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  • Rupert Maas was born in 1960, the same year the gallery in Mayfair, London was founded by his father Jeremy...
    Rupert Maas was born in 1960, the same year the gallery in Mayfair, London was founded by his father Jeremy Maas. After a BA in Art History from Essex University, in the summer of 1983 he sailed the Atlantic, in an attempt to avoid his responsibilities. On his return he was tricked by his father into joining The Maas Gallery. Following the death of his father in 1996, he runs the Gallery, which remains family-owned and deals in Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite, Romantic and Modern British art, along with the work of one living artist, Sarah Adams, who paints the rugged landscape of the north Cornish coast. Since 1995 Rupert has made regular appearances on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow as a picture expert.  In 2020 The Maas Gallery moved to a larger space in St James’s, London, where we are now. We have regular exhibitions and show at TEFAF Maastricht each year.
    • Katie Finn Bannister

      Katie Finn Bannister

    • Elizabeth Twigg

      Elizabeth Twigg

  • Maasterpieces over the years...
    "I first saw Flaming June five years ago at the Frick Collection in New York. It was a single painting exhibition and I was writing an article for Vanity Fair. I didn’t realize then how much its celebrity depended on Jeremy Maas. When he bought the painting in 1963, Victorian art was on the wane—Flaming June had been abandoned in an empty house, sold to a framer (who sold its frame), and then to a barber with a sideline selling pictures. Maas hung Flaming June in his fledging Mayfair gallery, and sold it to Luis A. Ferré, founder of Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. Maas then put it on the cover of his Victorian Painters, the first critical survey of its kind. Today, Flaming June is called ‘the Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere’, and I’m delighted to wish the Maas Gallery a very well-deserved Happy Birthday!" - Patrick Monahan, Journalist (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "In the early 1820s, Francis Danby painted landscapes in and around Bristol for a local clientele and gave drawing lessons to earn a living. However, his reputation in London was built on exhibiting vast imaginary landscapes such as The Israelites Led by the Pillar of Light and An attempt to illustrate the opening of the Sixth Seal, his R.A. exhibit of 1828, which, like Subject for Revelations (also of 1828), was owned by William Thomas Beckford, the richest commoner in England. The mysterious Revelations has much of the tranquillity of Sunset at Sea after a Storm, which Danby exhibited at the R.A. in 1824 and which was bought for £100 by Sir Thomas Lawrence, the President of the Royal Academy who also voted for Danby, preferring him to Constable in the election to become a full member. I had the good fortune to have a gallery in Clifford Street for some years and Jeremy Maas was my neighbour. He had a justified reputation for impatience, but was immensely kind and tolerant of me and was an inspiring source of information about the Art world in 19th Century Britain. Of his many aphorisms, my favourite was: 'I never fail to be amazed at other people’s shortcomings'. I miss him and his colleague Henry Ford, but I have Rupert as consolation." - Dave Dallas, Specialist in Old Master & 19th-century pictures (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "I had first heard of the name Maas long before I first crossed the threshold of 15a Clifford Street and met Rupert. In 1997 I began a Master's degree in History of Art at University College, London and one of my recommended books for the study of 19th-century British Art was Jeremy Maas’s magisterial and utterly engrossing Victorian Painters. By the end of my MA course I had an idea for a PhD thesis: the image of the ordinary British soldier or ‘Tommy’ in the work of three British artists who had actually served at the front during the First World War. One of the artists I selected to focus on was that superb draughtsman Eric Kennington (1888-1960) and I noted in 1998 that the most recent decent-sized exhibition of his work had been held during the spring of 1981 at the Maas Gallery – curated by Jeremy and his friend Henry Wild. Very fortunately for me, Jeremy and Henry had researched the artist in great depth for the exhibition and had accumulated a treasure trove of material that was now in store in various filing cabinets located in the basement of 15a Clifford Street. One day I dropped in at the gallery and introduced myself to Rupert who could not have been more friendly, welcoming and encouraging; he gave me access to the magic filing cabinets and allowed me over a number of weeks to plough through the invaluable Kennington files. Perhaps even more helpfully, when he saw I was serious about Kennington, Rupert gave me an introduction to the artist’s son – this gave me access to a whole new cornucopia of works and archival material about Eric Kennington which proved critical to my eventual writing about the artist for the PhD. He also encouraged me to look at works by some of his First World War contemporaries such as the slightly older Scottish artist Keith Henderson (1883-1982). He deserves to be much better known as a talented artist and part of a select band of British artists who produced distinguished war art during both World Wars, along with Kennington, Paul and John Nash, Stanley Spencer, William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis. One of Henderson’s First World War images, which he produced while serving 1916-17 as a Captain in France in command of a company of dismounted Wiltshire Yeomanry, and which I particularly admired, was Campfire. On the face of it an unspectacular, even prosaic, image of war – this is no blood and guts presentation of First World War combat but something far more subtle and sensitive by an artist who was also an officer and who greatly admired the men he had commanded in France. Henderson has chosen to depict a nocturnal scene – a group of British Tommies muffled up in great coats against the winter cold grouped around a fire on which they were probably cooking some bully beef stew for dinner with the prospect of plum and apple jam on hardtack biscuit for pudding afterwards. Such an ordinary scene but how beautifully and atmospherically rendered by Henderson who seems to be channelling the 17th century ‘candlelight painters’ such as Honthorst, Schalken and De La Tour in the subtle and delicate way he captures the faces of the tommies by flickering firelight. These were the men of the sort Henderson had commanded in battle; in letters home to his future wife Helen, he admitted he did not really know them at all but he invariably found them to be brave, resourceful and completely reliable when the crunch came. They reminded him of workmen he had seen before the war, digging up the streets of London, and all too ready to down tools for a cup of tea and yet always ready to put in the necessary hours of hard physical toil. He admitted they did not look that formidable in France but in essence they were also very much Shakespeare’s tough and unglamorous ‘warrriors for the working day’ from Henry V." - Dr Jonathan Black, FRHistS, Senior Research Fellow in History of Art, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    “Diana, goddess of the moon, descends to kiss the object of her love, Endymion the shepherd who sleeps in eternal slumber. Always a seductive subject for artists from the antiquity onward, this mythological tale had many artistic exemplars, but none are as reductive as this clash of opposites. Watts’s painting presents a compelling encounter between the moonlit goddess Diana and nude youth Endymion in a tale of light and dark, life and death, action and inaction. The compressed composition, almost devoid of colour, is sculptural in conception. It was no coincidence that Watts worked on the bust of Clytie at the same time. Begun in the late 1860s, Endymion attracted the admiration of artists and collectors alike. Ford Madox Brown called it a masterpiece, ‘as full of power in execution as it is poetic in conception’. It was an early acquisition by discerning patron William Graham who bought it to add to his growing collection of works by Rossetti and Burne-Jones. If any painting by G.F. Watts should be better known, it is this one. In 1985, when I first encountered Endymion, it had gone through the saleroom, making a then record price for a work by Watts, but it soon disappeared to Australian shores and is now rarely seen in public. This is a shame because this painting is surely one of Watts’s most beautiful works—worth celebrating on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Maas Gallery! Personal thanks also to the gallery that allowed a postgraduate art history student (long ago!) to acquire a drawing by Watts at a very reasonable price.” - Barbara Bryant, art historian (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Congratulations on being sixty years old, and for the Gallery living that long as well – may you both grow older together. I would like to speak to a picture that is dear to my heart, because it was one of the late John H. Schaeffer’s favorite paintings in his possession by Adolphe Rudolph HIRÉMY-HIRSCHL (1860-1930): Ahasuerus (The Wandering Jew at the End of the World), 1888. The recent death of my close friend and art collector brings to memory John saying that the frozen nude lady in the picture 'Reminds me of a lot of the women I have known!' Then he caught himself and said in Dutch-English, 'But I don’t mean in the Biblical sense, if you catch what I didn’t say.' Few people have loved fine art as much as my Australian-Dutch buddy." - Vern Grosvenor Swanson, Ph.D. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "The first sight of any Maas picture carries with it an image of where one first saw it. Winding the Skein first hung over the mantel-piece at 15A Clifford Street, warming a winter evening. It is, at first sight, a placid domestic summer scene, with two figures to left and right, mother and daughter, perhaps, the one slowly paying out the thread of red wool while the other winds it briskly into a ball. Between them, distant mountains add to the pastoral calm. But all is not quiet: the winder is all impatience, her mother’s face speaks regret. Jeremy Maas, graphic artist manqué, sensed this tension, and split the image in two to make it a compelling cover for the Maas Gallery’s 1974 exhibition catalogue." - Nicolas Barker, Bibliophile (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "I started visiting the Maas Gallery in 1970, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, reading English at first but heading towards History of Art, not then a three-year course; the first catalogue I can find is Pre-Raphaelitism from November 1970 (designed, I see, by Antonia Maas). For a BA thesis I chose Edward Poynter, visiting his very Edwardian great-nieces in Canonbury and taking advice from experts including Jeremy Maas, who was immensely helpful. I was pleased to return his kindness in later years, sometimes lending slides for lectures. It was wonderful to see The Cave of the Storm Nymphs in the Stunners exhibition of June-July 1974, its lusciousness and shimmering setting showing the other side of Poynter's somewhat austere nature. I tried unsuccessfully to interest the Fitzwilliam in acquiring it: still unfashionable then, although it would have been an incredible bargain given its later astronomical price. Without means of my own - and nowhere to put it - I could only dream, but it retains a prominent place in my virtual collection." - Stephen Wildman, Former Director and Curator of the Ruskin Library (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton settled in Britain with her mother in the 1840s, taking up work as a maid and a cook before she began modelling for the Pre-Raphaelites from about 1859. Her distinctive features appear in many of their works, including a series of sketches produced by Simeon Solomon, Frederick Sandys and Walter Stocks in November 1859. Solomon's three sketches of Fanny, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, are dated 7, 8 & 11 November 1859; based on both her pose and the particular styling of her hair, it is presumed that Sandys' drawing, currently in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was executed during the very same session in November 1859. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "I’ve visited Burma many times and fallen in love with the gentle and charming people that I met in that mystical land. The exquisite painting of Saw (Honorable) Ohn Nyun captivated me when I first set eyes on it many years ago. Having grown up surrounded by our father’s collection of Pre-Raphaelites, this young Burmese woman seemed very exotic by comparison. The celadon green background with black lacquer bowl, the flower in her hair and the silken folds of her traditional dress (still typical of women today), skilfully conveys Burmese culture which is almost unchanged, despite it having been painted in London in the 1930s. I like to think that Saw Ohn Nyun’s delicate allure captivated the artist, which is reflected in the delicate and careful brush strokes. It pleases me that it now hangs in a home in Yangon. A fitting home for such a beguiling Burmese beauty." -Athena Strutt (née Maas) (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    This beautiful and atmospheric painting is the first in a series of similar subjects by Cayley Robinson, one his most ambitious and his best. Three young women gather around a table in a tightly furnished basement room in a compressed space, the table laid for them to eat. It is lit from three directions: eerily from behind a green curtain at the back, warmly from two candles at the far end of the table, and apparently by daylight from the front and to the left. A music box playing one of Mendelssohn’s 'Songs without Words’ is on the table in the foreground. The music eschews any literal interpretation, and accompanies the dream-like, contemplative mood of the picture. Robinson, too, defies narrative, and quite deliberately does not fully describe a definite theme. As Percy Bate put it: 'Into each of his pictures, full of delicate charm, the spectator will read just so much of poetry and romance as his own soul is gifted with.’ (Percy Bate) The triptych above the table in the Quattrocento manner is Robinson’s 're-imaging' of the the Resurrection of Christ. In the central panel are the two Marys, Magdalene and 'the other Mary', the first witnesses to the empty tomb of Jesus according to Matthew, and the first to encounter the angel bearing the message 'He is Arisen'. The left wing of the triptych has the haloed Mary mother of Christ with the infant Christ on her lap, whilst in the background, dark shrouded figures lead children on a path out of the town. In the right wing, Mary Magdalene anoints the feet of Christ with myrrh from a casket. The motif of the Resurrection runs through much of Robinson’s work, and in this painting a moth flies into the room to the upper right behind the green curtain. The moth was a symbol of death and transfiguration, from wriggling grub through inert chrysalis to winged creature. The three women in the picture seem not to interact with one another, but are united by their rapt attention to the music. The dark figure with the lantern in the central panel of the triptych harks back to John 11.9, a cryptic passage that to some extent explains the light in the painting and provides Robinson's title, ‘The Close of the Day’: 'Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.’ The picture was painted in 1898/9, and may be seen as an elegy on the death of Burne-Jones, who died in June 1898, from whom Cayley Robinson ‘undoubtedly learnt much' (Bate). When the painting was exhibited at the RSBA in 1899, it attracted many outstanding reviews. That from the Daily Telegraph and Courier, 25 March 1899, is representative: 'Mr Cayley Robinson makes a welcome reappearance with a curious fantasy, "The Close of the Day," quite in his usual manner, which is at once ultra-modern and archaistic - partaking both of impressionism and of the pre-Raphaelitism of the Brotherhood. In a humble room, lighted from without through closed blinds, and from within by a glow of artificial light, three damsels, in different stages of fresh youth, appear, listening pensively to the sounds of a musical-box, which, as the deftly reproduced inscription on the cover tells us, is playing Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte. Above hangs, unframed, and strangely contrasting with the rest, a large triptych in the style of the Quattrocento . . .the compound illumination is cleverly treated, and everywhere it would be possible to point to passages of firm draughtsmanship, of execution both spirited and solid. The figure of the girl in the foreground, with hair of pale, gleaming gold, set off by a muslin dress of lilac and white, is altogether charming, and such as very few English painters of today could surpass . . . Still, with all its affectations, "The Close of the Day" is unquestionably the most interesting work in the exhibition.’ (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Today, fewer than ten paintings by Charles Allston Collins survive; the rediscovery of The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary, from the early years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, reveals a fascinating story." Read more about this early Pre-Raphaelite picture - now in the Detroit Institute of Arts - in Rupert Maas's 2014 essay (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Despite encouragement from John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, Smetham achieved no popular success; for the last twelve years of his life, he was afflicted with madness brought on by a combination of religious melancholia and a sense of failure. His faithful friend Rossetti described Smetham as "a painter and designer of our own day who is, in many signal respects, very closely akin to Blake; more so probably than any other living artist could be said to be. James Smetham’s work – generally of small or moderate size – ranges from Gospel subjects, of the subtlest imaginative and mental insight, and sometimes of the grandest colouring, through Old Testament compositions and through poetic and pastoral of every kind to a special imaginative form of landscape." (Gilchrist, Life of Blake, 1869) (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Edward John Poynter’s Andromeda is a celebration of the female form, painted at a time when nudity in art was deemed acceptable when accompanied by a classical narrative. The sky darkens and waves lash against the rocks, whilst the statuesque Andromeda awaits her fate, her nakedness covered by the most ineffectual piece of drapery in Victorian Art. Her rescue is delayed, thanks to Poynter’s busy painting schedule – Perseus didn’t arrive until three years later, when the subject was repainted in 1872. The model was Antonia Caiva, of whom Burne-Jones wrote: '…she never spoke, but looked like a creature coming from Olympus – I never drew from any one who came near her for splendour & solemnity, and her glory lasted near ten years'." - Scott Buckle, Scholar (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Such a beautiful and important early Gainsborough in his Suffolk style. Painted in the 1750s, when Gainsborough was in his mid to late twenties it combines the rococo line with a loving observation of natural details. It is instantly recognisable as a work painted by a hand that would transform British landscape painting and influence the landscapes of John Constable." - Mark Bills, Director of Gainsborough's House (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "The Fairies’ Favourite by the extraordinarily inventive ‘Fairy Fitzgerald’, as he was called, is one of my favourite acquisitions that I have put forth at the Toledo Museum of Art. I could swear that every time I look at the painting I see yet another bizarre, wildly attired critter, as if the fantastic, indescribable entities are procreating smack there on the surface. I haven’t experimented with opium (yet), but if it really was such stuff that triggered such creativity in Mr. Fitzgerald, doing so may be added to my 'bucket list' in the not too distant future." - Lawrence W. Nichols, William Hutton Senior Curator, European and American Painting and Sculpture before 1900 / Toledo Museum of Art (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Glowing like a page in an illuminated missal, J W Waterhouse’s ethereal Saint Cecilia (1895) is not only one of his key masterworks, but also an enduring object of desire for a long line of passionate collectors. Even before it left the artist’s studio, it was purchased by the ‘Silver King’ George McCulloch (1848–1907), a Glaswegian who made a fortune in Australian mines and retired to London in 1892. By his death, he had spent at least £250,000 (a staggering sum then) on more than 300 contemporary British and continental artworks displayed from 1896 in the luxurious