Tout ce qui brille n’est pas or: The Gilded Apple (1899)

Abstract

In 1901, the neo-pre-Raphaelite artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale became an overnight success with a show of watercolours at the London dealers Dowdeswell’s. The works were characterised by critics as decorative moralities relying on allegory and literary reference. Focussing on one of these works, The Gilded Apple, allows an examination of this millennial moment of currency for the moral parable in which the traditional benchmark of wealth, good and benefit—gold—was a central referent.This intensely worked drawing was not explained by the artist, whom some critics reproached for the opacity of her stories. Notwithstanding, this choice of theme can be connected to her preoccupation with the competing appeal of worldly wealth and moral or spiritual richness, seen in other works in the 1901 exhibition which generally warned against materialism; and to the intensely topical issue of the worth of modern woman’s soul or character, which appeared widely in cultural discourse at the time, and in which Brickdale, as a woman, would have been expected to interest herself. Gilding is used here to invoke that long-established English proverb that warns against trusting in appearances in the pursuit of riches. This is not the reliable, genuinely precious golden apple of the beauty contest involving Paris, Helen and Venus; or of the race run by Atalanta, who was decoyed into losing her independence by the lure of golden apples; but a superficially valuable object or prize by which the unwary, gullible or greedy person stands to be duped. Modern woman’s role in this moral challenge was the turn-of-the-century society’s preoccupation: it is not certain whether it was the artist’s, but it could well have been her viewer’s.