Thomas Matthews Rooke

Mrs Noel Rooke, the artist's daughter-in-law;
Private collection

Julian Hartnoll (at the Burlington Fine Arts Fair, Royal Academy), Victorian Art – Sacred & Secular, 1979, no. 33

STRUCTURE The sheet is sound and not laid down but is adhered to a mount about the edges. The work is in good overall condition with stong colours throughout. FRAME Held under glass in a gilt plaster.
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Thomas Matthews Rooke's conversation piece entitled The Musicians shows the artist's brother, Alfred Rooke and his family in their house at Park Hill, Ealing. In the foreground are seen Ethel Rooke, who in adult life became a professional musician, and her brother, Herbert Kerr Rooke, who followed a career as a marine artist and graphic designer. Seated beside the fire is Mrs Rooke, Alfred and Thomas Matthews' Rooke's mother. As an image of family life, the watercolour speaks of a loving and harmonious relationship between the three generations present. Both branches of the Rooke family seem to have been very musical, and with a particular fondness for impromptu concerts in their various houses.

The decoration of the interior – with coloured papers on the walls, blue and white plates and other decorative ceramics on display, shelves of finely bound folios, aesthetically framed drawings, and ebonised furniture, indicate that Alfred and his wife shared T.M. Rooke's aesthetic taste (which perhaps originated in his having worked as a designer for Morris and Co, and through whom he had come into contact with Edward Burne-Jones when he had been assigned to assist with the designs for stained glass that Burne-Jones made for the firm and otherwise to assist him in his studio.

T.M. Rooke's early life was spent in London, as he was the son of a Jermyn Street tailor. He attended evening classes at the National School of Design at South Kensington and in 1868 enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1876, showing a succession of Old Testament subjects as well as landscapes. He also sent to the Grosvenor and New galleries, and eventually became a member of the Royal Water-Colour Society. Perhaps his most characteristic works are his watercolours of buildings, architectural detail, and decoration – and in which he focuses closely on places which Ruskin feared were at risk of outright destruction or insensitive restoration. He had a gentle and unassuming personality; at the time when Burne-Jones was recommending Rooke as an architectural draughtsman and copyist to Ruskin, Burne-Jones said of him: 'Also there is a very high place in Heaven waiting for him and He Doesn't Know It.' Rooke died in his hundredth year in his house in Queen Anne's Gardens, Bedford Park. 

The picture can be dated to 1891-1892. CSN