce Papers about his artistic practices in this field, even though it was the primary focus of his work throughout the period of the documents.
Wells began his professional career as a portrait miniaturist, having learned the techniques while apprenticed from the age of fourteen to the publisher, print-seller and photographic agent Joseph Dickinson (1780– 1849) who had a fine art business at 114 New Bond Street, London. His initial training was as a lithographic draughtsman, and while it is unclear what precipitated the transition to miniature painting, it is evident that the young Wells had a natural aptitude for this exigent practice. Between 1848 and 1860, Wells exhibited upwards of seventy works at The Royal Academy, the majority portrait miniatures. The Boyce Papers make it clear that this figure was a fraction of Wells's output in the medium. Indeed, if his productivity accorded with that of fellow miniaturist Sir Charles William Ross, then the leading exponent of miniature painting, it is possible that Wells could have painted in the region of fifty miniatures a year.
1 - ‘Fabrics of Enchantment’: Artist Travellers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Europe
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- By Sue Bradbury
- Edited by Katie J. T. Herrington, University of York
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- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 08 May 2024
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- 28 May 2024, pp 17-48
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FOR ARTISTS, TRAVEL HAS long been a powerful source of inspiration, but in the early nineteenth century it became something more. The mountains, coasts and landscapes of rural Britain were already feeding romantic longings for nature and the sublime, and the advent of the railways in the 1840s made those landscapes much more accessible. In addition, as William Vaughan has written: ‘There really was a time … when to be a Romantic meant more than to be a dreamer or a love-sick youth;’ and travel, both in Britain, Europe and beyond, was central to the philosophy of the Romantic movement in art from the late eighteenth century onwards.
In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, sites which had been so familiar to the affluent and aristocratic Grand Tourists of the previous century, opened up to middle-class travellers. By the middle of the century more far-flung destinations, such as Egypt and the Middle East, hitherto largely the preserve of explorers, merchants and archaeologists, were attracting artists hungry for adventure, inspiration and enlightenment.
The rich contribution of Joanna Mary Boyce, George Price Boyce and Henry Tanworth Wells to the artistic history of the mid-nineteenth century came to light recently, and their descriptions of their travels, in particular, stand out for two main reasons: first, the 1840s and 1850s were relatively early for this kind of middle-class travel, and second, the three of them hardly ever travelled together. Instead, they recorded their experiences in detail, largely for the delectation of each other. Their letters, diaries and sketchbooks – all three were insatiable sketchers from an early age – paint (in some cases literally) vivid accounts of the places they visited and the art, architecture and landscapes they saw. Many artists have left records of their European adventures – among them Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), John Ruskin (1819–1900) and Anna Mary Howitt (1824–84), with all of whom the Boyce/Wells trio were familiar – but none, perhaps, have left quite such a lively picture of the actual business of travelling. Trains, public carriages, steamers and sledges over the Alps; the sleeping arrangements; the dangers to health; the political upheavals and even an earthquake – all were faced with admirable stoicism and equanimity.
7 - Decolonising practice: ‘doing’ Contextual Safeguarding with an ethics of care
- Edited by Carlene Firmin, Durham University, Jenny Lloyd, Durham University
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- Contextual Safeguarding
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- Bristol University Press
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- 23 January 2024
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- 20 July 2023, pp 89-102
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The authors of this chapter are non-Indigenous academics and practitioners. We wrote the chapter because we believe good intentions are not enough. Many professionals involved in safeguarding practice are white and located in privileged positions within an ongoing colonial society. We believe that non-Indigenous social welfare practitioners, policy makers and leaders need to do more to reimagine practice, to challenge the mistakes of the past that have filtered into the present and to advance ethical ways of thinking and doing. We acknowledge the need for this work to be undertaken in partnership with First Nations colleagues and leaders. They hold critical knowledge to inform and transform systems and practice and are already leading this journey. It's time for the rest of us to catch up. This chapter urges critical thinking about past and contemporary practice. It is not intended to replace essential and valued First Nations and minoritised ethnic perspectives and leadership, but to stand in solidarity with, and advocate the importance of, dismantling colonial legacies for the mutual liberation of all. As we move forward with this chapter, hold in mind this whakaaro (thought) from kaumātua (Māori elder) Koro Hata Temo: “Sometimes what I’d like to say is, the problem with you guys is you never lived in our world … but you forced us to live in yours” (Koro Hata Temo, 2016). Koro Hata's whakaaro challenges us to disrupt colonialism as norm, keeping us alive to the many ways of knowing and being that can enrich our practice. This chapter is an attempt to disrupt the all-encompassing nature of settler colonialism, and to reimagine the world (through the lens of child protection) with First Nations’ values in mind.
