Lot 97: WILLIAM FREDERICK YEAMES

WILLIAM FREDERICK YEAMES 1835 - 1918 DR. HARVEY AND THE CHILDREN OF CHARLES I signed l.l.: W.F.YEAMES 166 by 115cm., 65¼ by 45¼in.

Royal Academy, 1871, no.81

James Dafforne, 'The Works of William Frederick Yeames, A.R.A.', in Art Journal, 1871, p.100

William Frederick Yeames was born in southern Russia, the son of the Consul. His childhood was spent in Odessa and Germany but he moved to London in 1848 aged thirteen and began to study painting. He exhibited for the first time in 1859 and specialised in subjects from Elizabethan and Cromwellian history painted in fine detail and with emotional gravitas. He is best-known for his Royal Academy exhibit of 1878 And When did you Last see your Father? (FIG 1. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) which became one of the most famous and beloved paintings of the mid-nineteenth century. The picture depicts the interrogation by Roundhead soldiers of the son of a Royalist who stoically refuses to betray his father's whereabouts. The painting became so famous that a popular song The Young Royalist was based upon it and in 1934 Madame Tussaud's in London produced a waxworks tableaux of the picture (versions created in 1955 and the 1960s and only dismantled in 1990). Between 1887 and 1938 one-hundred-and-twenty applications were made to the Walker Art Gallery to print reproductions of the painting in history books. The painting caught the public imagination but the present, earlier picture, having been in a private collection rather than on public show, is much less known.

When this picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871, the following explanation of the narrative was given in the catalogue; 'The young princes accompanied their father the King, whilst he waged war with the Parliament. At the outset of the battle of Edgehill, their tutor Harvey, the famous discoverer of the circulation of blood, took them to a place of safety, as he thought, and all absorbed in his meditations, sat down, pulled out his books, and plunged into his studies. It was only when the bullets whistled about their heads that he became aware of the danger to which his young charges were exposed.' Yeames treated the subject with an element of humour, contrasting the alert and concerned animation of the children and the oblivious calm of their guardian stroking his beard and engrossed in his book. In the background the smoke of the battle of Edgehill shows the danger that confronts the children. The Battle of Edgehill was the first pitched battle of the Civil War, fought in southern Warwickshire on Sunday 23 October 1642. Yeames' painting depicts the periphery of the battlefield; 'The figures are unusually large, but effective: the princes have climbed a high bank and are watching the battle with the curiosity of young children, while the learned doctor, absorbed in his studies, seems perfectly unconscious of anything that is passing around him.' (James Dafforne, 'The Works of William Frederick Yeames, A.R.A.', in Art Journal, 1871, p.100)

There was great appeal for subjects from the history of the English Civil War in Victorian art, especially for those sympathetic with the Royalists. Walter Scott's novel Woodstock of 1826 is an important example from the literary world while a series of paintings for the Houses of Parliament by Charles West Cope tackled the subject in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1847 a popular adventure novel was published by Captain Marryat entitled Children of the New Forest containing extended accounts of the confrontations between Royalist children and revolutionaries. Both Dr. Harvey and the Children of Charles I and And When did you Last see your Father? depict historical events but Yeames' concentration on childhood gave the paintings a shared sense of humanity and emotion. Yeames may have consciously been producing pictures that would tug at the heart-strings and also paintings which would become famous as illustrations of history with which Victorian children would identify. The two pictures share not simply the historical setting of the subject, but also the contrast of the innocence and fragility of the children and the violence and danger of the conflict. The blue suit worn by the boy in And When did you Last see your Father? is the same costume worn by a child in Dr. Harvey and the Children of Charles I. It almost certainly derived from Gainsborough's Blue Boy.

As has been written of And When did you Last see your Father? but equally could be said of Dr. Harvey and the Children of Charles I; 'Yeames's achievement lay in crystallizing for all time... the whole saga of romantic, doomed Cavaliers and stern, relentless Puritans, a subject which occupied a central position amongst the themes and obsessions of the Victorian literary and artistic mind.' (Roy Strong, And When did you last see your Father, The Victorian Painter and British History, 1978, p.136)