It is unclear how Butler first made it from Washington to China, although an account of Butler’s commercial activities given in the journal of the American Missionary Association in 1881 calls him ‘at one time a protégé of Anson Burlingame.’ It therefore seems likely that he was in some way connected to the diplomatic mission of the prominent abolitionist Anson Burlingame (1820-1870). Burlingame had been appointed American Minister to the Qing Empire by Abraham Lincoln in 1861. Burlingame forged important and lasting links with Qing officials. On the eve of his retirement he was asked to lead a diplomatic mission to America consisting of a retinue of Qing diplomats to familiarise them with the manners and customs of the west. Butler evidently stayed in China and forged close links with senior Qing diplomats, this probably explains his presence on Zeng Jize’s embassy to Europe.
This drawing offers an extraordinary window into a remarkable life. George Butler was born enslaved in Washington, in the house of the prominent Naval commander, John Rodgers. He joined Anson Burlingame’s mission to China in 1861, before being appointed confidential secretary to Zeng Jize, the Qing minister to Britain, France and Russia throughout the 1870s. Warren captures Butler at the height of his powers, showing him as a worldly, respected figure and one worthy of further research and study. Come and see this drawing and learn more about the life of George Butler at The Winter Show from January 23rd
Butler makes an appearance in a number of contemporary accounts of travellers in China. Most significantly in the account of the American politician William H. Seward, who had served as Secretary of State during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, of a visit to Shanghai in 1870. Seward was invited to a ball given by Elizabeth Warden, the wife of the American merchant Henry H. Warden, where he explains:
‘At Mrs Warden’s ball, a colored man named Butler was received on a footing with the other guests. This Mr Butler, who is equally modest and intelligent, is a native of Washington, and was born a slave of Commodore Rodgers, the father of the present admiral. He is here superintendent of the ‘go-downs’, and charged with the entire freighting business of the Shanghai Steam-Navigation Company, receiving for his services a salary of four thousand dollars.’
Seward’s account of Butler’s origins can be corroborated. The marriage register for St John’s Church, on Lafayette Square, Washington contains an entry for Butler’s parents: ‘Henry Butler, slave of Captain John Rodgers, and Susan Smith, slave of George Graham Esquire. May 3 1827.’ Butler was therefore born enslaved in the household of one of the most prominent naval officers in Washington, Commodore John Rodgers (1772-1838). Butler was almost certainly born at the Rodgers House, formerly at 717 Madison Place, now the location of the United States Court of Appeals, just across the square from the Whitehouse. To be continued…
The English language papers printed in China and Hong Kong enable the reconstruction of further aspects of Butler’s life and career. In February 1877 the London and China Telegraph announced the marriage of George Augustus Butler ‘son of the Rev. Henry H. Butler of Washington City to Annie, second daughter of the late David Walker of London.’ Butler was therefore American by birth, the son of the Reverend Henry H. Butler, founding minister of the Second Baptist Church of Washington. The Butlers’ marriage certificate shows that the wedding took place in the Anglican cathedral in Shanghai and that the United States Consul General, John C. Myers (1823-1890), was their witness. It further shows that Butler was listed as Superintendent of the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company.