A call to reflect and rethink
CS is now well established and scaling up throughout England, Wales and Scotland, bringing context to the forefront of current safeguarding practice. Following this growth and success, it is timely to reflect on this practice and experience and explore more deeply its application with communities who have been disproportionately impacted by child protection systems. Not only is this relevant to the UK context but it seems particularly important now, given current plans to test the applicability and feasibility of CS in international settings, including in British settler postcolonial nations.
G. P. Boyce’s Diaries 1848–1875
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- The Boyce Papers
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- 26 May 2022
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- 15 March 2019, pp 963-1100
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Introduction
George Price Boyce was the eldest son of George and Anne Boyce. He was born in September 1826 while his parents were still living in London’s Bloomsbury, a few years before they moved to 5 Park Place Villas at Maida Hill, which would remain the family home until Anne Boyce’s death in 1890, at the great age of 89.
The family’s early history is vividly told by Alice Street (the daughter of George’s sister, Joanna, and her husband, Henry Wells) in her Memoir (see p. 976). George went to school at Chipping Ongar, near the home of his paternal grandfather, but in 1842, when he was sixteen, his parents took him to Paris, where, after a fortnight’s sight-seeing, they left him for a year in the care of M. and Mme Gachotte. He was assiduously tutored by them in all subjects, including German and drawing, but seems to have had little or no contact with boys of his own age. He spent his solitary leisure visiting interesting buildings and developing the love of ancient and vernacular architecture that became so central to his work.
Back in London in 1843, he began his training with the architect Thomas Little in Northumberland Street. There he met George Devey, who shared his passion for vernacular buildings and materials and became both a friend and mentor to the younger man. In 1846, George joined the architectural partnership of Wyatt & Brandon as an ‘improver’,but he and Devey remained close and the latter was a guest at George’s ‘exhibiting party’ on 23 October 1849, a social occasion which featured ‘pigeon pie, fowls and ham’ and some excruciating singing.
A glutton for education and culture, George attended lectures at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of British Architects and London University, and even joined his sisters at their weekly German lessons. Even before he qualified, however, he had decided to become an artist – a decision confirmed by his visits (from 1848 onwards) to the artists’ colony at Betws-y-Coed.
Artists had been drawn to the beauties of the Conwy Valley from an early date. Most early depictions of North Wales concentrated on the antiquities, but by 1770 interest in natural scenery for its own sake had become fashionable.
Family tree
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- 15 March 2019, pp xiv-xiv
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1 - Memoir by Alice Street, including diaries and letters to 1855
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- The Boyce Papers
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- 26 May 2022
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- 15 March 2019, pp 13-282
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Introduction
ONE of the highlights of Alice's Memoir, in which the lives of Joanna, George and – eventually – Henry too, are told largely in their own words, is her own commentary. Although she was only five when her mother died, her father had ensured that Joanna's memory was kept alive in all her children: it is apparent from the commentary that Alice had absorbed an enormous amount of family history, which, even in old age, she was able to bring to bear on her parents’ story and that of their respective families.
Joanna Mary Boyce began her art training early, encouraged by her father. She was not yet 12 when, in the summer of 1843, she studied landscape and architecture under Charles John Mayle Whichelo, and her first drawing book (now in the British Museum's Prints and Drawings Collection) is full of increasingly complex and sophisticated studies of castles, cottages and Gothic churches. In the very first pages are architectural sketches, shaded boxes and a round house with a conical roof. On page 14 there is a beautiful sketch of a ruined abbey and cottage – her first drawing to include people. It is signed and dated 4 May 1843, and next to it, in the centre of the page, Joanna has written: ‘My darling father was pleased with these figures.’