new Kensington house he shared with his wife, Mary, a miner’s daughter. After a controversial showing at the Royal Academy in 1909, their collection was dispersed at Christie’s in 1913. The sale there of Saint Cecilia for the huge sum of £2,300 to the civil engineer Brodie Henderson (1869–1936), whose wealthy family were Waterhouse’s chief patrons, astonished the trade and broke Waterhouse’s auction record. Eighty-seven years later, on 14 June 2000, Saint Cecilia worked her magic again at Christie’s: the composer Andrew, Lord Lloyd-Webber, paid £6,603,750, making this the most expensive Waterhouse picture sold publicly to this day. It is ironic that Andrew Lloyd Webber, who owns such an important collection of Victorian art, bought Saint Cecilia in the same room where Esther Waterhouse had dispersed the contents of her late husband’s studio at rock-bottom prices in 1926, when Victorian art had fallen from favour completely. Waterhouse’s star rose again later and shows no sign of fading anytime soon. The Maas Gallery has been fortunate to handle Saint Cecilia three times, most recently just before it headed to Christie’s in 2000." - Peter Trippi, Editor-in-Chief, Fine Art Connoisseur (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "This painting was purchased by Penlee House Gallery & Museum in 2013 with assistance from the Art Fund and the Friends of Penlee House. Since then it has become a firm favourite with our visitors and we have produced a range of bespoke products such as tote bags and magnets featuring this enigmatic portrait. Ruby was also part of our 'Penlee Inspired Online' challenge during lockdown, where we invited people to create their own interpretations based on works in our collections. Click here to see more. This may be a portrait of Ruby Bone, a Newlyn girl, whose father worked at Penlee Quarry and who was aged four in the 1911 census. However, the title could quite easily be symbolic, referring to the girl's striking red hair, rosy cheeks and red cape. Gotch wrote that he painted this in Newlyn during the winter of 1908-9. Gotch painted another work of this title in 1909, which appears to show the same model as an older child." - Katie Herbert, Curator, Penlee House Gallery & Museum (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "One of the highlights of my time at Tate was helping to acquire this painting for the collection and I would like to thank the Maas Gallery for its encouragement and support. The painting has been on more of less continuous display since it was acquired and has attracted much attention from academics and the public alike for the poignant way in which Osborn highlights the plight of the female artist struggling to make a living in a male-dominated metropolis. Do check out the Tate Shots film about the work ." - Dr Alison Smith, Chief Curator, National Portrait Gallery (formerly Curator of 19th-century British Art, Tate) (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    A study for the figure on the right (Alexa Wilding) in The Bower Meadow (1872). Alexa Wilding's relationship with Rossetti, unlike with a number of his other models including Lizzie Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris, was free of emotional and physical complications. One of his favourite models during the 1860s and 1870s, Wilding sat for Rossetti regularly during this period and appears in an astonishing number of major works including Venus Verticordia (1864-8, Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, Bournemouth), Monna Vanna (1866, Tate Gallery), La Bella Mano (1875, Bancroft Collection, Wilmington, Delaware), and The Blessed Damozel (1875-8, Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard). Although we do not know Miss Wilding's date of birth, it is thought that she was in her late 20s or early 30s when she began modelling for Rossetti. They met quite by chance one summer evening, as Rossetti was on his way to The Arundel Club. Walking alongside a young woman, Rossetti was struck by her beautiful features and her auburn hair and followed her for some distance. Finally building up his courage, the artist approached Miss Wilding and asked her to visit his studio and sit for him. They agreed for her to visit the next day; however, to his great disappointment she failed to appear and he gave up hope of seeing her again. Some months later, Rossetti chanced upon her again on The Strand and convinced here there and then, to visit his studio. On learning that she could earn more money in a single sitting than in a week as a dressmaker, she agreed to model for him exclusively. For a number of years in the late 1860s and 1870s, Rossetti paid Alexa a retainer of £2 a week to sit for him exclusively. Rossetti's assistant Henry Treffry Dunn is recorded as stating 'Miss Wilding's was a lovely face, beautifully moulded in every feature, full of quiescent, soft, mystical repose that suited some of [Rossetti's] conceptions admirably, but without any variety of expression. She sat like the Sphinx waiting to be questioned and with always a vague reply in return; about the last girl, one would think, to have the makings of an actress in her; and yet to be that was her ambition.' Dunn also noticed that 'she had a deep well of affection within her seemingly placid exterior.' When Rossetti died in 1882, she was one of the few who travelled down to Birchington-on-Sea, even though she could ill afford it; a testament to the depth of their friendship. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Alice Gray emerged, unidentified and unattributed, from a grubby carrier bag at Christie’s front counter shortly after the millennium. The picture went on to fetch three times its estimate at auction and now hangs on the walls of the Getty. I never see it without thinking of the vendor whose old age was made more comfortable by the sale and how those in the commercial art world can often transform their clients’ circumstances for the better. I’m also reminded how easily unsigned pictures can be lost and how a rediscovery really is a cause for celebration!" - Peter Brown, Senior Director of 19th Century European Art, Christie's (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Congratulations on the Maas Gallery's and Rupert's own 60th anniversaries. It is also a 60th anniversary for me, as I first stated to take a serious interest in the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian art more generally while spending 1960-61 in London. I met Jeremy then while he was putting together his first exhibition (from which I was allowed to buy, in advance, a Ruskin drawing), while at the same time, unknown to me, he was becoming a new father. Dyce was one of my early discoveries, and I wrote my first article, published in the Burlington Magazine in 1963 about him. He remains one of my favorite artists and this Welsh Landscape is one of my favorite pictures by him, which I first saw too late for that article, but borrowed it for an exhibition and wrote about in 1968, not too weIl. So here is another attempt to do it justice. Dyce painted -- or began -- this beautiful picture in 1850 on a six-week trip to Wales 'for a change of air,' away from the major undertaking of painting frescoes in the new Palace of Westminster that occupied him through the 1850s. It is one of a group of such pictures on millboard panels all the same size that he could carry with him on holidays. While the painting's painstaking detail and high degree of finish can be related to contemporary early Pre-Raphaelite landscapes, the self-effacing discipline and cool detachment are distinctly and unforgettably Dyce's own." - Allen Staley, Author of The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (2001) and the New Painting of the 1860s (2011) (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Congratulations on the 60th Anniversary of the Maas Gallery! Not surprisingly, I have chosen the painting by our relative Madeline Green. Such an evocative painting; the muted colours, the sparse room, yet a positive feeling of confidence and expectation. The painting draws you in and you could look at it for ages" - Dr. Carole Walker, author of Reflection of an Artist: Madeline Green (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "I know this woman - I lived with her for quite a few years! It's our mother, Antonia Maas, painted by John Ward in our lovely house in Twickenham in the early 1960s. Mummy is standing in our drawing room on the second floor, holding our whippet Apollo (she used to love promenading along the Kings Road with Apollo and his brother Phoebus, where we lived before moving to Twickers). John would come to our house to paint each of us children in water colour - I still have the ones of me. I remember our parents settled on this house because a particularly favourite painting fitted perfectly into the panel above the fireplace in that room. In the background is the window in our music room where mummy would play her boudoir grand. The gold leaf on the wood panels was painstakingly applied by her. As an artist of some note herself she helped prepare early catalogues with daddy, decorating the covers. Happy birthday, bro, and happy anniversary, gallery. Rupert, so many of the pictures you are posting have so many wonderful childhood memories for me!" -Jonathan Maas (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "One of the great pleasures for me in the many years I have been visiting the Maas Gallery has been the opportunity to sit down and visit with Jeremy and Rupert and to discuss the aesthetic qualities and scholarly aspects of various works of art on display in their gallery. In 1993 I had the good fortune to see this spectacular Burne-Jones watercolour sketch of young maidens asleep at a well and a loom and to talk about it with them before the drawing was purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Although somewhat unusual in Burne-Jones oeuvre, I was struck by its incredible beauty and would have dearly loved to buy it myself except that it was out of my price range. Two years later I had the good fortune to buy pencil studies, both dated 1870, for the two figures to the far left of the composition. This splendid watercolour sketch is the only work that survives of what should have been the fourth canvas of the so called 'small Briar Rose set' that Burne-Jones started in 1871 for his patron William Graham and completed in 1873." - Dennis T. Lanigan, renowned collector of Pre-Raphaelite works on paper (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    “Suppress the sniggers that Frank Dillon’s title, The Colossal Pair, might provoke, and think yourself back