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Giovanni Mazzaferro
Lady Christiana Herringham between history of art techniques and heritage conservation
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Christiana Herringham, Woman wearing a black bonnet with a pink and white bow, about 1900
Fonte: https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/events/christiana-herringham-artist-campaigner-collector/
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A small-scale exhibition entitled Christiana Herringham: artist, campaigner,
collector is taking place
in London in these days (to be precise from January 14 to the end of March, 2019). The
exhibition is held at the Royal Halloway of the University of London, where the
collection of this English artist and researcher is kept. Michaela Jones and
Laura Mac Culloch took care of the exhibit. Tomorrow (on March 2) a day of study, dedicated to Christiana Herringham and her Circle, will also be held.
I learnt of Lady Christiana Herringham as she
authored the second English translation of the Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini, published in London by George
Allen in 1899 with the subheadings: A
Contemporary Practical Treatise on Quattrocento Painting, with Notes on
Medieval Art Methods by Christiana J. Herringham [1]. Moreover, as I edited a book dedicated to Mary P. Merrifield's letters, i.e. the first
English translator of Cennini’s work, the temptation to compare Christiana with
Mary is, of course, very high.
Certainly a few common points can be detected.
First of all, both were women with an extraordinary life (even if Ms Herringham
had a much more tragic one). Moreover, both would be considered today as historians
of art techniques; also, both enjoyed great consideration in their days. Just
think of the words that, in a conversation of the 1970s, Daniel V. Thompson
(author of the third English translation) spent on the true cult that in England in the 1930s hovered around Herringham edition of Cennini. Finally,
they both fell into oblivion (from which, in fact, Ms Herringham came out
first, ahead of Ms Merrifield). Indeed, Mary Lago (1919-2001) dedicated a
monograph to Christiana in 1980 [2]. Thanks to the recent reorganization of the
Royal Halloway collections, her albums of photographs and one hundred and
twenty sketches and watercolours could be rediscovered [3]. Almost contemporaneously,
Meaghan Clarke dedicated an essay to the English researcher, with an indication
of the previous bibliography [4]. Michaela Jones is also bringing to end a PhD on
Lady Herringham; she is also about to publish an article on the topic in Tempera Painting 1800-1950. Experiment and
Innovation from the Nazarene Movement to Abstract Art (London, Archetype,
forthcoming).
A tragic life
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| Christiana Jane Powell Herringham c.1885 (c) Jean Vernon-Jackson collection Source: https://twitter.com/RHULexhibitions?lang=it |
Christiana Jane Powell (1852-1929) was born in
a family who became well-off in coincidence with the great economic boom of
England at the time of the industrial revolution. His father run multiple entrepreneurial
initiatives, but most importantly was chairman of a private bank. Educated
according to principles of moderation and philanthropy, Christiana was already a
rich woman when she married Wilmot Herringham in 1880. The father had divided
the heritage into equal parts among his children before dying, and therefore
Christiana had for all her life an income making her independent of her
husband, a future renowned doctor. It should also be said
that Wilmot never drew on his wife's estate. Christiana had a great passion for
art and had established herself as a copyist of paintings of the fifteenth
century. Her's was a real profession (it is no coincidence that Mary Lago entitled
her preface Introduction to an Artist),
which she also continued after the birth of her two sons, Christopher (1882)
and Geoffrey (1884). At the age of nine (1891) Christopher became ill, and
despite the best available health care, long stays in Egypt due to the more
favourable climate and the constant closeness of the mother, he died in 1893.
Christiana threw herself completely into her work and, between the end of the
century and the first decade of the following, published Cennino’s translation,
founded the Society of Tempera Painters
(1901), was one of the four founders of the National
Art Collections Fund, actively participated in the cultural life of the
country by engaging in first person for the protection of artistic heritage, and
even did not disdained political life, siding openly for the vote to women. She
discovered, finally, her great interest in India where she travelled, first in
1906-7, then in the winters of 1909-10 and 10-11, with the precise aim of
copying the Buddhist frescoes of the Ajanta caves (today UNESCO heritage). She
produced therefore the first systematic mapping of one of the most
extraordinary places of Indian art of the first centuries after Christ.