Though sketching tended to be regarded primarily as a social and practical accomplishment for young women (Charles's brother, Henry Mayle Whichelo, was the author of a popular students’ guide to sketching landscape, designed to help the young traveller abroad), the maturity of Joanna's style, even at that age, is impressive.
The Memoir begins with the childhood letters of Joanna and her elder brothers, George and Matthias, which reflect a charmed existence. They include Matthias enthusing to Joanna about the visit to Brighton of the ‘Ioway’ Indians, probably brought to England by George Catlin, while George lectures her in a lordly fashion on the history of the area of Shropshire in which their maternal relations lived: the celebrated ‘Bone Well’ – a holy spring near Ludlow – went on to have both sad and happy memories for Joanna. George also took pleasure in testing her on her French, while his passion both for the theatre and for music is already apparent, as is her love of singing.
Bibliography
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- 15 March 2019, pp 1111-1116
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8 - Letters and diaries 1861
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- The Boyce Papers
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- 15 March 2019, pp 809-860
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THE year began with an invitation to both George and the Wellses to take tea with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife. ‘No sort of party,’ he wrote. ‘Don't tog, for I shall be in my painting coat.’ It was almost immediately rescinded because of Elizabeth Rossetti's ill-health, and a further invitation, for 22 January, was also cancelled. In his letter Rossetti expresses their ‘vexation’ at being prevented from seeing their friends, and his particular disappointment at not seeing what he calls Joanna's ‘faggot picture’ – The Heather-Gatherer.
The Rossettis notwithstanding, George was heavily committed socially. It was at lunch with Ruskin on 10 January, where the ‘principal topics of discussion’ were ‘spirit rapping, immortality of the soul, Spurgeon, modern Christianity, ridicule, joking, its rise, harmfulness’, that he first met the Simons. John Simon, who was Medical Officer of Health for the City of London, believed Ruskin to be ‘the great prophet of the imagination’, and he had expressed interest in both George's and Rossetti's pictures. This meeting was a great success and led to dinner on the 19th at which Daniel Douglas Hume, the leading Spiritualist medium of the day, was also present. He had arrived in London in 1855 and gained a substantial following: Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of his disciples and he was almost certainly the model for Robert Browning's satire, Mr Sludge the Medium.
Evidence for the daily lives of Joanna, George and Henry during the first half of the year comes largely from George's diary. On 15 January he records dining with the Wellses at Phillimore Gardens. The Rossettis were expected but didn't come, but Clayton was present, and it was on this occasion, according to Alice, that Henry had the idea for his portrait group, Conversation Piece.Alice writes:
I remember him telling me, how, dessert finished, he had left the room to fetch some book or other, when, on re-entering, he beheld the others forming a group around the dinner table, which so caught his attention and was so satisfying, that without a moment's hesitation he took pencil and envelope from his pocket and jotted down the composition which he saw before him:
VOLUME I
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Frontmatter
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APPENDICES
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- 15 March 2019, pp 1101-1102
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5 - Letters and diaries 1858
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- The Boyce Papers
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- 26 May 2022
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- 15 March 2019, pp 657-706
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THE first reports of the earthquake that struck the Naples area on 16 December 1857 came in The Timeson the 24th and 26th of that month. The first was a telegram from Marseilles, the second was a longer account which bore out Joanna's description (in her letter of 6 January 1858) of Neapolitans camping out in the streets or staying in their carriages rather than trusting themselves to buildings. It only became clear much later that half the villages in the Basilicata area south-east of Naples had been completely destroyed, and the number of fatalities, then estimated at 11–12,000, was almost certainly far greater. In spite of the devastation, Joanna and Henry remained in the area for a further five days, even making an ascent of Vesuvius which, in the circumstances, carried insouciance to the level of recklessness. They arrived back in Rome on Christmas Day.
