Dorilla (1913)

Autographed at the top right: “J.W. Godward 1913”

Title, signature and date on the back: “J.W. Godward Rome 1913”

Bibliography: V. Grosvenor Swanson, J.W. Godward 1861-1922. The Eclipse of Classicism, London, ACC Art Books, 2018, p. 307, no. 5.

Provenance: Italy, private collection

John William Godward has been the last of the great English Pre-Raphaelites. Specialized in Neo-Pompeian painting, in Greek and Roman subjects characterised by an extraordinary technical expertise and brilliant colourism, he has been the greatest poet of the pure Apollonian beauty between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the twilight of the Victorian Era. He trains in London at the turn of the century, following the painter William Clarke Wontner, who had his studio in St. John’s Wood, a prestigious artists’ neighbourhood where Lawrence Alma-Tadema, to whom Godward is particularly stylistically akin, also lived.

His debut at the Royal Academy’s 1887 Summer Exhibition immediately sees him as the interpreter of an aestheticizing painting of classicist inspiration, where the female figure, immersed in scenically reconstructed Graeco-Roman settings, is the absolute protagonist. The Pre-Raphaelite appearance of Godward’s models certainly contributed to his fortune: the Pettigrew sisters, the painter’s first muses, were also the models of the most sought-after artists of the time, including John Everett Millais and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Moving to one of the Bolton Studios and then to Smith Street in Kensington in the late 1980s, he deftly enters the prestigious London art scene and quickly achieves success with the public and critics. Bacchae, priestesses, mythical heroines, goddesses, maidens in Pompeian baths or silhouetted against backgrounds of precious polychrome marbles and leopard skins, or against the light blue of the Mediterranean are the subjects that Godward presents in exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

The painter’s essential growth occurred between 1895 and 1900, a period in which he participates less assiduously to exhibitions and in which, however, the activity undertaken by the art dealer and collector Thomas McLean, who disseminated the artist’s works also through engraved reproductions, was fundamental. His canvases become more detailed, the references to antiquity richer and more sumptuous, fuelled also by his passion as a collector that sees his new studio in Fulham Road filled with the most disparate antiques, marbles, statues, small columns, fabrics and vases. The painter’s most successful paintings date back to this period, starting with Dolce Far Niente, as well as his first trip to Italy between 1904 and 1905, when he visits Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Capri and Sorrento, the places he had always imagined in his canvases and now seen live. The second and longer stay in Italy took place between 1911 and 1912: in this phase he appreciates with more calmness and awareness the inebriating Roman artistic climate, amid ancient ruins, Renaissance, Baroque and artists’ studios in Via Margutta and in Villa Strohl-Fern, where Godward also occupies “one of the finest studios”¹ between 1912 and 1913.

It is exactly during the prolific and happy period spent in Villa Strohl-Fern, and precisely in 1913, that the artist painted the female profile portrait Dorilla. It was the perfect place to paint his classical beauties, in which to meditate on the ancient and on nature, far from the hustle and bustle of the streets of London. Rome is the splendid setting for the classic aesthetic precision of his maidens in profile, a small and precious gallery of female portraits with Roman names, certainly read in a compendium, which Godward begins to paint in 1909 for the collector and dealer Eugene Cremetti, McLean’s successor. The Dorilla portrait is the representation of the eternal feminine beauty as well as of her ephemeral vanity. Her dark hair is gathered in a light blue band decorated with purple circles, the bright colours of her golden dress and pink stole stand out against the fine-grained marble background, down to the Serpentine marble at the bottom. Her face is delicate, rosy, statuesque.

A limpid and dreamy composition, in which the English painter’s technical expertise, aesthetic intent and the reference to the classical, the enchanted evocation of Apollonian perfection, stand out.

Elena Lago

¹ V. Grosvenor Swanson, J.W. Godward 1861-1922. The Eclipse of Classicism, London, ACC Art Books, 2018, p. 13.