Back in England (indeed, already during the
trip back to the ship), Christiana showed signs of mental imbalance, as she alleged
to be spied and persecuted for making known to the world the sacred images of the
local Indian tradition. Two months later, she was checked into a nursing home
for mental illness. She would remain there until her death, eighteen years
later, at first still making her voice heard through the letters (the voice of
a woman sometimes perfectly logical, sometimes haunted by nightmares), and
finally sinking into a deep absence. Christiana failed therefore to realize not
only that the world she knew was being disrupted by the world war, but even
that his second son lost almost suddenly his life in battle in October 1914.
Equally, she certainly never realized she had become Lady, following the
appointment as Knight of her husband for the merits of taking care of British
soldiers on the front (1919). Christiana's life ended in this unfair way, for a
woman who had given so much to the world of English art.
The translation of Cennino Cennini's Book of the Art
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| Christiana Herringham, Saint Catherine (after Sandro Botticelli) Source: https://twitter.com/RHULexhibitions?lang=it |
When Christiana Herringham published her
translation of the Book of the Art by
Cennino Cennini (1899) she was, unlike Mary P. Merrifield, an already
well-known personality. For years (probably since before marriage) she had worked
as a copyist, showing interest in the study of tempera technique. Meaghan
Clarke recently attempted to shed light on her artistic activity. Christiana
had produced in particular a series of copies of Italian artists of the
fifteenth century (above all Botticelli), many of which were exhibited at the Victorian Era Exhibition, held at Earls
Court in 1897 [5]. Cennino's translation was brought out two years later. To
justify a new translation, Christiana wrote in her introduction that Mary P. had
translated Cennino from the first Tambroni version in 1821, which was based on
an unreliable manuscript kept in the Vatican; she had worked instead on the
second Italian edition, edited by the Milanesi brothers in 1859, resulting from
the interpolation of two manuscript, more reliable, codes: the Mediceo Laurenziano P.78.23 and the
Riccardiano 2190 [5]. Moreover - the authoress continued – Merrifield’s
translation, although written in a pleasant style, was often very incorrect [6]
and Herringham felt the need to amend the previous text [7].
However the difference was not only about philological
accuracy. As known, Merrifield decided to translate Cennino to make a personal
contribution to the knowledge and dissemination of the fresco practice in years
when it was decided to use such technique (monumental par excellence) to
decorate the walls of the new Parliament, being reconstructed after the
devastating fire of 1834. With Herringham, however, the focus shifted
decisively towards the practice of tempera. As Margherita d'Ayala Valva rightly
wrote, Ms Herringham’s version was fully part of a series of editions by
authors (often 'painters-craftsmen') who considered "the Book of the Art as a
manual from which they could still learn something, since they felt they could
draw from it, besides recipes and technical indications, also a lesson about
modernity"[8]. This does not mean that 'modernity', for these authors,
consisted in technological progress or new production methods; indeed, more
often than not (see Renoir) they felt that 'modernity' was sick, and that to be
'truly' modern meant, rather, recovering, even from a practical point of view,
the techniques and methods of production of the past; this context explains Ms Herringham's
interest in tempera, of course also in the light of the previous
Pre-Raphaelites and of the deep admiration she had for Ruskin.
In the introduction, Christiana added that she had
relied on the Milanese version, but also made use of the German translation by Albert Ilg dated 1871. Here one should distinguish between translation and
overall evaluation of the work. On the latter, Ms Herringham’s views could not
be most different from the German scholar: for Ilg Cennino was a witness to a
dying art. He was certainly not the first to support such positions. In 1847,
in the second volume of his Sketches of
the History of Christian Art, Lord Lindsay wrote about the Book of the Art as "this dying legacy of the man who, in his amiable but blind idolatry of the past, might be fitly styled the Last of the Giotto followers" [9].
