John William Godward, R.B.A.

Christie's, 6 March 1970, lot 136;
Leger Galleries, London;
Private collection

Vern Swanson, John William Godward: The Eclipse of Classicism, 1997, p.242, cat. no.1918.7

STRUCTURE This picture is unlined and in very good condition. There are areas of fine craquelure around the girl's face but this is only visible upon close inspection. The paint surface is clean. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There is very fine infilling to the craquelure but this has been very sensitively executed. FRAME This picture is under glass and contained in a moulded plaster frame (some of the mouldings are lifting) with a wooden surround. For more information regarding this picture please contact the Victorian & Edwardian Pictures Department on +44 (0)207 293 5718.
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Godward was the son of an investment clerk and born into a  conservative and respectable family living in Battersea in London. His family were not supportive of his wish to become a painter but against their wishes he is believed to have studied 'rendering and graining' alongside fellow classicist William Clarke Wontner, probably learning to paint fake marble for fireplaces and furniture. Details of more formal artistic training have not been found but it is likely that he was a student at one of the many art schools in London, or possibly in Europe. In 1887 Godward had a picture accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time, a painting entitled The Yellow Turban. It was around this time that he began renting one of the Bolton Studios in Kensington in the heart of the London artist community. Godward continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy for almost two decades but by 1905 he felt that his style of painting was no longer receiving critical acclaim and he ceased to exhibit and sold his pictures through an agent and various art dealers. Despite his withdrawal from the public eye Godward enjoyed commercial success during his lifetime and the fact that he did not have to paint to please critics and the hanging committees of art galleries meant that he was able to paint what he wanted; the lovely ladies in roman garb surrounded by beautiful objects and flowers. 

In his study of Victorian painters of classical subjects Christopher Wood described Godward's career; '... the best, and the most serious of Alma-Tadema's followers was John William Godward... All his life he devoted himself only to classical subjects, invariably involving girls in classical robes on marble terraces, but painted with a degree of technical mastery that almost rivals that of Alma-Tadema. Godward was also an admirer of Lord Leighton, and his figures do sometimes achieve a monumentality lacking in the work of most of Alma-Tademas followers.' (Christopher Wood, Olympian Dreamers, Victorian Classical Painters 1860-1914, 1983, p.247) Godward's admiration of Leighton is proved by a photograph of a model in his studio standing before a fireplace behind which is a large framed print of Leighton's famous The Garden of the Hesperides in which the female figures have a similar heavy languor to the maidens painted by Godward. Another modern writer has recognised the influence of Leighton in Godward's work; 'Godward's treatment of women is completely decorative. The drapery of Leighton, the slightly monumental cast of the figures, is used for decorative purposes.' (Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny, The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting, 1989, p. 338).

Godward was a quiet and ultimately tragic man (he committed suicide in 1922) but the bleakness of his solitary life is never hinted at in his pictures which depict a perfect world of happiness and sunshine. Consumed by an almost obsessive interest in female beauty, Godward toiled away in his studio upon a series of paintings which explore the varying aesthetics of luscious female sexuality. Glamorous, youthful and sultry, his young Grecian maidens are iconic in the eternal perfection of those lovely soft cheeks and elegant white necks. Diaphanous Greek robes, barbaric jewelry and backgrounds of cool reflective marble compound the exotic sensuality and suggest links to those smoldering courtesans of the ancient world; of Helen of Troy, Phryne and Campaspe. The greatest appeal of Godward's paintings is the sensual rendering of textures and harmonious colouring, from the pale coolness of the marble to the warm blush of the girl's lips. The present picture takes its title from the name of the first love of Sextus Propertius, one of the greatest of all Roman elegiac poets whose magnus opus was the poem Elegies. She was a maid in the house of her love-rival Cynthia whose jealousy she provoked when Propertius reveals his affection for the woman that had instructed him in the arts of love-making when he was an innocent youth. She is demurely dressed in violet and seen against a wall of varying marbles which display Godward's wonderful ability to paint stone, learned when he trained as a painter of marble fireplaces. Lycinna was painted during Godward's stay in Rome, when he took a studio at the Villa Strohl Fern. A story told within the Godward family explains his reason for quitting London and moving to Rome; 'He left in a rush, running off with his Italian model to Italy... His mother never forgave him for this breach of conduct. He shocked the family by living with his model.' (Vern Swanson, John William Godward, The Eclipse of Classicism, 1997, p. 96)