FEBRUARY 13, 2021
IN MAY 2009, I used to be looking the web site of a favourite New York print store. I’ve lengthy had a fascination for engraved prints and admired the extraordinary talent that they require. Within the 18th and Nineteenth centuries, they have been the posters of the day: just like the Picasso or O’Keeffe reproductions that embellish many a dorm room or house, engraved prints allowed new or acquainted artworks to enter middle-class properties. In contrast to a Picasso poster, nonetheless, a positive engraving might take months to arrange. However the outcome was inexpensive artwork. Whereas few might buy an unique Gainsborough or Turner, many would possibly purchase an engraver’s skillfully wrought copy. Over the centuries, notable artists from Dürer to Warhol have turned their skills to the printing press, creating unique works in small or giant editions. Immediately, when the value of high quality work is much past most of us, many historic prints stay inexpensive.
As I browsed the web site, one print caught my eye. It was a portrait in pink ink of a younger lady in a Roman robe, her hair pulled again and her eyes gazing into the gap. The area behind her was full of leafy vines, although it’d simply as simply have been William Morris wallpaper. It was certainly British, completed in what we now name a Pre-Raphaelite or Aesthetic fashion. Suppose Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Edward Burne-Jones: idealized pictures of femininity that have been well-known and notorious within the second half of the Nineteenth century.
Comparable drawings by Rossetti or Burne-Jones commonly promote for 5 or 6 figures. However this was a lithograph, not a drawing; and the artist was unknown. The title “Mary Anderson” appeared in pencil within the decrease right-hand nook. An artist’s monogram simply above, combining an M and A, appeared to verify the title. However no artist by that title labored in such a method, and so the print vendor added a query mark beside the title. And a worth in three figures.
Reader, I bought it.
My day job is instructing Nineteenth-century British and American literature, and the title Mary Anderson rang a bell. On the probably time of the print’s creation — through the Eighteen Eighties — Mary Anderson was some of the well-known actresses of the day. Born in Sacramento in 1859 and raised in Kentucky, she drew sell-out crowds in New York and London. Oscar Wilde needed her to star in considered one of his performs, and he or she might have impressed the character of actress Miriam Rooth in Henry James’s 1890 novel The Tragic Muse. A fast verify confirmed that the picture resembled Anderson, albeit in a stylized rendering.
If Mary Anderson was the topic, then who was the artist? I despatched the picture round to associates and acquaintances who examine artwork historical past. One recommended Alice Mary Chambers, a little-known British artist with a couple of imprecise connections to Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler (of Mom fame). Positive sufficient, an outdated public sale catalog confirmed that Chambers used the identical monogram: not MA, however AMC (the C unobtrusively curves across the different letters).
I wasn’t fully stunned that the artist was a lady. Vital analysis by artwork historians Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, amongst others, has restored to scholarly (and generally public) view the lives and works of a substantial variety of Nineteenth-century feminine artists. In 2019, the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in London offered “Pre-Raphaelite Sisters,” an exhibition centered on a few of these girls. Marie Spartali Stillman and Evelyn De Morgan might not be family names, however they’re now acknowledged and picked up artists of the Victorian period.
However who was Alice Mary Chambers? Was she half of a bigger creative group? And if she was able to such skillful and delightful work, why wasn’t she higher recognized?
When time permitted, I searched British census information, Eighteen Eighties exhibition catalogs, and library collections for proof of her life and profession. There have been transient mentions of her in research of Whistler, and I found {that a} handful of her letters survived in London and Manchester archives. She had even donated Rossetti’s demise masks to the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in London. The analysis wasn’t simple, however finally the broad define of her life emerged.
Alice Mary Chambers was born in 1854 or 1855 (no start certificates appears to outlive) in Harlow, some 20 miles northeast of London. Her father, John Charles Chambers, was a outstanding Anglican minister who, slightly scandalously, integrated a number of the ceremony and ritual of the Catholic Church into his personal companies. Each of Alice’s mother and father died when she was younger, however she will need to have discovered a strategy to examine artwork, for she described herself within the 1881 census as “Artist in Drawing & Portray.” She was quickly exhibiting works in London, Liverpool, and Birmingham.