For Ms Herringham, instead, the Book of the Art was
not at all a dying legacy, but had a 'modern practical value': "My justification for undertaking a new
translation is that I have really used the treatise to learn tempera-painting,
and that I have for a good many years been trying to find out how to produce by
this method the various effects of fifteenth-century painting, having also read
everything else I could find that might bear on the subject" [10].
Herringham did not undertake an antiquarian exercise, but wanted to make the
case for modern painters.
It is not by chance that the last eighty pages
hosted critical apparatuses aimed at deepening the technical aspects of the
pictorial procedures, with a clearly pedagogic intent. She started with a first
chapter of a general nature, aimed at confirming that the Italian tempera painting used the yolk of egg, to then better explain the procedure illustrated in
Cennini’s treatise and to study the chemical behaviour of vehicles based on the
use of egg. Then she went on to consider the fresco and its analogies with the
tempera, the use of the first oil painting (namely before van Eyck), the
preparation of the grounds, the gilding, the pigments used by Cennino, and the
paints used by the primitives. From this point of view, Ms Herringham's
approach was certainly techno-scientific, just as it had been the case for Ms
Merrifield; both - it has already been said - would today be considered historians
of art techniques. However there were also evident differences.
Mrs. Merrifield vs. Lady Herringham
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| Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of Smeralda Bandinelli, about 1475, London, Victoria and Albert Museum Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Botticelli,_Sandro_-_Portrait_of_a_Lady_known_as_Smeralda_Bandinelli_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg |
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| Christiana Herringham, Portrait of Smeralda Bandinelli, copy after Botticelli, Source: http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=279559 |
Without any doubt, the most obvious dissimilarity
is that Merrifield, after translating Cennino's book and writing an anthology
on fresco technique (The Art of Fresco
Painting [11]), shifted to the study of oil painting. Her Original Treatises of 1849 [12] were the
result of an official expedition to Italy mandated by the British government in
search of the recipes of the ancient masters (what was meant were the Lombards,
the Emilians and above all the Venetians). Merrifield’s 'ancient masters' were
Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, or the great colourists of the sixteenth century;
those of Herringham were the artists of the fifteenth century, especially the
Florentines. Ms Merrifield never visited Florence, something that Herringham
could not even conceive of. Again: Ms Merrifield blindly believed in the
progress of humanity (which substantially coincides with that of the English
Empire) and presented precisely her translation of Cennino (but also her
subsequent works) as a formidable tool for the progress of a new English art. Ms
Merrifield was a woman of unshakable certainties; Ms Herringham (and her
personal story confirmed this) was instead a person of great disquiet. The
former was supported by Charles Lock Eastlake and the Victorian establishment;
the latter was inspired by Ruskin and William Morris. As Meaghan Clarke wrote, Ruskin’s
approach also explains why Christiana's attention did not focus only on
tempera, but also on architecture and the preservation of ancient buildings.
The question of 'artistic heritage' was, without a doubt, the aspect that most
distanced the two women. Ms Herringham always addressed the mapping and
conservation of buildings, not hesitating to stand against restorations that she
considered unorthodox. Thus, for example, in 1905, writing on The Burlington
Magazine and the Times, she opposed the interventions planned for the Basilica
of San Marco in Venice (how could we not think of Ruskin?). Merrifield,
basically, did not seem to grasp the urgency and importance of the thing.