This was a position Butler had occupied since at least 1863. Operated by the American trading house, Russell & Co, the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company had been formed in 1862. They began operating with five steamships which eventually expanded to 18 by the 1870s. During Butler’s tenure the company would average 12% profit, with their best year seeing a 50% return. With $1.35milion in initial capital, the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company became the largest joint-stock company in China. Butler led a plan to purchase rival steamships that were operating on the Yangtze River, from 1867 the company would hold a monopoly on the river and two coastal routes, Shanghai and Ningbo and Shanghai and Tianjin. Butler appears throughout the commercial and private correspondence of European traders in this period, invariably described as ‘Black Butler’. A photograph of Russel & Co employees, taken in Hong Kong in c.1885 and now in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum. Read more in our next post…
As improbable as this sounded, it was to prove a vital lead in recovering Butler’s biography. Warren had shown a painting at the Royal Academy in 1886 entitled ‘The Marquis Tseng, Chinese Minister, awaiting officials on New Year’s Day, a custom in China’. This made a direct connection between the artist of our drawing and Chinese diplomats. Marquis Zeng Jize (Tseng Chi-tse) was the Qing minister in Europe from 1878 until 1886. Sure enough, multiple sources list George A. Butler as Zeng’s ‘secretary’. In 1887, the year Warren shows his portrait, The London and China Telegraph reported from Peking (Beijing) the arrival of Zeng’s wife and children ‘at the new house built for their reception. Mr George A. Butler, confidential secretary to the Marquis during the latter part of his stay in Europe, has resumed his duties.’ The question remained as to Butler’s nationality and how he got to China. To be continued….
Just occasionally you stumble upon a story so good you simply can’t believe it hasn’t been the subject of a PhD, a book or even a movie. A recent acquisition has led us on one of the most thrilling hunts, sleuthing through records to reconstruct the life of an amazing, completely forgotten figure. Our research took us from antebellum Washington, via London to the Qing court at the end of the nineteenth century. It all began, prosaically enough, with the inscription on the verso of a drawing. The drawing shows a prosperous, self-possessed black sitter identified as ‘G. A. Butler Esqre’. Beautifully refined and carefully worked in pen and ink, the drawing is signed by the little-known British painter Charles Knighton Warren and dated 1887.
The drawing shows Butler as a worldly figure, wearing a fashionable black coat with fur collar and cuffs, gold pince nez and gold fob watch, standing against a fashionable Japanese screen decorated with stalks. This was the first clue that he was someone of status in Victorian London. Warren showed the finished portrait at Royal Academy in 1887. The drawing reached us with the improbable statement that Butler was ‘attaché at the Chinese Embassy’. To be continued…
This remarkable, large-scale work was made by Joseph Severn from a room in Brantwood, John Ruskin’s house on the shores of Coniston Water. Severn was the son of the painter Joseph Severn, who spent much of his career in Italy, latterly as British consul where he was celebrated as the friend and promotor of John Keats. Severn junior, in turn became a painter, working with John Ruskin and Albert Goodwin in Italy. Ruskin was a formative influence on both Severn’s art and life; following his marriage to Joan Agnew, Ruskin’s niece, Severn joined Ruskin’s household, eventually becoming his heir. The present monumental work shows Ruskin’s influence in the intensity of its observation and vivid palette, whilst the view was one intimately connected with Ruskin, being made from an upstairs room in Brantwood, Ruskin’s house overlooking Coniston Water in the Lake District. Preserved in exceptional condition and housed in its original frame, this pulsating landscape shows how experimental and unexpected late nineteenth-century British landscape watercolours could be.
Included in our exhibition of Recent Acquisitions now open in the gallery.
PRB, resonant initials in the history of art. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded by a group of painters and poets in 1848, modelled on the Nazarene movement, their aims were to strip away pictorial artifice and return to the abundant detail, intense colour and complex compositions of quattrocento painting. Describing something as Pre-Raphaelite suggests certain aesthetic qualities and as a loose term it is often applied to works made by artists working into the first decade of the twentieth century. But true PRB works, those made by members of the Brotherhood between 1848 and the first moment of crisis following the exhibition of Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents in 1850 are incredibly rare.
This drawing is a proper PRB drawing and incredibly rare. Made by William Holman Hunt in December 1849 when William Michael Rosetti reported in the PRB journal that Hunt had begun ‘the head of the preacher.’ The careful, graphite study was made in preparation for Hunt’s 1850 Royal Academy exhibit, A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids, now in the Ashmolean, this was the painting that hung as a pendant to Christ in the House of his Parents. This drawing is one of only two Hunt made in preparation for the painting and was chosen by Hunt to be included in the retrospective exhibitions of his work at Liverpool and Glasgow in 1907 as well as reproducing the drawing in his own two volume account of Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
How many more PRB drawings, made by members of the Brotherhood in the white heat of their engagement with the movement are left out there? This sheet is crucial for understanding Hunt’s working method and his unflinching interest in naturalism, preserved in beautiful condition it is included in our Summer Exhibition which opens tomorrow. If you are in London come and see it and other recent acquisitions.
