(Londra 1861 - 1922)
Perilla (1911)
Measures: cm 50,8 x 40
Technique: oil on canvas
Autographed at the top right: “J.W. Godward 1911”
Bibliography: V. Grosvenor Swanson, J.W. Godward 1861-1922. The Eclipse of Classicism, Londra, ACC Art Books, 2018, p. 303, no. 7.
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 during the second Roman period, precisely in 1911, that the meditative purity of the female portrait of Perilla is located, one of the most refined profiled executed by Godward. It is part of a small cycle of profile portraits, begun in 1909, and purchased by his collector and dealer Eugene Cremetti, McClean’s successor. Perilla, one of the daughters of the Latin poet Ovid, stands out against an elegant marble wall – a recurring motif found in his works of the 1910s. Her dark hair is gathered in a very fine golden ribbon, the red dress is combined with a lavender stole with delicate drapery.
An ethereal and precious composition in which the absolute technical perfection and colouristic accuracy of the English painter, the aesthetical intention, the dreamy evocation of harmonious classical beauty and the emblematic representation of the ideal Apollonian balance stand out.
1 V. Grosvenor Swanson, J.W. Godward 1861-1922. The Eclipse of Classicism, Londra, ACC Art Books, 2018, p. 135.
Elena Lago