The Society of Tempera Painters
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| Christiana Herringham, Madonna with Child (copy after Cosmè Tura) Source: https://twitter.com/RHULexhibitions?lang=it |
For reasons of space I cannot devote all
necessary attention to the Society of
Tempera Painters, founded by Herringham in 1901 (it later became the Society of Mural Decorators and Painters in
Tempera). Suffice it to say, however, that no academician was part of the
original nucleus; instead there were figures like Roger Fry (1866-1934), before
his post-impressionist 'turn'. The relations between Fry and Christiana were
always of mutual respect and esteem. These were the years when The Burlington
Magazine was born and Roger did not hesitate to make the columns of the review available to Herringham not only as a 'whipper' of wrong restorations
(as we saw earlier), but above all as an expert in the technique in tempera,
and therefore as a connoisseur of primitives. Cennino’s translation by
Christiana soon became the sacred text of the Society of Painters in Tempera, to the point that it was reissued
in 1920 and 1932 and enjoyed great fame until the later translation by D.V.
Thompson.
The National Art Collections Fund
In 1903 Christiana Herringham contacted the art
critic (and painter) Dugald Sutherland MacColl (1859-1948) to follow up on a proposal that
the latter had launched on the Saturday
Review in September 1900. MacColl suggested the creation of a private association
(on the model of the Société des amis du
Louvre) that would take charge of keeping in England, and donating to
museums, works of art threatened by the imminent risk of being exported
overseas. The historical circumstances, compared to only a few decades before,
had changed drastically. Relying on a centuries-old collecting practice by the
local aristocracy, Britain had traditionally been a buyer of (especially
Italian and Flemish) paintings and other artefacts. This was combined (in the
mid-1850s) with a systematic mapping of the artworks potentially available on
the market for the enrichment of the collections of the National Gallery. In
this sense, an example was represented by the travel journals of the director of the National Gallery Charles Lock Eastlake. In the 1880s, however, things
changed dramatically. The great agricultural depression hit hard the landowners
and in particular depressed the value of the possessions of the nobles, hitting
their disposable income. Moreover, an 8% inheritance tax was introduced in 1894.
Many aristocrats reacted by selling their art collections in search for
liquidity. On the other front, that of the novel demand for art, the new
American millionaires and above all the institutional German buyers entered the
market, starting from that Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929), responsible for the
Berlin museums, who was the real incarnation of an aggressive purchasing policy
during the years of the Wilhelmine Empire (we have already spoken about this for the impact on Italian art markets). Mary Lago pointed out, correctly, that
the Germans had an excellent knowledge of the English private collections
thanks to writings such as those of Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Johann David Passavant. "Bode was so well informed that in 1857 Prince Albert had brought him in as principal organizer of the British Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, “the first large exhibition for the public of works of art from private collections in England” [13] ". In a country where
there was still no form of restriction on the export of artistic goods,
potential foreign buyers moved undisturbed, alike vultures, ready to strike at
the slightest mention of the patrimonial weakness of this or that aristocratic
family. What began in England is conventionally called the "Great
Exodus".
MacColl, in short, set alarm bells ringing on
the need of protecting the English artistic heritage. And the first to respond
(if we ignore two less significant cases) was Christiana Herringham, who offered
to intervene with an initial donation of two hundred pounds. The National Art Collections Fund was born;
it is today the Art Fund, the most
famous non-profit association in favour of art in the world. The events leading
to the creation of the Art Fund are
actually much more complex, and Mary Lago described them with particular skills,
taking the opportunity to draw a moving and thrilling picture of the English
art scene in the early twentieth century. In particular, there was the risk, in
the first few months, that the Art Fund
would not become an association open to all, but would establish itself as a
structure in the hands of the Academy or the same landowning nobility that was
affected by the crisis. However, a fact is undeniable. The four promoters of
the association were MacColl, Herringham, Roger Fry and Sir Claude Phillips
(1846-1924); and all began with the money put by Christiana Herringham. The
successful story of the Art Fund took
off in January 1906 with the acquisition, for £ 45,000, of the Rokeby Venus of
Velázquez, which was about to end up in the United States. Also without Christiana
Herringham’s contribution (who, moreover, almost immediately chose to keep a
low profile, limiting herself to responding from time to time to requests for
extraordinary acquisitions), most likely, sooner or later, the Art Fund would have been born anyway, with
someone else's intervention. But we do not know how much later. And certainly
many works preserved in private English collections, meanwhile, would have been
sold abroad.
