Lot 25: Valentine Cameron Prinsep, R.A. (1838-1904)

The Gossips
signed 'Val Prinsep' (lower right)
oil on canvas
38 x 30 1/4 in. (96.5 x 79.4 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1871, no. 1030

Athenaeum, no. 2272, 13 May 1871, p. 596.
Times, 15 May 1871, p. 6.

with Henry Whitley & Son, Scarborough.
with Frost & Reed, London.

A genial, extrovert, giant of a man, popular in artistic and social circles. Val Prinsep belonged to a leading Anglo-Indian family that had already produced several talented amateur artists. He was born in Calcutta on St Valentine's Day 1838; his father, Thoby Prinsep, was a distinguished Indian civil servant, and his mother, the redoubtable Sara, was one of the celebrated Pattle sisters, who also included Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer, and Virginia, Countess Somers, one of the great beauties of the day. The Prinseps returned to England in 1843, and in 1851 took a lease on Little Holland House in Kensington. There for nearly twenty-five years Sara presided over a salon frequented by celebrities in the worlds of art, politics, literature and science.

Val received his earliest art education from G.F.Watts, who lived in the house as its genius-in-residence. By 1857 he had fallen under the spell of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, two more of his mother's 'lions', and was helping them to paint murals illustrating the Morte d'Arthur in the Oxford Union. He then went on to study under Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he encountered Whistler, Poynter, George du Maurier and other members of the so-called 'Paris Gang'. He appears as Taffy in Trilby, du Maurier's romanticised account of the vie de bohème published in 1894. In the 1860s Prinsep came under the influence of Frederic Leighton, his neighbour in the colony of artists that was rapidly establising itself to the south-west of Holland Park, and in 1879 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, of which Leighton had become President the previous year. This was probably in recognition of his labours on an enormous canvas depicting the durbar held by Lord Lytton at Delhi in 1877 to proclaim Queen Victoria Empress of India. The picture was exhibited at the R.A. in 1880 and is now in St James's Palace.

Given the varied influences to which Prinsep was exposed in early life, it is not surprising that his work is eclectic. In the late 1850s he toyed with the quaint medievalism currently in vogue in Rossetti's circle. By the early 1860s he was working in the 'Venetian' idiom that was attracting so many of the Pre-Raphaelites and their contemporaries. Later still he was to opt for a conventional academic mode, reflecting his training in Paris.

The Gossips, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871, shows him painting an eighteenth-century costume piece of a type he often attempted at this time. One of the earliest examples, My Lady Betty, appeared at the R.A. in 1864 and was sold in these Rooms on 3 June 1999 (lot 82); other examples included An Amateur Dairy Maid (1869), Reading 'Sir Charles Grandison' (1870) and Lady Teazle (1873). Such pictures were enormously popular during the early phase of the Aesthetic movement. John Everett Millais was one of the leading exponents, attiring his models in Georgian dress as assiduously as he sought inspiration from Reynolds and Gainsborough in forging his later style. Fine examples are his two 'portraits' of Swift's heroines Stella and Vanessa (Manchester Art Gallery and Sudley House, Liverpool), shown at the R.A. respectively in 1868 and 1869, but Early Days, which followed in 1873, is perhaps more typical. Sold by Christie's in London in June 2003, the picture exemplifies Millais' many likenesses of enchanting little girls in mob cap. All echo Reynolds' portrait of his great-niece Theophila Gwatkin as 'Simplicity', one of the most famous and appealing of his so-called 'fancy themes'.

Millais and Prinsep, however, were only two among may representatives of the eighteenth century revival. Some artists, like W.Q. Orchardson and Marcus Stone, built much of their reputation on Georgian or Regency subjects, while others as varied as W.P. Frith, G.D. Leslie, Atkinson Grimshaw and G.H. Boughton made significant contributions. Boughton's A Chapter from 'Pamela', inspired by Richardson's well-known novel, appeared at the R.A. the same year as Prinsep's Gossips, causing William Bell Scott, in a review in the Academy, to comment on the fashion for such 'idylls'. Indeed neither Scott nor his mistress Alice Boyd were immune to this fashion themselves. Nor of course was the revival confined to easel pictures. Any comprehensive study of the subject would have to take account as Walter Crane's illustrated children's books and the 'Queen Anne' style in architecture, to name but two more manifestations.

Prinsep must have been disappointed in the critical response to Gossips. Bell Scott was so struck by another of his pictures that year, Odin, The Norther God of War, that he overlooked the more retiring canvas, while the Times, though it liked this 'graceful group of handsome girls', did not think it up to Reading 'Sir Charles Grandison' and other 'former studies of female loveliness from the same hand'. F.G. Stephens held out hopes of more positive comments when he told his readers in the Athenaeum that he would 'notice' the picture 'by and by'. But either from lack of space or forgetfulness he never did so.

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