This severe profile head appears to relate to a series of designs the artist Gluck made of herself during the war years. Gluck is one of the most fascinating artistic figures of the mid-twentieth century. Born Hannah Gluckstein, she cut her hair short, wore tailored men’s clothes and changed her name to: ‘Gluck, no prefix, no suffix, or quotes’. Encouraged initially by Laura Knight, Gluck produced a series of beautiful still lives, landscapes and allegorical paintings which she showed at the Fine Art Society in a series of shows. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Gluck was in relationships with women, including the celebrated floral designer Constance Spry and through Spry she was commissioned to paint works for the interior designer Syrie Maugham and Molly Mount Temple. Gluck’s androgenous self-portraiture has long been recognised as pioneering and this drawing offers important evidence for this evolving self-fashioning.
The present drawing shows a head drawn in profile, features modelled in graphite. The cropped hair, swept back from the face and fine features recall Gluck’s own, the use of profile precisely accords with Gluck’s careful personal iconography. A number of studio portraits of Gluck survive – by Angus McBean, Emil Otto Hoppé – show her in profile and Romaine Brooks’s 1923 portrait of Gluck, now in the Smithsonian Art Museum, show her similarly posed. Some of these images, such as Howard Coster’s studio portrait, are lit in such a way as to emphasise the masculinity of her aesthetic. Gluck was one of the most singular and remarkable artists working in mid-twentieth century Britian, her careful self-fashioning and androgenous aesthetic make her a significant figure in histories of gender non-conformity.
Come and see this fascinating drawing at the Winter Show through Sunday.
During the 1860s Frederic Leighton was commissioned to produce designs for two of the artists who were to be included in the so-called Kensington Valhalla, a frieze of earlier artists to be executed in mosaic and decorate the South Court of the new South Kensington Museum. Leighton was given the thirteenth-century sculptor Nicola Pisano and the painter Cimabue. The commission was of some importance to the young Leighton who spent time puzzling over the composition. We are excited to be exhibiting this oil study for the head of Nicola Pisano at the Winter Show which opens to the public on Friday. This fluid oil sketch shows Leighton working from a life model to capture the resolute features of the young sculptor and establish the complex foreshortening of the left hand, which is shown holding a small bronze modello; the lithe, taut hand displays Leighton’s extraordinary facility as a designer. A drawing at Leighton’s House (LH/D/0763) survives showing Leighton’sinitial thought for the full-length figure of Pisano, wearing a hooded cloak, bearded looking at a small bronze statuette. The sheet includes details of the left hand gripping the figure, head and feet. Our sketch shows Leighton developing the salient ideas of his composition, presumably with heightened awareness that his design was to be translated into mosaic and needed to be legible from a distance. Most significantly, Leighton decides the figure should be beardless, replacing the cowl with a red velvet cap and showing the figure in a red outfit, with a white undershirt. This oil sketch was clearly made ad vivum from a model to clarify the complex position of the left hand holding the statuette. The model is identifiable as the same model Leighton used for the features of Christ in the frescos he was working on of The Wise and Foolish Virgins in the church of St Michael & All Angels, Lyndhurst in Hampshire and The Golden Hours at the same time. Leighton captured the model in a beautiful life study now at Leighton House Museum, London.