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| Diego Velázquez, Rokeby Venus, 1647-1651, London, The National Gallery Source: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/diego-velazquez-the-toilet-of-venus-the-rokeby-venus/ |
Ajanta
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| A general view of teh Caves of Ajanta Source: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotte_di_Ajanta#/media/File:Ajanta_(63).jpg |
When, in 1906, Christina Herringham saw the
paintings of the caves of Ajanta for the first time, during a leisure trip to
India, there was no awareness in England about the Indian artistic heritage. According
to the prevailing views, no local 'fine arts' had even ever existed there. It
was therefore believed that only the introduction of western art models in
the British colony could foster their development. In general – as Mary Lago writes
- "the verdict of official and tourist alike was that indigenous Indian painting and sculpture were shockingly erotic, socially and morally unacceptable, a sight from which to shield the eyes of respectable ladies" [14]. Instead, the public
opinion recognised the existence of a local handicraft, which needed to be
supported for purely commercial purposes in order to create a production that could
then be placed on the British market.
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| On the left: a scene from the mural paintings of Ajanta. On the right:: Lady Heringham's drawing Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiana_Herringham#/media/File:Aj2.jpg |
The travel literature included only few
mentions of the Ajanta caves (today Unesco heritage), in the Deccan region, and
their paintings. They were located, first of all, in a particularly impervious
area; then, due to a series of coincidences (which also demonstrate the scarce
importance attributed to the site), the wholly partial visual documentation
collected on the paintings in question had been lost in two separate fires,
once the drawings had been brought to England. The Ajanta murals dated back to
the Buddhist age, between III century BC and VII century AD. Naturally, who saw
them for the first time, did not realize it and confused them as the testimony
of Hinduism religion. Nor
was it simple to see them; the images (which were not always technically true
frescoes, in the sense that they were not all painted on wet plaster) were in
disastrous situations, inside caves inhabited by thousands and thousands of
bats (which obviously had sedimented guano for centuries) and invaded from the
water for long months of the year. Chistiana saw the images, or rather, saw a
wholly partial portion of them, and decided to engage in the following years in
the reproduction of the same before they would finally disappear, as the evidence
of a civilization that, until that moment, was considered primitive, because it
lacked perspective and coloristic virtuosity. It was really a case of
'rediscovering primitives', where this time the primitives were not Cennino or
Italian fourteenth-century artists, but artists who had produced their cultural
heritage on the other side of the world. Mary Lago dedicated many pages to the
Indian adventure of Herringham (which most probably, according to the authoress,
inspired the figure of Mrs. Moore in Passage
to India by Edward Morgan Forster). For reasons of space, unfortunately I
cannot dwell on the details. However, let me recall some key aspects. In the
winter of 1909-1910 and 1910-1911 Herringham spent several months, along with a
handful of other valorous associates, copying images of the Ajanta caves.
Images and testimonies acquired a sense right in front of her eyes, in
extremely extreme working conditions. It was an all-encompassing experience; without
any doubt, judging by the letters, it also (and above all) involved Christiana on
an emotional level. All in all, Ms Herringham's approach to the wall paintings
of Ajanta was very similar to that of Ruskin for the stones of Venice. Both
lived in deep symbiosis with a world that was risking disappearing and
analytically documented its evidence. The ultimate result of Christiana's
frenetic work was the publication, in 1915, under the patronage of the Royal India Society of a book containing
some of Christiana's drawings [15]. A facsimile reprint of that work, performed
in New Delhi in 1998, can now be consulted on the Internet [16]. Among other
things, the volume included writing by Christiana in which the copyist pointed
out, for correctness, that she had omitted some gaps in the works for the
purposes of a better intelligibility of the same. However, in 1915 she hardly took
notice of the publication and, above all, of having achieved her goal, having raised
the problem of the site conservation. As I said at the beginning, her mental
health had already deteriorated dramatically, so much so that she had plunged
into a world of ghosts.
