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Introduction
- Edited by Katie J. T. Herrington, University of York
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- Book:
- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2024, pp 1-16
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Summary
THE BOYCE PAPERS, EDITED by Sue Bradbury and published by Boydell & Brewer in 2019, made accessible to students and scholars for the first time the letters and diaries of the Boyce family artists: Joanna Mary Boyce, George Price Boyce and Henry Tanworth Wells. These cover the period 1850 to 1861 in detail and have already provided the artists’ remarkable personal stories, retold in Sue Bradbury's Joanna, George and Henry: A Pre-Raphaelite Tale of Art, Love and Friendship. Interwoven with that drama, there is a wealth of material which sheds light on the artistic world of the time and on artistic methods and concerns from whether pigments ‘fly’ to the perpetual search for patrons or buyers. The protagonists’ diaries and letters illuminate both their work as painters and other roles they played within the art world. Joanna Boyce was an art critic; her forthright pieces on major French, British and international exhibitions appeared in the newly founded Saturday Review. George Boyce formed an extensive and important art collection, dispersed on his death in 1897.3 Henry Wells contributed to the running of the Royal Academy of Arts, most notably as Deputy President in 1895, during Frederick Leighton's absence due to illness.
THE BOYCE FAMILY ARTISTS AND THE ART SCENE OF THE 1840S TO 1860S
Joanna and George's father, George John Boyce was a successful businessman – a pawnbroker and wine merchant, though in later years he described himself as a silversmith. He provided his children with considerable financial means, a pleasant home in London – the family residence by the time of Joanna's birth being a villa in Maida Vale – and a high standard of education, in private boarding schools. He built up a wide circle of contacts in the cultural and artistic world and had liberal views, allowing his children to choose their own careers and positively encouraging their early interest in art. For instance, it was Joanna and George's father, ‘a man of a most kindly and affectionate disposition’, who took them sketching in Wales in 1849 and Joanna to view art in Paris in 1852.
10 - Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portrait Painter of Distinction
- Edited by Katie J. T. Herrington, University of York
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- Book:
- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2024, pp 309-336
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Summary
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.
6 - Joanna Mary Boyce: Beyond Pre-Raphaelitism
- Edited by Katie J. T. Herrington, University of York
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- Book:
- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2024, pp 191-238
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Summary
The writings of Mr. Ruskin kindled her warmest sympathies, and did much in helping to form her taste, though in no slavish spirit. The example of such men as Millais, D.G. Rossetti and Holman Hunt, did more. From their works she derived invaluable stimulus, assimilating to herself much that is best in the spirit of them, borrowing nothing of the letter, as the common run of so-called young Pre-Raphaelites do.
SO WROTE JOANNA MARY Boyce's obituarist, Alexander Gilchrist. Boyce's artworks confirm that, in her attention to the ‘spirit’ as opposed to the ‘letter’ of early Pre-Raphaelite painting, she saw through the detail to the bigger picture. Indeed, her innate intellectual and creative independence made her more than a ‘young Pre-Raphaelite’. Pioneering scholarship by Pamela Gerrish Nunn successfully reinserted Boyce into art historical conscience in the 1980s and furthered her reputation in the 1990s by giving focus to her connections with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. My reassessment examines the breadth of Boyce's pursuit of her own individual style, which was not fully realised until shortly before her premature death. Indeed, by exploring diverse visual allusions to early Pre-Raphaelite paintings and intersections between Pre-Raphaelitism and emerging Aestheticism in her work, as well as her knowledge of traditional teachings of the British and French academies of art, contemporary French juste milieu style of painting, British and French social realism and historic Venetian painting, it is possible to appreciate her engagement with diverse sources within but also beyond Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Boyce's oeuvre is critical to our understanding of British art movements from the 1850s to early 1860s. In particular, her work reveals the genealogy of a shift towards Aesthetic art in a period when the intersection of separate categories in painting, Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, became fraught. Indeed, Boyce became one of the earliest, and purest, Aesthetes. Her position in a varied milieu of artists – today associated with Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, academic art and social realism, for instance – can only be appreciated in the light of her immersion in the mid-nineteenth-century British art world as a social scene in which men, and women, networked and came to know one another's art work.