It’s rare to see abstraction in the gallery, but we are excited to exhibit this group of inventive watercolours this week. Made in 1928 these technically experimental studies are by the British artist Edmund Blampied. Painted whilst Blampied was convalescing from a serious illness these swirling, pulsating works were made by placing damp paper on glass and allowing watercolour pigment to diffuse through the substrate. Blampied called these watercolours ‘Colour Symphonies’ or ‘Colour Poems’, signing them prominently and exhibiting them at the Schwartz Galleries in New York in 1932. Each of the sheets are distinct in character, some show shimmering layers of watercolour, others opaque blots of dark ink, in some Blampied has blotted areas of wash, in others he exploits the uneven effects of drying pigment. Whilst completely abstract, the sheets are not wholly organic or accidental. Blampied has clearly manipulated the paper to cause liquid paint to run in different directions; added inks of differing viscosity and density and introduced a careful range of colours. Most of the sheets are carefully signed and dated by Blampied indicating their orientation and underscoring their status as completed art works. The title Blampied gave the works when he exhibited them in New York in 1932 ‘Colour Symphonies’ suggests a powerful analogy with music, a trope that was being actively pursued by European abstract artists at this date. These exciting works represent an important, but little known, facet of British abstraction. If you are in London for Frieze, drop in and see them.
‘He was pre-eminently a draughtsman… to draw was his natural mode of expression – line flowed from him almost without volition.’ So wrote Graham Robertson about his friend, Edward Coley Burne-Jones. This exceptionally refined head study was made by Burne-Jones in preparation for his monumental painting The Wheel of Fortune now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Completed in 1883 when it was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, the composition went through a complex evolution.
During his third visit to Italy in 1871, Burne-Jones fell comprehensively under the spell of Michelangelo. To study the Sistine Chapel frescoes he ‘bought the best opera glasses he could find, folded his railway rug thickly, and lying down on his back, read the ceiling from beginning to end, peering into every corner and revelling in its execution.’ Galvanised once home he began working on a range of new designs including The Troy Triptych, inspired by the form of Italian Renaissance altarpieces. The predella was divided by four figures, Fortune appearing at the far left. According to Philip Burne-Jones, Fortune was the artist’s favourite design. He produced at least six painted versions, of which the Musée d’Orsay is the most forceful and compelling. The present drawing represents the head of Fortune, it was presumably made early in the gestation of the project, as the model is shown with hair uncovered.
If you are in London today -Sunday - come and see this drawing in our Summer Exhibition open until 5pm.
This conflagration depicts a key moment in a night that almost precipitated full-scale revolution in Britain. Painted by William James Müller who witnessed the events in Bristol on the night of 30th October 1831.
The Representation of the People Act, known as the Reform Bill proposed a major change to the electoral system in Britain. It was designed to reapportion constituencies to address the unequal distribution of seats and radically expand the franchise by broadening and standardising the property qualifications to vote. At the general election of 1831 the Whig party campaigned on a platform of electoral reform, winning decisively, in September 1831 the Second Reform Bill was finally approved by parliament. It was in the unelected House of Lords that the Bill met opposition, not just from Tory peers, but from the bishops. News of this defeat coincided with the arrival of the anti-reform judge Charles Whetherell in Bristol for the assizes. Whetherell was the Bristol Recorder and MP for the rotten borough of Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, which had an electorate of just 48; he had spoken passionately against electoral reform and had stated in Parliament that Bristol, as a city, was anti-reform. Bristol had, in fact, sent a petition of 17,000 names to support reform and hosted large pro-reform public meetings in the first week of October.
Whetherell’s carriage was stoned as it entered Bristol and he and the Mayor, Charles Pinney, had to seek refuge in the Mansion House. Violence escalated, particularly after the police and a mixed body of Dragoons carried out a number of charges into the crowd, one of which led to the death of a protestor. Pinney read the Riot Act, but failed to calm or disperse the crowd who stormed the Mansion House, Whetherell and Pinney fleeing over the rooftops. The crowd looted the Mansion House, emptying its wine cellar and setting the building on fire.
Müller shows the Mansion House consumed by fire watched by a crowd of people. As we will trace in the following posts, the rioters moved to other civic buildings and the violence escalated. Come and see this – along with other recent discoveries – at our Summer show.