She was additionally making associates within the artwork world: not simply Whistler, but additionally one of many nice scoundrels of the period, Charles Augustus Howell. Howell is most well-known as we speak for serving to Dante Gabriel Rossetti dig up a pocket book of poems Rossetti had buried in his spouse’s coffin; he was additionally the inspiration for the blackmailer Milverton in considered one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales. Howell was often known as an artwork forger, and Chambers might properly have assisted him. In later years, she appears to have given up artwork and spent appreciable time touring on the continent. She died on Could 4, 1920. A quick discover of her passing within the London Occasions makes no point out of her creative profession.
It’s all the time attainable {that a} closet, attic, or uncataloged archive someplace in England is full of a trove of paperwork that can fill out this skeleton of a life. However, in all chance, we’ll by no means know as a lot about Alice Mary Chambers as we do about Rossetti or Whistler, as a result of nobody saved her letters and drawings the best way so many did for her extra well-known contemporaries. Moreover, her creative profession was slightly brief. It was (and nonetheless is) tough for ladies to be taken significantly as artists, and this might have restricted the commissions accessible to her.
A handful of Chambers’s works have come up for public sale in recent times, principally watercolors or drawings in pink chalk. However lots of her works are recognized solely by their titles in exhibition catalogs from the Royal Academy and elsewhere. The good majority are portraits of girls: in some instances, these are portraits of contemporaries, typically in classical costume (like my lithograph); in others, they’re figures from the classical world (“Cydippe,” “A Priestess of Ceres”). Displayed collectively, I think about they would supply a putting portrait of late-Victorian ideas of femininity.
I pulled collectively every thing I realized about Chambers and printed it in a scholarly article in 2018. I had written about little-known figures, principally literary, earlier than. However this felt particular: it was the primary time that an object I owned had impressed me to analysis and write about its maker. It additionally added one other lady to the boys’ membership of late-Nineteenth-century London artwork. Chambers wasn’t some Whistler hanger-on; she was a gifted artist whose physique of labor deserved consideration.
Whenever you write a few forgotten artist or author, you hope that somebody will discover. But it surely isn’t like discovering a brand new poem by Percy Shelley or a brand new letter by Jane Austen. It might take months, or years, and even a long time earlier than one other scholar picks up the thread. Younger students publish their first article anticipating that everybody will quickly be speaking about their intelligent discovery. However you quickly be taught to only get on with the following mission.
I used to be getting on with that subsequent mission when, early in 2019, I acquired an e mail from a distinguished London artwork vendor. She had seen my article, and he or she had in her possession an exquisite and beforehand unknown drawing by Alice Mary Chambers. We corresponded concerning the attainable topic of the portrait — I questioned if it is perhaps considered one of Edward Burne-Jones’s daughters, maybe Georgiana — however, with out proof, such conversations remained conjecture. When she marketed it in a gross sales catalog as Portrait of a Younger Girl, she kindly thanked me for my enter. I emailed her a thanks in response (you’d be stunned how typically individuals use your work with out citing it), including, “I’m hoping a museum acquires it, in order that I can see it in individual considered one of lately.”
That was good. However one thing even nicer occurred after that. In late September, the Huntington Library and Artwork Museum introduced that it had acquired Portrait of a Younger Girl. Because the Huntington’s news release declared,
Although she was properly linked amongst London’s Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts artists, and commonly exhibited her work on the Royal Academy, Alice Mary Chambers was a Victorian-era artist who solely just lately is rising from obscurity due to the latest definitive identification of the monogram with which she signed her work and a 2018 scholarly article on her life and profession.
Hey, that was me!
I’m completely thrilled that the Huntington has acquired this work. It matches properly with the library’s necessary William Morris assortment and the Artwork Gallery’s gorgeous Burne-Jones stained glass — and, by success, the Huntington has additionally simply been given an exquisite Edward Burne-Jones portrait of his daughter, Margaret. If my hunch is correct, Margaret will quickly be reunited together with her sister. However, most necessary, the truth that an establishment of the Huntington’s stature has signaled its curiosity in a gifted however little-known feminine artist like Alice Mary Chambers implies that different public establishments will probably observe. I hope it encourages extra work on Chambers, and work on Nineteenth-century girls artists extra typically.
And at some point, when journey is protected, and the Huntington galleries are open once more, I’ll stare upon that portrait and really feel the satisfaction of realizing that generally analysis makes a distinction.
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