Pictures worth a thousand words

The Victorian narrative paintings on display at the Tampa Museum of Art lecture on morality, exhort patriotism, teach history and just plain pique our curiosity.

By MARY ANN MARGER

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 18, 2001

TAMPA -- Like trailers for movies, the Victorian narrative paintings from the Forbes magazine collection, now on view at the Tampa Museum of Art, tell just part of the story.

Unlike the trailers, the paintings are all there is. You won't get resolutions, just riddles.

And sometimes just soupy satisfaction. The text panel introducing the show describes the subject matter's range "from the melodramatic to the sentimental to the penetratingly psychological."

The show takes you back a hundred years and more, before movies, soap operas and Oprah Winfrey, when people sought out the exhibits of the Royal Academy for entertainment and, as with Oprah's Book Club, the occasional shred of enlightenment. Now that the 20th century, which brought us perplexing and elitist art forms, is over, people are gleefully turning to shows like this for art they can understand. (Don't get too complacent -- the mind-wrenching stuff hasn't left.)

If you associate Forbes with acquisitions, it's probably for Malcolm Forbes' collections of toy soldiers or Faberge eggs. But those are in the Forbes Magazine Galleries in Manhattan. The London galleries house a noted collection of 19th century English art, collected by Malcolm's son Christopher "Kip" Forbes, and on tour in the United States for the first time.

The paintings on view in "The Defining Moment" lie somewhere between a Dickens novel and a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Sometimes they are morality plays, recalling the era of Britain's longest-reigning (1837-1901) monarch, Queen Victoria, and the conservative behavior she prompted.

Back then everyone knew their place. Boys learned early to be strong while girls learned to pour tea. John Morgan's boys get ready to slug it out in The Fight. Nearby on the wall, in It's My Turn to Play Mother by Sophie Anderson, a little girl pouts cutely when she's denied the grown-up role.

Class distinctions were taken for granted. Arthur Hughes' Home from Work depicts with dignity a laborer coming home from a hard day's work to be lovingly greeted by his wife and child. Marcus Stone's My Lady Is a Widow and Childless shows that wealth does not always bring joy. William Mulready's Train Up a Child suggests giving to the poor.

All these works are narrative paintings -- paintings whose chief function is to tell a story. They are tableaus, as if frozen from a theatrical scene. Some are morality plays: In Night on the River Thames by Augustus Egg, an adulteress crouches with her illegitimate child beneath Waterloo Bridge.

Some teach current events: Jeremy Barrett's Florence Nightingale acquaints people with the rigors of the Crimean War. Some suggest never forgetting her majesty: John Evan Hodgson's grubby soldiers in the desert raise their canteens to toast the queen. Some are just fun: Alexander Burr's Blind Man's Buff depicts delighted children dodging a happily blindfolded old man.

Many, like Norman Rockwell's narratives a century later, tell you clearly what they're about. But others seethe with ambiguity. For whom is the damsel mourning in Arthur Wardle's A Comforting Friend? What is the outcome of Robert Gemmell Hutchison's Awaiting the Verdict? Why is the lady in Edmund Blair Leighton's Till Death Do Us Part marrying the wrong man?

The mirror and the doorway are often-used devices in these works, enabling the artist to introduce a second scene to the story line. Alice Walker in Wounded Feelings shows the lady in darkness and the source of her distress in light beyond the archway. Rebecca Solomon's The Love Letter leaves the reflected intruder unannounced.

William Holman Hunt also uses a mirror in Il Dolce Far Niente ("the sweet doing nothing"), though it is overshadowed by the fine-tuned detail that the artist gives his exotically dressed lady with flowing curls, seated in a wooden chair with elegant white inlay.

Hunt, John Everett Millais and James Collinson, also in the show, were three of seven founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a secret movement that rejected 19th century academic painting and sought instead a return to early Renaissance standards, embracing "truth to nature" rather than an illusionistic approach.

Nevertheless, they later turned to the Royal Academy, which accepted their works. Millais served as its president. Most of the works on view were exhibited in Royal Academy shows.

We don't know if nepotism played a part in acceptance, but family ties are apparent. Exhibiting artists John and Thomas Faed were brothers, as were Alexander and John Burr. Frederick Hayllar's four daughters were all artists exhibited in both the academy and in this show. Ironically, the senior Hardy's painting at the museum is titled The Only Daughter, portraying the "defining moment" when a young woman takes leave of her parents before joining her suitor.

The half-dozen women artists in the show add richness and variety to the treatment of themes. Kate Hayllar's A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy Forever centers around a black-and-white print of Raphael's painting Madonna and Child, which she translates back into paint.

A single risque work marks the show, Henry Scott Tuke's nude male bathers in Worshippers of the Sun. But that was in 1908, when "Victorian" had turned to "Edwardian."

The show, organized by the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, is highly accessible not only by the nature of the works but by text panels throughout, and a review copy of the catalog (attached to a stand). The mood is augmented by furniture borrowed from the Plant Museum across the river, including an 1856 bust of the young queen by M. Noble, complementing John Calcott Horsly's A Portrait of Queen Victoria and Her Children, c. 1852-1865. It's a pleasant change from her more common depiction, widowed in 1861, and forever after attired in black.

From Tampa the show goes to its fifth and final venue, the Forbes Magazine Galleries, New York.

Art review: "The Defining Moment: Victorian Narrative Paintings from the Forbes Magazine Collection," through April 22 at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, Tampa. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thur., 1 to 5 p.m. Sun. Admission: Adults $5, seniors $4, students and children 6-18 $3. Admission by donation only on Thursday, 5 to 8 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m. to noon. Call (813) 274-8130 or check http://www.tampamuseum.com

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