To the Pre Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery today: here are (with a couple of exceptions coming up later) some details. I saw no lichen - or very little to speak of; no snails; only vaguely delineated dandelions - but plenty of other flowers;
cats very much needing to be fed;
musicians of various ethnicities;
plants wilting in their pots;
and a rather mischievous looking owl.
One of the real treats of the show are the number of pictures for which the Jamaica-born Fanny Eaton was the model, and the catalogue has an essay on her based on family history research.
And then quite the saddest thing was the register/log from the County Asylum in West Sussex, which is where Fanny Cornforth passed the last couple of years of her life, suffering from dementia: the model for Rossetti's Found and The Blue Bower; Spencer Stanhope's Thoughts of the Past; Burne-Jones's Sidonia von Bork 1560, and much more.
Just after the Cornforth room I overheard:
"They had very open relationships, you know. But they were artists, of course."
No comments:
Post a Comment