There they remained until the beginning of April. This was initially to allow Henry to complete the various commissions he had undertaken before returning to England, but on 25 February Joanna suffered a miscarriage. In a letter to Matthias, dated 3 March, Henry describes the dramatic events which led up to it. Though they were both aware that Matthias needed their help and support in his continuing battle with their mother over the family businesses, it became impossible for them to return early. There was also the matter of finding somewhere to live. Matthias and Lilly kindly offered to rent them their house in Clifton Road for two months, while Matthias and family were staying in Richmond, to give them time to find a home of their own.
It is apparent from their letters that the newly-weds were somewhat self-absorbed at this time – insisting on four months rather than two at Clifton Road. The details of their own house-purchase – barely achieved when Joanna was poised to give birth to her first child – are exhaustively rehearsed, and their questioning of Matthias over the businesses, to the extent of indicating that all might not be well – an implication that almost certainly came from Henry – would have tried a less patient man.
2 - Letters and diaries 1855
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- 15 March 2019, pp 283-332
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FROM September 1855 onwards, Alice's commentary falls away and she allows the papers to speak for themselves. On 25 September 1855, Joanna, her mother and her younger brother Bob left London for Paris. Joanna's engagement was at an end, but the letters she continued to write to Henry smack of a despair at the prospect of losing him that she had not shown before. And it is characteristic that even in the midst of that despair she is thinking of her painting, and wondering aloud to him whether she should study under Rosa Bonheur or under Thomas Couture.
Joanna went to Paris at a turning point in French art. Although the École des Beaux-Arts (like the Royal Academy) championed the academic tradition in its teaching, there were already a significant number of artists – Jean-François Millet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, Gustave Courbet and Paul Delaroche among them – who were developing new forms of realism. Barbizon, a village near Fontainebleau, became an artistic centre where Corot and Millet went to paint and students to learn.
At this stage there were relatively few artists accepting female pupils. Rosa Bonheur, a realist painter and sculptor specialising in landscapes and animals, was one of the most successful and Joanna was tempted to study under her; but Bonheur favoured large canvases, while Joanna's work thus far had tended towards small-scale portraits. Thomas Couture, who represented the juste milieu, in which French art, in the period following the revolution, strove for a happy medium between the Classical tradition and the Romantic avant-garde, appealed to her – partly because under his tutelage she would become versed in the tradition of the tête d’expression (in which students learned to depict passions and emotions in their paintings and sculptures of heads), and partly because Henry had studied with him for six months in 1850. Joanna had become accustomed to taking Henry's advice in artistic matters and there is no doubt that he exerted a powerful influence on her decision.
Her letters to him paint an invaluable picture of her life in Paris. Whatever she had initially decided after breaking off their engagement, her ingenuous habit of assuming their correspondence would continue even though she declared each letter to be the last, ensured its continuation.
3 - Letters and diaries 1856
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- The Boyce Papers
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- 15 March 2019, pp 333-510
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AT the end of the previous year, Joanna had been launched in the Saturday Review as an art critic. Her two articles on ‘Some of the French Pictures at the Paris Exposition’ excited intense interest and speculation. And though she was writing anonymously (her youth and gender were not initially known, though her cover was blown soon enough when the editor John D. Cook confided her identity to John Ruskin), her voice was sufficiently original and her opinions strongly enough expressed to attract attention. Spencer Hall, the librarian at the Athenaeum and a close friend of the family, was among the first to write to her following her debut: his letter, dated New Year's Day 1856, is characteristically elaborate, but his judgment is shrewd. Meanwhile, from Cook's point of view, his faith in his young protégée had been amply rewarded, and he proceeded to work on her to produce articles on the Royal Academy Exhibitions later in the year.
Her studies under Couture continued and her portrait of her Parisian landlady, Mme Héreau, was later accepted for the R.A. But it was becoming clear that Couture's influence on her work was not entirely benign. In one of her last extended commentaries, surviving in manuscript, Alice Street had the following to say about the influence of Couture on her mother's work.
