Lot 106: Valentine Cameron Prinsep, R.A. (1838 - 1904)

St John the Evangelist teaching the New Commandment 'That ye love one another'
oil on canvas
35 1/2 x 53 1/2 in. (90.2 x 135.9 cm.)
in the original frame

St John the Evangelist, one of the apostles closest to Christ and the author of the Fourth Gospel, played a prominent part in the history of the early Church; he shared in the work of his brother St Peter, and later settled at Ephesus. The Book of Revelation is ascribed to him, although his authorship has been doubted.

This interesting painting seems to be an important but unrecorded work by Val Prinsep, dating from about 1861. It is surely later than his earliest known picture, The Queen was in her Parlour, eating Bread and Honey (Manchester City Art Gallery), an essay in quaint Rossettian medievalism exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1859. On the other hand, it seems to be earlier by several years than La Festa di Lido, shown at the Royal Academy in 1866 and sold in these Rooms as part of the Forbes Collection on 20 February 2003, lot 293. Our picture and La Festa are not in fact dissimilar in conception, and a certain pyschology common to the figures in both works is one of the things that supports the attribution of St John the Evangelist to Prinsep. But while this picture still betrays the artist's Pre-Raphaelite affiliations, La Festa shows him working in a more international style that reflects his training in the atelier of Charles Gleyre. Having received his earliest artistic instruction from G.F. Watts, the resident genius at his parents' home, Little Holland House in Kensington, Prinsep had joined Rossetti, Burne-Jones, William Morris and others in painting the famous Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union debating chamber in the autumn of 1857. In 1859 he left to pursue his studies in Paris, encountering Whistler, Poynter, du Maurier and other members of the so-called Paris Gang, and earning his place in du Maurier's fictionalised account of the vie de bohème, Trilby (1894).
St John the Evangelist seems to owe something to Holman Hunt's Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), a work of 1849-50 that Prinsep had probably seen in Thomas Combe's collection when he was painting his Union mural in 1857. There is also a marked resemblance to the central panel of the triptych that was painted by Burne-Jones as an altarpiece for St Paul's Church, Brighton, in 1861 (Tate Gallery). Showing the kings and shepherds adoring the infant Christ, this painting, like St John the Evangelist, is a composiition with a 'hole' in the middle, round which the figures are grouped.

The two pictures must in fact be more or less contemporary, and very much the product of shared ideas. By 1861 Burne-Jones and Prinsep had known each other well for several years. They had met in July 1857, when Rossetti had taken Burne-Jones to Little Holland House, and that autumn they had both been involved with the Union murals. When Burne-Jones's health gave way in the summer of 1858, Sara Prinsep, Val's kindly and rather bossy mother, had taken him to recover at Little Holland House, and he had lived there for several months, adding lustre to her salon. Val, Lady Burne-Jones recalled, 'was like a younger brother to him' at this time, 'and used his great strength tenderly for his help'. (Val was blessed with a magnificent physique, while Burne-Jones was neurasthenic.) The two men were still close in the autumn of 1859 when they travelled together in north Italy, encouraged to make the pilgrimage by their mentors Ruskin and Watts.

Burne-Jones's altarpiece and Prinsep's St John the Evangelist have more in common than similar compositions. In both pictures members of the artists' circle can be identified as models. Burne-Jones painted William Morris as one of the magi, himself and Swinburne as shepherds, and either his wife or Jane Morris as the Virgin Mary. In Prinsep's painting, the elderly St John may well be a likeness of his father, Thoby Prinsep, a distinguished retired Indian civil servant, or the poet Sir Henry Taylor, another of Sara's 'lions' (who certainly had the beard); while the apostle's female audience could include almost any of the girls and young women who populated Little Holland House: Val's sister Alice, for example, of whom Watts painted a fine portrait in 1860 (G.F. Watts: Portraits, exh. National Portrait Gallery, London, 2004, cat. no. 37, illustrated); his cousins May Prinsep and Julia Jackson, who were also immortalised either by Watts or their aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer; or the numerous Anglo-Indian children whom the hospitable Prinseps took under their wing while their parents were abroad. As for the lank-haired man leaning on a staff behind this group, he bears a distinct resemblance to Burne-Jones, even if he looks older than the artist would have been in 1861 (twenty-eight).

The environs of Little Holland House itself seem to be reflected in the picture's landscape background. This part of Kensington was still very rural, and fields with grazing sheep lay not far beyond the house's spacious gardens.

Val Prinsep is an artist who urgently needs further research, and when that study is undertaken our picture will be important evidence for a reconstruction of his early career.

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.