NOTES
[1] For Cennini’s editions from 1821 to 1900, I
would like to refer in this blog to my Cennino Cennini and the "Libro dell'Arte": a Check-list of the Printed Editions. Part one: from 1821 to 1900.
[2] Mary Lake, Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene, London, Lund
Humphries Publishers, 1980. The
American Mary Lake was a famous scholar of English literature, and taught lengthily
at the University of Missouri. Her studies were mainly devoted to the
Anglo-Indian literary world (she wrote many books on Rabindranath Tagore and E.M.
Forster). Her 'discovery' of Christiana Herringham was therefore linked to the copies
of the wall paintings in Ajanta, which Christiana produced between 1910 and
1911.
[3] See https://bedfordcentre.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/christiana-herringham-artist-collector-campaigner/
[4] Meaghan Clarke, ‘The Greatest Living Critic’: Christiana Herringham and the practise of
connoisseurship in «Visual Resources. An international journal on images and
their uses»,
Volume 33, 2017 – Issue 1-2: Special Issue: Women’s
Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseruship. A draft is available on the Internet at this
address:
This is what I consulted and to which I referred in the citations.
[5] Meaghan Clarke, 'The Greatest Living
Critic' ... quoted. pp. 5-6.2
[6] Mary P. Merrifield did not master Italian
perfectly. For Mary P. Merrifield see: The Woman Who Loved Colours. Mary P. Merrifield: Letters from Italy (1845-1846) (edited by Giovanni Mazzaferro).
Milan, Officina Libraria, 2018
[7] See Giovanni Mazzaferro, Mary P. Merrifield and the First English Translation of Cennino Cennini’s 'Book of the Art': the Press Reviews.
See in particular the review appeared on Atheneum on March 15, 1845.
[9] Sketches
of the History of Christian Art, John Murray publisher, London, 1847, volume II, page 306.
[10] The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini. A
Contemporary Practical ... cit., p. vi.
[11] M.P. Merrifield, The Art of Fresco
Painting, with a Preliminary Inquiry into the Nature of the Colors in Fresco
Painting, with Observations and Notes, London-Brighton, Charles Gilpin-Arthur
Wallis, 1846.
[12] M.P. Merrifield, Original Treatises, Dating
From the 12th to 18th Centuries on the Arts of Painting, in Oil, Miniatures,
Mosaic, and on Glass; of Gilding, Dyeing, and the Preparation of Colors and
Artificial Gems; Preceded by a General Introduction; with Translations,
Prefaces, and Notes. 2 vols., London, John Murray, 1849.
[13] Mary Lake, Christiana Herringham and the
Edwardian Art Scene ... quoted, pp. 62-63.
[14] Mary Lake, Christiana Herringham and the
Edwardian Art Scene ... quoted, pp. 147.
[15] Ajanta
Frescoes: Being Reproductions in Colour and Monochrome in Some of the Caves at
Ajanta After Copies Taken in the Years 1910-1911 by Lady Herringham and Her
Assistants, H. Milford,
Oxford University Press, 1915.
[16] Ajanta Frescoes by Lady Herringham with Introductory Essays by Various
Members of the Indian Society, New Delhi, Arian Books International, 1998.
See: https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.83267.
On Ajanta, please see also a
bilingual English-Italian work in two volumes, recently published by Gangemi
publisher: Ajanta Dipinta –
Painted Ajanta. Studio sulla tecnica e sulla conservazione del sito rupestre
indiano – Studies on the techniques and the conservation of the indian rock art
site. Roma, Gangemi, 2013.
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