It was most unfortunate that my Mother, whilst under the tuition of Couture should have felt it imperative, for the reasons which we gather from her letters, to follow his ill-judged method. Not only did this go against the grain with her, but it proved most disastrous to the two pictures – Madame Héreau and Rowena – painted according to Couture's precepts. The layer of bitumen between the grounding and the final coat (the process recommended by him), though giving at the time of painting a pleasant quality to the finished work, soon wrought havoc on the picture. Bitumen does not dry and has the dangerous effect of ultimately contracting the superimposed paint into patches, leaving brown bituminous cracks in between. Even in the early stages, the bitumen, in its effort to come to the surface, seems to have had the effect of giving a general darkness to the pictures on which it had been used.
Contents
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Appendix 1 The Short Memoir
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ALICE's completed Memoir appears in full as the commentary to the letters and diaries of Joanna Mary Boyce, George Price Boyce and Henry Tanworth Wells, but, as referenced in The Principles of this Edition on p. xi, there were at least two earlier versions, together with a brief handwritten survival. Most of the material in the shorter versions appears in Alice's final Memoir, but there are a number of interesting variations and additions which – in the interests of completeness – it seems sensible to include here. In particular, the Short Memoir contains some fascinating details about Henry Wells's family and his training as a commercial artist and miniaturist at the art firm of Dickinson’s, in Bond Street, London.
Passages in small type appear in the Memoir printed above, and are given so that the narrative is continuous.
JOANNA MARY BOYCE (m. Wells)
December 1831 – July 1861
The story of the short and troubled life of a greatly gifted but now unremembered artist, Joanna Mary Boyce, deserves record. Time had scarcely permitted her to show and prove her power, when, at the age of 29, death in childbirth snatched her from its realization.
A short record giving the early life of the brother and sister artists George and Joanna Boyce, seems a desirable introduction to the letters written to each other before and after their marriage by the latter and my father, Henry T. Wells.
These letters he confided to me, that through them a true picture of my mother's beautiful character and personality should be made known to her children, who were but babes when she died.
George and Joanna's father, George John Boyce, was head of a well-established business in London. He must have been a man of a most kindly and affectionate disposition to judge from the expressions of love and admiration towards him, that from first to last are found in Joanna's diaries and letters.
In April 1825 he married Anne, then 24, the pretty and fascinating daughter of Matthias Price, a prosperous yeoman farmer of Orleton, Herefordshire. One surmises that Boyce – known to have been intimate in 1821 with a certain Rev. Aaron Thomas, possibly a son of the Rev. John Thomas the then vicar of Orleton, must when on a visit to the latter, have made the acqu aintance of the three charming Price sisters, the youngest of whom was to become his wife.
7 - Letters and diaries 1860
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- 15 March 2019, pp 753-808
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ON 4 January Joanna gave birth to her second child, Alice. As with Sidney, the birth seems to have taken her by surprise as she had been to hear the scientist, Michael Faraday, give his Christmas lecture on ‘The Various Forces of Matter and Their Relations to Each Other’. The series of Christmas and other lectures, aimed at the general public and at children, were begun by the Royal Institution in 1825, and Faraday himself, who left school at the age of 13, had attended as many as possible and regarded them as fundamental to his education.
The correspondence for the first few months of the year is sparse – largely because Joanna and Henry were rarely apart (though this did not stop them sending each other notes) and Joanna was recovering her strength after her confinement. By April she must have begun to go out again socially, as the correspondence boasts an enigmatic note from John Ruskin, dated 2 May, thanking her for an unstated kindness, and hoping that she and Henry would visit him again ‘when I’m more free’. Alice Joanna was christened on 11 May.
