Nineteenth century english picture frames II: The victorian high renaissance

Abstract

Some later owner could not have agreed with Rossetti, as the frame has since disappeared from the picture; but, by comparison with Leighton’s other large mythological paintings, it should have been either a moulding/entablature frame, richly decorated with antique motifs, or a full-blown aedicular design, based on 15th century Florentine altarpieces but more severely neoclassical in feeling. It might not have merited the label ‘flash’, but it would most probably have epitomized both the artistic style, which Rossetti so disliked, of Lord Leighton and the other Olympians, and the idea of the classical frame which is so closely associated with these painters of the Victorian High Renaissance-Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Burne-Jones, and even Holman Hunt. The fashion for artists in the 19th century to design their own frames, making a unified whole of painting and setting, had been fully inaugurated by the Pre-Raphaelitesespecially by the experiments of Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti with elements of early Northern styles.* The 1850s and 1860s saw an enormous increase in the range of artists’ frames, as the influence of those first designs spread through the followers and associates of the Pre-Raphaelites even to those artists who might be wholly at odds with the type of painting they framed. One such artist was Leighton; by 1855 he was already designing his own frames, notably for his first major entry for the Royal Academy at the age of 25, Cimabue’s celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence.3 Other designs followed, purely decorative in tendency and looking towards those of the Aesthetes later in the century; but as Leighton turned more and more towards the Greco-Roman world for his subject matter, the abstract decoration of his frames was joined, and later all but replaced, by classical structures and ornaments. This was very much in tune with the influences which shaped the mid-century classical revival in art. They included the example of France, where David had celebrated the virtures of the Greek and Roman republics, and whose pupil Ingres had passed on a ‘classical’ style and content to his own followers, Gleyre and Gerome, which lasted into the second half of the 19th century. The Elgin Marbles, which had arrived in England in the early 18OOs, were republicized 50 years later through their description in the Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon; and another publication of the 185Os, Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament, collected the archaeological discoveries of the previous hundred years into an accurate dictionary of design and pattern. 4 Travel increased, too; artists ventured abroad more widely, not merely in Western Europe, and examined the sources