BOOKS

So beautiful she made men cry

Simon Poëwelcomes a revealing biography of Marie Stillman, a Pre-Raphaelite painter who was famous for both her looks and her inexplicable marriage.

The painter Marie Stillman was the daughter of Michael Spartali, importexport merchant and sometime Greek consul in London. Born in 1843, she was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown and worked alongside his daughter Lucy (the future Mrs William Michael Rossetti), who became one of her closest friends. She quickly developed a distinctive and unmistakable style of her own. Stillman was also a great beauty. Swinburne said that she was so beautiful it made him want to sit down and cry. John Addington Symonds, the author of Renaissance in Italy(1875-86), who knew her in Florence, numbered her among the wonders of the city: ‘There is the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Bargello, the Accademia! There are the churches. There is Villari to talk to & Miss Paget [Vernon Lee] to quarrel with & Mrs Stillman to admire.’ The arch

A Pre-Raphaelite Marriage: the Lives and Works of Marie Spartali Stillman and William James Stillman

D AVID B. E LLIOTT

Antique Collectors’ Club, £35

ISBN 1 85149 495 2

seducer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (to whose fabled charms she proved resistant, but who became a friend) said she was ‘the most beautiful woman that ever lived or ever will live in the world, though she can’t be less than 45’. She sat to Brown, BurneJones, G.F. Watts, Val Prinsep, J.R. Spencer Stanhope, Julia Margaret Cameron and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of whose favourite models she was. Immortalised in their work, she became one of that small group of women whose faces have shaped

our notion of beauty. After she died in London, a few days short of her eightyfourth birthday, her grieving stepdaughter Bella wrote that she had ‘conquered old age and won eternal youth…the marvellous beauty of her, lying there like an empress, so sweet and serene, makes one almost glad.’ Stillman was loved by a wide circle of friends throughout her long life. Both her own children and her two stepdaughters adored her equally. No one seems to have had a bad word to say for her. And yet she chose to yoke herself aged 27 (he was 42) to the self-centred, rancorous, quarrelsome Yankee William James Stillman (18281901), whose first wife had committed suicide, and whom she married in 1871 against the wishes of her family and the advice of her friends. William Stillman had been a painter of real but inadequate gifts who characteristically blamed Ruskin (whose

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follower he had been) for the extinction of his modest talent. Like Rossetti (whom he introduced to the drug) and Marie’s sister Christina (who died of it), he was a regular user of chloral, which had a bad effect on both his health and his personality. His twisted features glare out of Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin(1873-74, Lady Lever Art Gallery). Stillman worked as a diplomat in Italy and Crete and was The Timescorrespondent in the Balkans, Greece and Italy, but could never sufficiently suppress his own prejudices to be either an unbiased national representative or an objective reporter. He was fearless, committed to the truth as he saw it, and a life-long ‘loose cannon’. Because of his work and his wife’s childcare and other family responsibilities they spent long periods living apart, and yet, when he died after thirty years of marriage, she mourned the loss of ‘this dearest of all companions and friends’. Still, many of her friends must have felt, as readers of David Elliott’s excellent double biography will doubtless feel, that acquaintance with William was at best a price worth paying for familiarity with Marie. Henry James’s judgement that Marie Stillman was ‘a spontaneous, sincere, naïve Pre-Raphaelite’ and George Bernard Shaw’s that ‘in spite of manipulative deficiencies, her pictures have the rare quality of being memorable’ are both sound. She worked mostly on a small scale

in watercolour and gouache, and the colour and atmosphere of her paintings are always admirable even when the drawing is faulty. Her Italian landscapes show the influence of Giovanni Costa and the Etruscans, while her flower pieces recall Fantin-Latour, and her English village scenes (often painted around her parents’ home in the Isle of Wight) Helen Allingham. Her portraits and subject pictures (many of them from Dante, who, following Rossetti, she loved) probably show her at her best. Stillman’s reputation has risen steadily in recent years. She was a star of the 1997-98 ‘Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists’ exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery. Her substantial presence in the ‘Waking Dreams’ exhibition of paintings from the Delaware ArtMuseum (currently at the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota), where she is shown to advantage in top-notch company, is also a reminder of her friendship with the great American collector Samuel Bancroft. David Elliott’s book will certainly not be the last word on her, but, with its profuse (if not always very good quality) illustrations, wealth of biographical detail and comprehensive checklist of identified works by the artist, it will be an invaluable point of reference for years to come.

A critic and historian,Simon Poë is researching the painter Roddam Spencer Stanhope.

ACAPRICCIOREDISCOVERED

In 2004 a mysterious marble Capriccio appeared in a London saleroom. Now known to be by the celebrated neoclassical sculptor and medallist Benedetto Pistrucci, this virtuoso carving looks like a pile of classical fragments, but is in fact a marble autobiography. Now owned by Lord Rothschild, it is elucidated in an exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (until 18 March) and then at Waddesdon Manor (29 March-29 May). It is accompanied by an elegant book: Pistrucci’s Capriccio: A Rediscovered Masterpiece ofRegencySculpture, published by the museum and Waddesdon, £6. To order it, visit www.soane.org

Hybrid houses in Tartary

James Stevens Curlreviews an account of the little-known Crimean houses, gardens and landscapes created by British designers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries .

Charles Cameron and Adam Menelaws are among the British architects who are remembered today for their buildings in Russia. It was through Cameron that his fellow Scot William Hastie (c. 1755-1832) settled in Russia, where he had a distinguished career, even though he seems to have started life as a stonemason. Tutored by Cameron, he became an accomplished draughtsman, and his design work at Tsarskoe Selo certainly does not lack distinction. His work in the Crimea (now an autonomous state within the Republic of Ukraine) included measured drawings of the Palace at Bakhchisaray that demonstrate his mastery of draughtsmanship: Charles Brett reproduces them in his new book (published shortly before his death last year), and very fine they are too. Hastie’s meticulous drawings were to provide the basis for restoration work under the supposedly English Philip Elson (also known as Philippe d’Elson or Filipp Fyodorovich Elson, c. 1785-1867), ‘one of the earliest specialised conservation architects in Europe’, as Brett calls him. Although Bakhchisaray was used as a hospital during the Crimean War (which, in Brett’s words, ‘did the palace little good’), it owes its present appearance largely to the efforts of Hastie and Elson. Now a museum, it is a fascinating example of the architecture of the Islamic Khans, beside which is a haunting cemetery with mausolea. Bakhchisaray was restored under the aegis of Count (later Prince) Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov (1781-1856), Governor-General of New Russia (which

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