George, who had returned to the Isle of Wight in early January to finish his painting of the Undercliff, came back to visit his sister and the new baby on 15 January (‘the little girl has pretty hands and feet’). He would disappear again to Mapledurham (another Thames haunt) at the end of April, but while in London his social and artistic life centred on the Hogarth Club. Through the club he met new artists, including Frederic Leighton, William Stillman and James McNeill Whistler. Leighton, with G. F. Watts, was a leading light in what became known as the Holland Park Circle, centred on Little Holland House, the home of Thoby and Sarah Prinsep. With regard to Watts, Sarah once said: ‘He came to stay three days; he stayed thirty years.’ According to Caroline Dakers,4 the artists of Kensington, unlike Rossetti's Chelsea set, courted the establishment: they opened their houses and studios to newly rich patrons in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, and encouraged their description in the ‘House and Garden’ magazines of the day.
List of illustrations
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6 - Letters and diaries 1859
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- 15 March 2019, pp 707-752
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THE key family events during this year were the birth of the Wells's first child, Sidney, and the death of Bob, the youngest of the Boyce siblings. Joanna's confinement was not straightforward, and at first only one visitor, her sister Anne, was allowed. When Anne's baby, Charles, died at midnight on 25 February, his first birthday, Joanna was with her, to comfort her. In addition, both she and Henry continued to work assiduously on their submissions for the Royal Academy. Joanna's included the two landscapes she had begun at Joldens, A Homestead on the Surrey Hills (which was accepted) and No Joy the Blowing Season Gives (which was not), while Henry had eight miniatures and drawings accepted, including his painting of Clara Mordan.
George also had two landscapes accepted by the Royal Academy: At Lynmouth, North Devon and The East Lynn, at Middleham, North Devon. He was a regular visitor and support to Joanna in the weeks following her confinement, lamented that she was unable to attend the Punch and Judy show he had organised, and paid regular visits not only to Rossetti but also to Rossetti's lover and model, Fanny Cornforth. He may or may not have shared her sexual favours with his friend, but there is no doubt that they were close: a drawing by Rossetti of Fanny, leaning over George's shoulder while he paints, radiates intimacy, and on 17 January he records taking her to supper at the Argyll rooms and her trepidation lest Rossetti should come in – ‘and lo! he did so …’ Whatever the nature of his relationship with Fanny, however, George's friendship with them both led him to commission a painting of her, Bocca Baciata, from Rossetti, which would later be heralded as the earliest in a series of Aesthetic paintings of female figures.
On 26 April, George left London for Streatley-on-Thames, an ancient town with the ravishing river scenes to paint. There he would remain, on and off, until the end of the year.
Given that her relationship with her mother remained unresolved – it was not until 3 June that there was any indication of Anne Boyce's seeking a reconciliation – it was generous of Joanna to accompany her to Ilfracombe to help her care for Bob in his final days.
10 - Essays by Alice Street
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IN her desire to fulfil her promise to her father as fully as possible, it was natural that Alice should look back on the letters and diaries with which she had been so closely involved for so long, and find within herself the need for a final summing up. She had lived with her parents’ lives and work for many years by then, and it was as if Joanna, who died so young and whom she had never really known except through her father's eyes, had taken on flesh for her – as if the letters themselves had given to ‘airy nothing, a local habitation and a name’. Whatever the reason, Alice was compelled to say more.
In two remarkable essays she sums up her mother's character from all that she had read and heard, and her appearance from the portraits and memorials that survived.
In Joanna's Character we are reminded of her generosity of spirit – a selfless quality that she had evidently inherited from her own father. She also had a gift for friendship which was evidenced very early on during her schooldays, and was later perhaps most apparent in her support – emotional and practical – for her less robust friend Hennie Moore. Her care both for her brother George throughout his trouble with his hip, and for her youngest brother Bob, an invalid, was extraordinary by any standards. Lest we are tempted to think of her as some kind of saint, Alice also reminds us that she had a wicked sense of humour and enjoyed nothing more than a good tease. Given her fears about the effect on her art of being a wife and a mother, it is also touching to discover just how much she revelled in her babies and just how idyllic her short marriage proved to be.
Alice also collected together the Obituaries of her mother that appeared following her untimely death. These speak for themselves, but Alexander Gilchrist summed up the general mood in the Critic on 27 July 1861, when he said: ‘Seldom have the tidings of the premature loss of a gifted artist had so painful a significance for us as those … of the unexpected death … of Mrs H. T. Wells.