Maria Spilsbury

The Rt. Rev. and Hon. Shute Barrington, Bishop of Llandaff and later Bishop of Salisbury and Bishop of Durham (1734–1826);

Thence by descent to the present owners.

C. Yeldham, Maria Spilsbury (1776–1820), Artist and Evangelical, Farnham 2010, p. 174.

London, Royal Academy, 1803, no. 645 (A Sunday-School).

This monumental and important painting by the British female artist Maria Spilsbury is the most important work by the artist to appear at auction in recent times. It can be identified with a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1803 and appears to have retained its original frame.

The Artist

Maria Spilsbury exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London from the age of 15 and between 1792 and 1808 exhibited forty-nine works. She was among some 700 female artists to have exhibited at the RA between 1769 and 1830. Relatively little is known about Maria’s artistic career but what is evident is that much of her art is informed by her evangelical Protestant upbringing and its concern for education and enlightenment. During her life, Maria and her family (her father was an engraver and a Moravian preacher) were acquainted with the Wesley family and she was brought up in the Moravian Church. The German Moravian church, or The United Brethren, dates back to the 15th century and is one of the oldest Protestant denominations. The British Methodist movement is an offshoot that came to England in the 18th Century. 

The highlight of her prolific career was the Prince Regent’s commission to paint Patron’s Day at the Seven Churches, Glendalough (1816, The National Gallery of Ireland) which was considered one of the most celebrated pictures ever painted of ‘Irish manners’. The Prince was a frequent visitor to Maria’s studio St George’s Row in London, and expressed his impatience at the slow progress of the artist’s work, exclaiming: ‘Really, Mrs Taylor (Maria’s married name), I swear that you can do no more to that! You’ve finished it and a damned good picture it is.’

Women often appear at this time as guardians and nurturers of morality but Maria’s art differs in that it adds an overt symbolism and draws on her intensely religious childhood experience. At the end of the 18th century art was increasingly being used by evangelicals as a tool in their moral crusade. Artists were employing scriptural subjects, classified as historical subjects to avoid association with Catholicism. With the Church of England’s increasing acceptance of the use of art for religious purposes, there was a huge growth in the production of illustrated bibles. Maria Spilsbury’s religious upbringing instilled in her an extensive knowledge of the bible and the use of biblical episodes was a way of encouraging the religious education of children.

The present picture must also be seen in the context of a huge expansion at the turn of the century of the Sunday School movement. Maria often set her education scenes outdoors, reflecting the innocence and virtue of the natural world and the thought that believers travelled along an enlightened path, lined with flowers, streams, trees and fruit.  This too was echoed in the hymns of the time. So too, in the first years of the 19th century, the cottage became a symbol of Maria Spilsbury’s religious and moral philosophy. In the pair of oil paintings entitled Going to School and After School (both engraved in 1802), a mother is seen with her children at the cottage door. The symbolic vines and bunches of grapes on the cottage exterior look to be those seen from the interior of The Sunday School, which although set indoors is filled with nature and all its accompanying religious meaning.

The Painting

A closely related picture, on a much smaller scale and called The Schoolmistress, after Shenstone, is in the Tate collection.¹ This painting was gifted to the gallery in 1937 by Ruth Young, a descendant of Maria Spilsbury and the author of Father and Daughter: Jonathan and Maria Spilsbury.²  Although the gallery have associated their picture with this title, Charlotte Yeldham has suggested that it is more likely to be Spilsbury's 1804 Royal Academy painting entitled Sunday evening; a young lady teaching village children to sing.³ Despite being closely related, this painting of A Sunday-School contains noticeable differences. This includes the addition of a crucifix painting in the background, a tablet with the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall, and the child on the floor clearly reading illustrated scenes from the Bible. Infrared imaging also reveals a number of pentimenti throughout the present canvas, showing that this painting must be the artist's first attempt at the composition. These include the presence of a maid consoling the crying child in the lower right corner, and a different arrangement of the arms of the lady who holds the child in the lower left corner. There are also minor changes in the background and elements of still life, including signs that the fireplace was added on top of a display of plates and drapery. The Tate painting's reduced size, in conjunction with the lacking of details highlighted above, is evidence for it being the painting exhibited the year after the this picture.

The overtly religious references in this painting, not to mention the prominent crucifix-like cross-beam in the ceiling and the quiet country church painted beyond, is in keeping with Spilsbury's evangelical Christian beliefs that often appear within her works as highlighted above. As such, it is perhaps no surprise that this work of art was later acquired by The Rt. Rev. and Hon. Shute Barrington, Bishop of Llandaff and later Bishop of Salisbury and Bishop of Durham (1734–1826), in whose family this painting has descended until the present day.

¹ Oil on canvas, 76 x 91 cm.; https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/spilsbury-the-schoolmistress-n04880

² R. Young, Father and Daughter, Jonathan and Maria Spilsbury, London 1952.

³ Yeldham 2010, p. 70–71.