into the Victorian mind-set. These two enormous statues, then known as the ‘Colossi of Memnon’, stand on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor. Famed since antiquity, by the 19th century they had acquired legendary status. For visitors and for those at home who eagerly read their tales, such mighty remnants from ancient Egypt’s glorious past evoked melancholy thoughts of former grandeur and present decay. Hence Dillon’s glorious technicolour scene, in which the towering statues silhouetted against the setting sun, survey a desolate watery expanse. When the painting was exhibited at the British Institution in 1857, one reviewer summed up what it meant to Dillon’s contemporaries: ‘The skeleton of camel shows the vastness the sculptures, and does not disturb the utter loneliness of the scene. Death and eternity are the thoughts which that scene conveys’. The splendid frame is original. One of David Roberts’s most famous lithographs, Statues of Memnon at Thebes, during the inundation (1848), set the elegiac tone that many artists followed. Dillon himself made several visits to Egypt, the first in 1854-55, during which he travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan, making a more down-to-earth sketch of the statues from a different angle, dated 13th February 1855. Rather than Memnon, a hero of the Trojan War, with whom they were associated, the statues represent the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. In Dillon’s day, they were the only substantial remains of Amenhotep’s enormous mortuary temple, completed c.1360, and stood guard at the entrance. Built on the edge of the Nile flood plain, massive earthquakes and the regular annual inundations undermined the temple’s foundations causing it to collapse. One earthquake shattered the northern colossus, opening up cracks that reportedly caused it to ‘sing’ at dawn.” - Briony Llewellyn, Art historian (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Four years ago, the Delaware Art Museum was presented with the opportunity to acquire this stunning painting by Leigh Smith Bodichon, an early member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood circle and a pioneer in the women’s reform movement. It is perhaps the most important work she created during her career. It is a piece that is also meant to be in the Bancroft pre-Raphaelite Collection, both as a stellar example of Ruskin’s call for ‘truth to nature’ as taken up by the young pre-Raphaelites, and as representative of the few bold women who were able to negotiate the gender imbalance of the era and achieve professional success. I am deeply indebted to the Maas Gallery and Rupert Maas for this once-in-a-curator’s-lifetime experience!" - Margaretta Frederick, Chief Curator and Annette Woolard-Provine Curator of the Bancroft Pre-Raphaelite Collection, Delaware Art Museum (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Rossetti’s work of the 1850s is now considered by scholars to be his most poetic and sensitive; his best work from this period was in watercolour and pencil. As Alastair Grieve has noted: “His watercolours and ink drawings are elaborately worked and must have taken almost as long to make, though perhaps not as long, as his oils. He used watercolour in an almost dry state, building up painstakingly worked layers of colour … His watercolours breathe and give off colour in a way which his oils do not.” Pictured here is Annie Miller, who met Rossetti soon after Holman Hunt ‘discovered’ her working as a barmaid behind his Chelsea studio. When Hunt left for the Middle East in 1854, Rossetti took her up, going for walks with her (and more besides) - but Rossetti and Hunt were not Annie’s only admirers; something of her morals, and of her relationship with Hunt may be understood from the fact that she was the model for Hunt’s Awakening Conscience. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Frith painted love struck couples in various guises: awaiting the decision of a father, Shelley proposing to Mary Godwin and a couple looking towards the sea. This is one of his most charming and natural in its setting by a hillside and waterfall, a composition he was to use again. The hill remained, the dress changed. Fickle fashion against unchanging nature. In its colour and detail it is almost Pre-Raphaelite. A splendid Frith." - Mark Bills, Director, Gainsborough's House (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Married for Rank shows the genius for storytelling that would make Millais such a brilliant illustrator of novels. The newly-weds are a beautiful young bride and her ancient groom (surely an ancestor of Mr Burns in The Simpsons), who wears the insignia of the Order of the Garter. Both offer their hands, he to an obsequious well-wisher, she to a wounded soldier, her former lover, who hardly believes what she has done until he sees the ring. For me the drawings of emotionally charged scenes from modern life that Millais made in 1853–4 are among his best works." - Malcolm Warner, Curator (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "In 2016, I visited the gallery with my new department head, Nadine Orenstein, and we found ourselves unable to take our eyes off Alfred William Hunt’s Snowdon hanging behind Rupert’s desk. Acquiring this stunning watercolor was a significant step in our efforts to enrich the Met’s holdings with fine Victorian works on paper. Snowdon encapsulates what Hunt sought when he braved rain, mist and sleet in northwest Wales during the summers of 1856-57. His vision had been shaped at Liverpool’s Collegiate School by the Rev. William John Conybeare, a scholar of both geology and the Bible, then stimulated by Ruskin’s praise 'of mountain beauty' in Modern Painters (volume 4, April 1856). "My thanks to The Maas Gallery for making this wonderful acquisition possible and many congratulations on your 60th year!" - Constance McPhee, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Although born in Norfolk, Sandys' move to London by 1851 placed him firmly in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. For two years, he lived in the Chelsea house of Rossetti, who cemented his reputation among his peers by referring to him as 'the greatest of living draftsmen'. This rare oil by Sandys was modelled by Mary Emma Jones playing the part of Perdita from Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Among the many movements in late nineteenth-century British painting – Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Olympian neo-classicism, Symbolism, naturalism - the one we hear least of, I think, is Idyllism, with its lyrical, understated meditations on rural England. And among the Idyllists, Cecil Gordon Lawson is probably the least well-known. Fred Walker, George Heming Mason, Matthew Ridley Corbett, George Pinwell, John William North are all names more likely to spark a response in the art-lover’s breast. There’s a large picture by Lawson that has been in the Tate ever since his widow gave it in 1883, and it hasn’t been hung for a very long time. As Keeper in the ’90s, I put it on my list to be restored, but the sheer logistics of restoring large pictures are always problematic, and this specimen didn't rank high in the pecking order, alas. I believe it has now been cleaned. I’m delighted therefore that, even if it hasn’t got round to displaying Lawson’s The August Moon (1689 x 3061 cm.), in 2012 the Tate acquired from Rupert Maas an only slightly smaller picture, The Hop Gardens of England, which was painted, however, a good deal earlier. It doesn’t show moonlight, nor the kind of ambiguous half-light the Idyllists loved, but a scene in broad day, a typical Kentish valley, the hillsides covered with hops, and the landscape dotted with oasts, their white vanes glinting in the sun. Lawson tells us that this is a view near Wrotham, under the North Downs between Sevenoaks and Maidstone. For a sadly brief period of my life I had a house in just such a valley, at Plaxtol, less than five miles from Wrotham. We looked out over very similar, gently rolling hills covered in the later twentieth century, not with hops but with fruit orchards. In summer the air resounded with the irregular pops and bangs of bird-scarers, and there was a sense of ripeness and fecundity as in the pictures that Samuel Palmer had made in the 1830s a few miles north, up the Darenth valley at Shoreham. The plough in Lawson’s foreground might be a deliberate allusion to Palmer, and the distant reapers in the cornfield on the right likewise echo his favourite subject-matter. The hops are gone now, and the oasts nearly all converted into homes that at least retain their kilns (they are a selling-point). Their white vanes still sparkle in the sun. I remember as a boy, when hops were still a staple of the Kentish economy, hiking through a similar landscape near Cranbrook, where the oldest oast, dating from about 1750, is still to be seen. As night came on we pitched our tent in the middle of a hop garden, building a fire and trying to cook steak and kidney pudding (in its tin) over the inadequate flames. (We were learning about life.) This picture fills me with a poignant nostalgia, not only for the beauties of the ‘Garden of England’, but for a whole world that has passed irrevocably away, and which Lawson brings before us in vivid detail." - Andrew Wilton, Curator (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "A delicate vision of water and air, The Open Sea displays the artist's skill at manipulating materials, as well as his deep knowledge of the ocean. He had a sailor's appreciation of wind and water, a scientist's understanding of weather, and an artist's ability to depict them." - Melinda McCurdy, associate curator of British art, The Huntington Library (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    The portrait of Mrs Ernest Moon (Emma de Villiers Lamb) from Sydney was one of Blake Richmond's four best portraits reserved for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1888. Emma was eighteen when she met Ernest Moon while he was visiting Sydney. The young barrister wrote to her three years later to ask her to marry him; she embarked immediately for England and a new life. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    During the summer of 1818, Eastlake and companions (including Sir Charles Barry who designed the Houses of Parliament) travelled to Athens where Eastlake 'worked under an umbrella from morning to night' in the heat of the sun, earning himself the nickname of 'The Salamander' and damaging his eyes so badly he needed an operation on them. Eastlake stayed sketching in Athens for three and a half months, returning often to the Acropolis, 'the very essence of everything classic.' This is one of the ninety oil sketches that Eastlake produced during his tour. He used it later to paint Erechtheum, Athens, with Figures in the Foreground (1821), now in the Yale Center for British Art. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "I much regret not buying this picture when the Maas Gallery had it. Its slightly quirky subject sums up for me the zany taste of the Gallery and its propensity to plough a lone furrow, which I have long admired. In addition, I knew the artist very well. Leslie Worth was a charming, softly-spoken and unassuming man, who belied all the popular stereotypes of the successful professional artist. As President of the Royal Watercolour Society, Leslie was a technically brilliant watercolourist, and I had many conversations with him on watercolour painting and the great watercolourists, in whose footsteps Leslie rightly considered he was following. He once told me that he always felt himself inferior to Turner, but when he visited the Niagara Falls and painted them, he satisfied himself that, for once, he had done something that the great man never did." - Charles Nugent, Curator (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Hawksley was primarily a water-colourist; this is one of her very few oil paintings, perhaps her only one. Its title refers to Pharaoh's daughter Bathia, who found Moses in the bulrushes (visible in the background) and brought him up. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition in 1918, amongst a sea of harrowing paintings of the First World War. Hawksley’s works almost exclusively featured women, exuding motherhood, peace, and new life: poignant themes amongst the horrors of war. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "This watercolour intrigued me when Rupert sent me a photo of it in 1996, because it threw doubt on the watercolour of the same subject in the Whitehouse Collection of which I was the Curator. One was probably a copy by his amanuensis, Arthur Severn, and one was the original Ruskin - but which was which? I concluded that the Maas version was the original. Ruskin waited days in fine weather in the Alps in July 1858 for this weather effect, and wrote to his father: Yesterday a storm came up in fragments along the plane, just like an army in detached columns, with open sky between; and when it got to the Alps, they began to play with it in the most wonderful way. First it broke up against them, and great foaming thunder clouds dashed up here and there just like the spray of tremendous waves broken on the ridge. Then the Alps broke through these spray clouds and laid them this way and that on their sides, and made necklaces of them, and threw them out in long sheets far over the plane, shadowing it into deep blue, while the sun traversing over the peaks, sent long red rays over the sheets of foam between every gap of the rocks, pieces of pure and perfect blue sky set here and there so calmly in the middle of all the anger; and a purple range of unclouded peaks retaining one behind the other, in the way that you are so fond of seeing them – far to the north beyond the lago Maggiore. It was my old friend, the late Joe Links, who first took me to Clifford Street to introduce me to Jeremy Maas and his delightful gallery. My visits to London were infrequent, but thereafter every visit included going to the Maas Gallery. Jeremy knew that I was interested in the Lake District artist Thomas Sunderland. On one visit he showed me a lovely watercolour by Sunderland of the head of Coniston Lake, including the Old Waterhead Inn, which had been visited several times in his youth by Ruskin. I asked how much it was and Jeremy said £60. I didn’t have a spare £60 but I did have two very slight Ruskin sketches. I asked if he would accept these and £30. The deal was done and the Sunderland is still one of my favourite drawings on my walls. On one of my visits to Clifford Street I was introduced to the young Rupert – and I liked to think that we have remained good friends ever since." - James Dearden, Author and Scholar of John Ruskin (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Beardsley’s attraction to Chopin was on two levels: a shared experience with tuberculosis, and a shared love of music. Here, he focuses on Chopin’s hands, 'the main tool of expression for both pianist and painter' (Heyd 1986, p. 193). Now in a private collection, this work has recently appeared in both the Tate's and Musee D'orsay's exhibition of Beardsley's drawings. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Austin Osman Spare is thought of as an artist interested in esoterica and magick - but he was also interested in the sexual dynamics that partly underlie these subjects, and so nudes are very common in his work. Sometimes they are sultry and sirenish, a kind of late-flowering Symbolism. But this one is much more naturalistic and shows brilliantly all the temporal realities of the body that binds our spirit. This particular Spare was with The Maas Gallery in 2010, but the opening of their Spare exhibition in 2005 sits very clearly in my memory. Spare attracts interesting characters of all sorts - and they were all there. Appropriately considering the perceived diabolic frisson in some of Spare's work, everyone gravitated towards the basement, crammed in, boozing and talking intently. It was a very memorable night. Much later I would be a temporary resident in the basement, a very happy time for me." -Robert Upstone, specialist and dealer (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    “I joined the staff of the venerable, eighty-five-year-old Fine Art Society in 1961; the fledgling Maas Gallery was just around the corner in Clifford Street and I regularly looked in its window and frequently went into to the gallery, gradually getting to know Jeremy Maas. Jeremy was in the forefront of dealers and scholars rediscovering the virtues of the great Victorians - Leighton, Watts, et al. Conversely The Fine Art Society was in the rearguard having largely failed to notice that these artists were old fashioned and out of date. There was a natural overlap - the parable of the Hare and the Tortoise comes to mind. Jeremy asked me to read in draft the final chapters of the book he was writing, especially that relating to the early years of the New English Art Club, and my copy of 'Victorian Painters' is inscribed to me by Jeremy and dated 30.6.69 - my thirtieth birthday - which makes it both serendipitous and a pleasure to return the compliment fifty one years later and to join in the joint sixtieth anniversary celebrations of both the Maas Gallery and the ever-youthful Rupert who has kept the flag flying. The work I have selected from those that have passed through the Maas Gallery's hands is Arthur Gaskin's 'The Annunciation', a work which I first got to know and love in 1982 when, in conjunction with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, The Fine Art Society showed George Breeze's and Glennys Wild's pioneering exhibition of the work of Arthur and Georgie Gaskin. Many years later, when it came up at auction, I acted on behalf of Birmingham to try and acquire it but was outbid by Rupert. Its present owners are fortunate, it is a haunting image; may they enjoy it for many years.” - Peyton Skipwith (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Caught in 1838, in an unguarded moment by her friend and contemporary, Louisa Stuart de Rothesay (Lady Waterford), Queen Victoria almost appears to trying out her throne for size. A slight figure (she was under five feet tall), she barely fills the throne, and at only 18-years-old when this was painted, she was a year younger than Louisa, who had been presented at court three years before and was already well-travelled. The two young women shared a talent for art, which Louisa was able to exploit more freely than the Queen, while still retaining the amateur status required by her social position." -Charlotte Gere, Writer and Curator (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Years before the art of Richard Dadd was rediscovered in the landmark Tate exhibition of 1974, the Maas Gallery sold this watercolour to the famous collection at Bedford. Dadd was a brilliant fairy and literary painter around 1840 before falling into a terrible mental illness which led him to kill his father and be sent to a secure hospital for life. His work is often said to be disturbing or impenetrable. I find it hilarious and increasingly see Dadd as the great comic genius of 19th-century British art (a dark genius, to be sure). This is a child's idea of what a hermit might look like - but executed in the technique of a master." - Dr. Nicholas Tromans, Curator and Author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Waterhouse’s drawing, a study for his Lady Clare painting, is brilliantly executed. It is a three-quarter profile, the most demanding aspect because of the difficulty of rendering perspective accurately. Her head is tilted downward and her gaze averted – a pose sometimes thought to imply modesty or submission, and often found in depictions of the goddess Venus. It is a drawing by line alone, in which every line counts as an indicator of occlusion or contour. This is the method insisted upon by Henry Tonks, and used to superb effect by his Slade students such as Augustus John. Although the model is dressed and decorated in the same simple manner as the figure in his painted version, the attitude of head and face is entirely different – here reserved and even resigned, there resolute and confident. So it may be that Waterhouse may have thought of illustrating a different phase of Tennyson’s ballad, the moment where the Lady Clare, having delivered the bewildering news of her humble origins to her beloved, awaits rejection: 'If I come drest like a village maid, I am but as my fortunes are: I am a beggar born,' she said, 'And not the Lady Clare.' Whether capturing this moment would have made a more effective painting, I do not know. But what I know for sure is that, were both drawing and painting mine, and fleeing the burning house, I would save the drawing of Lady Clare. In the genre in which it sits, Waterhouse achieved perfection. -Robin Campbell (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "A Voice of Joy and Gladness by John Samuel Raven. What an apt title for such a perfect image by this rare artist. Perhaps in some part due to his being self taught, Raven developed a singular vision. Almost contemporary in its close up and cropped depiction of the beautiful subject, the painting sits splendidly in its quintessentially Victorian frame. An evocation of spring which is certain to come, has never been so welcome." - Victor James (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    This beautiful study, for which the artist’s daughter Margaret modelled, is the head of the Princess, the focal point of Burne-Jones’s celebrated Briar Rose series at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire. These paintings mark the climax of his attempt to illustrate the story of Sleeping Beauty, which occupied the artist for the greater part of his career. Burne-Jones was devoted to his daughter, a renowned beauty who encapsulated his feminine ideal. In 1886, when The Rose Bower was so much in progress, he painted a celebrated portrait of her, as well as a more fanciful likeness entitled Flamma Vestalis. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    In a letter to her former husband Ben, Winifred Nicholson gently upbraids him for his use of violet: 'you go and plop Earth-Red as a policeman to hold your magic Violet down, and hold it mum.' Perhaps it was a habit he acquired from his father, William Nicholson, who does exactly that with the violet magenta in this beautiful limited palette study, all the more lovely for the earth red underpainting that gives such depth to the flower heads, despite the simplicity of treatment they receive. The use of colour and technique throughout is economical, inventive, sumptuous, masterful. The whole thing sings. -Sarah Adams, artist (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "The model for the drawing was Maria Zambaco, Burne-Jones’s mistress. There is a very similar study from the same sitting in Birmingham City Art Gallery (1898P49), which is from a very slightly different angle. Both these drawings can be found in the Burne-Jones Catalogue Raisonné Foundation: www.eb-j.org, titled: Study for the Head and shoulders of Yseult (Iseult, Isoude, Isolde) holding the letter; for the painting Tristram and Yseult (finished pencil drawing, Torre Abbey); model: Maria Zambaco." - Peter Nahum and William Waters (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton settled in Britain with her mother in the 1840s, taking up work as a maid and a cook before she began modelling for the Pre-Raphaelites from about 1859. Her distinctive features appear in many of their works, including this by Joanna Boyce Wells, whose promising career ended when she died shortly after childbirth at the age of 29. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "‘Any woman reaching the heights in the fine arts had been almost unknown until Mrs Swynnerton came and broke down the barriers of prejudice’, so wrote Dame Laura Knight in her autobiography Oil Paint and Grease Paint (1936). In 1922, Annie Swynnerton was elected the first female Associate Member of the Royal Academy, a ground-breaking achievement that established her reputation as one of Britain’s most important artists and should have ensured her legacy – but, like so many women artists, her star gradually faded after her death in 1933. The Sense of Sight (1895), of which a related version is in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, is one of a number of portrayals by the artist which conveys female power, strength and hope during a period of social and economic change for women. A tour de force in terms of perspective, the spectator’s line of sight is below that of the angel, whose gaze is fixed on a startling vision above. The mystery of what has captivated the angel with such intense rapture is heightened as the drama unfolds outside the frame and out of view. With knowledge of Swynnerton’s feminist politics – she was a passionate supporter of women’s right to vote over three decades – it is tempting to read the picture’s title, ‘The Sense of Sight’, as a visionary evocation of women’s future emancipation." -Sacha Llewellyn, Curator (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Like many people, I discovered my love of Victorian art in Jeremy Maas’ wonderful book, Victorian Painters, when I was a teenager. It was the cover that first drew me to the book but it wasn’t the cover with Flaming June; it was the edition with The Lament for Icarus on it. I was fascinated by this achingly tragic and beautiful picture and decided to find out more about the artist who painted it, Herbert Draper. In those days you couldn’t just put a name into the internet and find what you wanted to know. So I went to the Tate on Millbank where the picture was hanging and asked at the information desk if they knew anything more about the artist – they suggested that I go to the Maas Gallery. Years later I was writing a book on Draper and found mention of a painting by him called Pot Pourri on an online blog written by a diarist who was trying to find out more about her parent’s painting. I was in the early stages of my career in the auction world and offered to help sell the painting. It was bought by Rupert who clearly inherited his father’s appreciation for beautiful pictures. He also inherited the ability to inspire people not just to appreciate Victorian art, but to love it as he does." - Simon Toll, Director, Sotheby's (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Hughes was the nephew of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Arthur Hughes, under whom he first studied. He then entered the Royal Academy Schools and worked with Holman Hunt, helping to complete some of his later works (including the St. Paul’s version of The Light of the World). He was also in touch with Burne-Jones and knew George Macdonald, to whose daughter he was engaged before she died. He worked mainly in watercolour, painting fanciful or literary scenes of a symbolist nature. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    An adherent of Burne-Jones, Strudwick was a later-wave Pre-Raphaelite painter. This is one of the best examples of his abilities using impasto, resulting in the porous quality of skin, the haziness of hair, and the rigged definition of jewellery. Music… has the instant iconic appeal of a beautiful figure clothed in rich, chiming colours. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "Although well regarded as a second-wave Pre-Raphaelite painter, Evelyn De Morgan's rare talent as a draftswomen is seldom celebrated. She was trained at the Slade School of Art from 1873 where she studied life drawing and anatomy before becoming a professional artist. These drawings reveal De Morgan's working process. 'Luna' probably drawn in 1885 is a study in gold pigment on dark brown paper, a technique unique to Burne-Jones and De Morgan, made for sale as an alternative to the oil version.'Head of Medea' was created for an altogether different purpose. Despite being a highly accomplished, beautiful standalone drawing, this work was only ever intended to be used privately by De Morgan in developing her final oil painting. Despite it being chance Rupert chose these drawings as a pair, they do have visual similarities. The loosely bound rope motif was one De Morgan used often in her pictures to symbolise freedom and change. Luna isn't actually bound to the moon, just as women's menstrual cycles aren't actually linked to the moon's orbit. The loose ropes enabled De Morgan to ridicule this 19th century pseudoscience. Medea, Jason's wife from the story of Jason and the Argonauts, was abandoned by her husband for another woman. Such was her rage that she avenged him by killing her own sons. In this careful, intimate study for Medea's head, the pearl strings in her hair indicate her wealth and status, but are only loosely bound to her hair, symbolising her world is about to come crashing down around her. Happy birthday Rupert and Maas Gallery!" - Sarah Hardy, Curator, The De Morgan Foundation (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "This early work, painted when Millais had just finished his training at the Royal Academy Schools, records a strange incident from Millais’s early career, of which there is no record in any of the published biographies or catalogues of the artist and his work. However, an unattributed inscription on the original backing to the picture (now lost) described the occasion which Millais depicted here as follows: ‘The painting represents an incident in Millais’s own life when he was sent for by people unknown to him, but who knew him to be a young artist, to draw a portrait of a girl in her coffin before her burial. The scene moved him so much that when he got home he made this sketch showing himself being asked to draw the girl’s portrait’. The composition is arranged so that the spectator of the painting becomes a witness to Millais’s visit to the dead girl. The artist is seen from behind, hat in hand as a mark of respect and apparently communicating with a woman whom, it is to be assumed, is the mother of the dead girl. The coffin is pushed into the foreground, inviting the spectator to look from the same angle which Millais himself adopted in order to draw the girl. The motif of a dead girl laid out on an oblique, horizontal plane is comparable with Millais’s later treatment of female death in Ophelia. Millais’s painting also serves as a visual record of the social rituals of death in early-Victorian England ; the white cloth covering the coffin is suggestive of innocence and was the colour traditionally used at the burials of children. Artists were often called upon to record the likeness of babies and children who had died prematurely through illness. The Liverpool Pre-Raphaelite artist, William Windus painted a portrait of his first son after he died aged seven months. The loose handling of the paint in The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl can be attributed to the fact that it is apparently a ‘sketch’ from memory, but it may also be compared with the freer brushwork which characterises Millais’s early paintings before he came under the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism. An early self-portrait by Millais, also painted on board and dated 1847 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), is comparable to the manner in which Millais has represented himself in this work. Millais later gave this painting to his friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite, Charles Allston Collins (1828–1873), whom he had met in the mid-1840s when they were both students at the Royal Academy Schools." - Tate Britain (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Like his contemporary John Anster Fitzgerald, Huskisson specialised in fairy paintings almost to the exclusion of all other subjects. He died aged 42 but in his short career he painted a handful of highly-finished, almost enamelled, paintings. Most of his compositions owe an obvious debt to the stage; the action here is seen through an arch as though in a theatre. As for the ‘actors’, they seem to be caught in the gaslight or limelight that revolutionised early Victorian theatre, and were never more effectively employed than in the ballets and pantomimes in which fairies so often played a central role. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    “I was slow to respond to Rupert’s kind invitation to contribute a text describing a work of art sold by the Maas Gallery. Most of the wonderful things that he and his father Jeremy had handled had been claimed by other friends of the gallery, but to my surprise and delight one particular item, and to my mind one of the most remarkable and in its own way beautiful things ever to be seen in Clifford Street, remained: John Everett Millais’s 1853 design for a Gothic window. As is well known, in the summer of 1853 Ruskin invited Millais to stay with him and his wife Effie at Brig o’ Turk in the Scottish Highlands having commissioned him to paint his portrait standing on the rocky bank of the Glenfinlas burn. Ruskin was at the time preoccupied with the question of how buildings, furniture, and even clothing, might be decorated in a way that was both imaginative and naturalistic, by incorporating carefully observed botanical, zoological and human forms, but in strange and bizarre conjunctions – ideas that he expanded upon in his Edinburgh Lectures the following winter. As Millais told his fellow Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt in a letter of 17 August, ‘Ruskin and myself are deep in the designing of novel architecture. He is quite delighted and astonished at my designs. He thought that we were simply capable of copying nature, and that we had no invention. Now he admits he was awfully mistaken’. The seriousness of their purpose of inventing a new type of architecture based on nature, and how the designs Millais made were intended to be translated into three-dimensional form, is conveyed in words written to Thomas Combe: ‘All this day I have been working at a window, which I hope you will see very shortly carried out in stone’. Millais seems almost to have felt that he had discovered a new vocation: ‘I think now I was intended for a Master Mason’. The design that Millais made for the moulded frame of the upper part of a Gothic window is certainly both imaginative and naturalistic. Three pairs of angels bend towards one another, their bodies and wings forming the archivolts, their outstretched arms making the patterns of the quatrefoil at the centre and the heads of the two side arches, and their faces – with lips meeting in petrified kisses – the apices of the arches. As an architectural project the drawing must have derived from conversations between Millais and Ruskin, but also from the artist’s knowledge of the forms of medieval buildings, informed we can assume by his reading of the second volume of The Stones of Venice, published as it was in July 1853 when Ruskin and his guests were already in Scotland but which Millais would have seen as a proof or pre-publication copy. Especially relevant would have been the chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’, while illustrations made by Ruskin for The Stones such as that entitled ‘Windows of the Early Gothic Palaces’ would have introduced Millais to architectural types that he had never seen with his own eyes. In addition to the respect shown for the authenticity of form, a personal element was provided by the use of the head and figure of Effie Ruskin (as she still was in 1853), six times repeated, as the model for the angels. This drawing was, after all, made just at the time that Millais was coming to realise that Effie’s marriage to Ruskin was a sham, and when he found himself falling in love with her, and she with him. I clearly remember the moment, sometime in the early months of 1973, when I first saw this beguiling work of art. I was then in my last year at the Courtauld Institute and was taking a two-term course on Pre-Raphaelitism conducted by Alan Bowness and Ben Read and followed by just two students, my friend Joanna Selborne and myself. It happened that while walking through the West End on my way to the Courtauld, then in Portman Square, I passed by the Maas Gallery and in the window of which the drawing was displayed. Astonished by both the beauty and the scale of the work – it is about seven feet in height and more than nine feet wide – I raved about it to Alan and Joanna and there followed a most stimulating conversation about Ruskin and his relations with successive Pre-Raphaelites. On the basis of my description, Alan said that he hoped it might enter a national collection (which sadly didn’t happen but might have done if it had come onto the market a year or two later at a time when Alan was director of the Tate Gallery). He also asked me whether I had gone into the gallery and if I had spoken to its proprietor. I said I had not, and that I would have been shy of doing so, assuming that a place of this kind was a private demesne where callow undergraduates would not be welcome. He told me I was wrong to think that and that there was much to be learnt from the luminaries of the London art world. So, on the next occasion that I was drifting through the purlieus of New Bond Street, I rang the bell of the Clifford Street emporium. Jeremy Maas was cautiously welcoming, if somewhat gruff, while his business partner Henry (“art history is bunk”) Ford was more voluble (perhaps following lunch?) We talked about the Gothic window design and other things besides, and I was invited to warm myself on the glowing coal-fire, and so we became friends. Once or twice Henry, Jenny and I went out on the razzle in the days when he lived in Stoke Newington Church Street. On one memorable occasion Jeremy and Antonia Maas invited me and my family to visit them in their lovely house in Sussex. It was there that I first met the gallant Rupert, sitting on the edge of the swimming pool entertaining two air hostesses (as such people used to be called) with whom he had made friends. Over the years I bought a small handful of paintings and drawings from the gallery. Negotiating a friendly price was easier with Henry than with Jeremy, I found, but both worked on a principle of inverted salesmanship that only made one want whatever it was the more intensely. I still love the paintings and drawings that I bought from the gallery, and which form my own personal galaxy of Maasterpieces. In 1991 I was honoured to be asked by Jeremy and Henry to write the introduction of the catalogue of the exhibition John Ruskin and his Circle. Opening a ‘Jeremy Maas’ file here in my office in Suffolk, a clipping of his Times obituary has fluttered out. Mention was made of what the writer mistakenly called a design for stained glass, but which must have been the present drawing (identified by the name of its celebrity purchaser). It is shocking to be reminded that Jeremy was only sixty-eight at the time of his death. If only he could be with us still. Congratulations to the Maas Gallery and all the people who have been involved with it in its sixty years, and fond birthday wishes to the ever youthful Rupert.” - Christopher Newall, Art historian, author and curator (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    "One of Simeon Solomon’s ‘late works’ (in other words, after the 1873 arrest), this is similar to many drawings by Solomon from around this time; however, it stands out from the rest by virtue of its composition, technique, artistry and painterly quality. The gallery has been run by father and son, Jeremy and Rupert for sixty years. And run in the most delightful and exemplary manner. Regular visitors may be invited downstairs for a special viewing. Barry Humphries has recorded that he was offered glasses of wine during the 1960s in that basement. Invitations to launch parties for their exhibitions are much sought after, as the crowds attest: squashed into that small space sipping good champagne, talking, people-spotting and (oh yes) looking at the art. Their catalogues for these shows are collectors’ pieces, often lavishly produced, always interestingly written and cleverly designed. The 2019 Engravings catalogue was a fitting innovation, printed on newsprint and designed by Rupert’s daughter Clementine, from the next generation. Long may the Maas Gallery continue." - Pam Solomon (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Here, George Hicks (1824-1914) shows, with Pre-Raphaelitic attention to detail, a strong and healthy workman bidding farewell to his wife and child as he departs for a day of honest toil. His corduroy trousers are secured below the knee with ‘yarks’, the buckled straps worn by both rural and urban labourers. His wife, her wedding ring visible, has pinned the front of her skirt to protect the fabric from the dust and dirt of her housework. The doorway is surrounded by thriving vines, fuchsias and nasturtiums - and we see the dresser of willow pattern plates inside the house - indicating the comfort and security of the lifestyle rewarded through hard work. The Victorians held the belief that work, self-help, discipline, and thrift were at the root of England’s greatness; but the industrial revolution bought prosperity to some at the cost of virtually enslaving the workers. With a rapidly expanding population, great industrial towns sprang up in which the labouring classes lived, in conditions of dreadful squalor. Only from the 1860s, was there an gradual concern amongst artists with the less favourable side of the labourer’s lot. The situation was to be explored by such artists as Herkomer, Frank Holl and Luke Fildes. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Aided by a telescope, James Nasmyth embarked on a mission to delineate the moon's surface in 1842, producing a series of famous studies; over 150 years later, when Rupert Maas and Buzz Aldrin met at a cocktail party in London, this particular study became the only by Nasmyth to have been signed by someone who had been to the moon itself: Just a few good places to land. Buzz Aldrin Apollo XI (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Harold and Laura Knight were the golden couple amongst the artists’s community in Newlyn at the beginning of the twentieth century. They had met as students at the Nottingham School of Art in about 1890, when he was 17 and she was 15. Towards the end of her life, Laura remembered their reunion in 1896 after his return from Paris, and his painting of her: ‘Only a few moments passed, however, before the bond between us that had been in existence since we first met made itself known - perhaps showing greater strength than ever before. In imagination I lived through his experience; hand in hand we walked through the galleries; eye to eye saw the great masterpieces; I learnt of aesthetic and technical developments hitherto undreamt of. With my hair done in a new French style that Harold fancied, I posed for a portrait of head and shoulders ... I often wonder if that fine and rather mysterious work still exists’. This memoir, written at least fifty years later, suggests a date of 1896/7 for this haunting early portrait, but the picture was first exhibited in 1905 (in Dublin), suggesting a later date. The colour and lighting derive from the Hague School, particularly the Dutch painter Jozef Israëls, who held dominant influence over the Staithes community of artists amongst whom the Knights lived from 1898 to 1907. However, the Knights probably did not encounter much of Israëls’s work at first hand until they honeymooned at Laren, a village by the Zuiderzee in Holland, where there was an art colony founded by him and Anton Mauve. The canvas is on a continental stretcher. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    This picture was listed in Rex Vicat Cole's 'The Art and Life of Byam Shaw', (Seeley Service, London, 1932) as a water-colour of 1913, not exhibited. Four years prior, Shaw had illustrated Edgar Allen Poe's 'Selected Tales of Mystery’, which included 'The Raven', revealing that there was as much black in Shaw's palette, as there was in Poe's imagination. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Dorette was Brockhurst’s nickname for Woodward, who became his muse and appeared in many of his works. They had first met in 1929, when she was just 16 and had already started modelling at the Royal Academy Schools in London where Brockhurst was a visiting professor, 20 years her senior. She later featured in his controversial 1932 etching, ‘Adolescence', which depicts her sitting naked in front of a mirror. Brockhurst was still married to his first wife, Anaïs Mélisande Folin, when he started an affair with Woodward, his portraits of whom were exhibited at every Royal Academy Summer Exhibition between 1933-39. These established Brockhurst’s career, earning him commissions from the likes of J Paul Getty. After Brockhurst and Woodward emigrated to the US in 1939, he continued to paint high-profile sitters, such as Marlene Dietrich and Wallis Simpson. They eventually married in 1947. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Walter Deverell was responsible for introducing Siddal to the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Struck by the extraordinary beauty of the twenty year old assistant in a bonnet-shop, he persuaded his mother to approach her and ask if she would consider posing as a model. Siddal was the model for Viola in his 'Twelfth Night' (1850), for a figure in Holman Hunt’s 'Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Priest’ (1850) and for Sylvia in his 'Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus' (1851), as well as for Millais’s ‘Ophelia' (1852); but from then onwards Rossettti monopolised her attenion, and for the next ten years she was his constant companion and source of inspiration, and finally, briefly, his wife. The lives and personalities of the Pre-Raphaelite group, and especially Rossetti’s, have been the subject of intense and sometimes sensation-mongering scrutiny; but unconventional though his relationship with Siddal was, no one has ever suggested that she was his mistress. It was understood that he would evenutally marry her and they were treated as an engaged couple, but his impecunious and disordered way of life was not conducive to matrimony. As passion faded and her health declined their relationship came under increasing strain. Finally, in May 1860, he married her, a year later she gave birth to a still-born child, and in February 1862 she died of an overdose of laudanum. Her death was certainly deliberate, a slip of paper pinned to her nightgown bore the message ‘Take care of Harry’ – her feeble minded brother to whom she was devoted. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    A recent rediscovery when the Maas Gallery sold it in 2012, this picture shows Poynter in the full maturity of his powers. The dusty shadows on her face are a trademark for the artist, and the bold colours chime confidently with one another in a simple, effective composition. Barine is a character from Horace's 'Odes', a calculating beauty who leaves a string of broken hearts and ruined engagements in her wake. Even Horace is charmed, and is duly deserted, joining her 'train of slaves [which] grows every day.' In the painting, she tears a love letter in disdain, and unravels an ouroboros bracelet (a snake devouring its own tail, a symbol of eternity, here undone). The relevant passage of Horace (Odes, II.8) can translate as: 'But when, perfidious, you engage / To meet high heaven's vindictive rage, / You rise, whit heighten'd lustre fair' Exhibited at the New Gallery in the year that Poynter became director of the National Gallery in London (two years later he was simultaneously President of the Royal Academy), Barine attracted what we might now describe as 'rave' reviews. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    By 1895, when Clausen was made an Associate of the Royal Academy and the year of this painting, Clausen was searching for a synthesis between the two French artists he most admired: Bastien-Lepage, whom he thought was ‘consummate’ in ‘rendering facts’, and his opposite in Millet, intensely spiritual, rendering ‘sentiment’. It was the moody Symbolist landscapes of GF Watts which provided a bridge. Clausen wrote (for a lecture on Watts that he gave at the RA in 1905): ‘...landscape does not mean only to peep out of doors... but it should express the infinite spaces of earth and sky.’ Kenneth McConkey writes: 'On a visit to Clausen’s studio at Widdington, Essex on 20 October 1895, David Croal Thomson, manager at the Goupil dealership, surveyed his recent work and agreed prices. Among the pictures Thomson saw was Solitude (August Moonrise), a Millet-esque nocturne depicting a fallow field. The work was a pendant to a larger canvas, The Plough, (sold Christie’s c. 1985) which Clausen had painted in the previous year. Where the earlier picture shows an abandoned plough, here the foreground contains a harrow. Three weeks after Thomson’s visit, on 9 November 1895, Solitude… was dispatched to Goupil’s, but no record is made in the artist’s account book of its eventual sale. The picture prompted its own sequence. Clausen began to draw scenes of harrowing and two years later embarked upon a large canvas for the Royal Academy in 1898. A monumental work that was later destroyed in a fire, The Harrow depicted a boy struggling to control an unruly plough-horse as he tries to turn the animal at the edge of a field. There is no such drama in Solitude…, merely that stillness which falls with a late summer moonrise.' (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    As explained in the Royal Academy's 1996 Leighton catalogue, "The subject comes from Homer's Odyssey, where the shipwrecked Odyssesus is discovered by Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous. She takes Odysseus to her father's palace, where he tells his story and where he competes successfully in the games with the Phaecians. Leighton has chosen the moment when Nausicaa watches his victory: "Now Nausicaa, in all her heaven-sent beauty, was standing by one of the pillars that supported the massive roof. Filled with admiration as her eyes fell on Odyssesus, she greeted him warmly." (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Gotch was working on this subject in 1895 and different versions exist in oil, pencil and water-colour. This would appear to be the most highly finished. The subject is a representation of innocence and experience, Gotch explained it as the child 'standing alone and unafraid in the innermost, horridest home of the Dragon, called the World, who is powerless against her innocence'. The model for the child was his daughter Phyllis. The oil version was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1895, it was judged too radical for the Royal Academy. It received mixed reviews, some critics thought the dragon more suited to pantomime than fear-inspiring. This irked Gotch who had spent a substantial amount of time researching the dragon in books on heraldry. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    The debutante is now a forgotten creature, a young, usually innocent and privileged lady who was launched on the London social scene when she came of age. Debutantes were presented at Court at the beginning of the ‘Season’, a series of balls and receptions that ran from about Christmas to Midsummer Day. For some mothers, it was a safe way their daughters could meet suitable husbands. When this painting was exhibited in 1863, young aristocratic beauty was a topical subject, for Edward, Prince of Wales had married the beautiful and young Danish Princess Alexandra earlier that year in a sensational wedding. Alexandra held her first reception at St James’s Palace later that year. An art critic observed: ‘Those who happened to have passed down St. James’s-street on the afternoon of the first drawing-room day held by the Princess of Wales will recognise the picture of many carriage interiors on that day, with the fair prisoners of fashion looking like some kind of fairy-like birds of Paradise, with tails of wondrous expanse, filling the carriage like a cloud. Mr. Hayllar has amused himself with painting this somewhat odd subject, but not without throwing a great interest into his picture. One might fancy a world of sentiment surrounding the destiny of those two lovely girls and their first drawing-room’. (London Daily News, 1863) (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Calderon was of French and Spanish descent, and lived in Poitiers and Paris before settling in London, where he became a leading member of the St. John’s Wood Clique, a group of artists working in north London who believed contemporary art should be produced to the public’s taste, not the Royal Academy's. He was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and drew inspiration from historical and literary sources, winning early fame for his popular picture of 1856 Broken Vows (Tate Gallery) which was accompanied by a line from Longfellow’s play The Spanish Student, an adaptation of Cervantes’ La Gitanilla. This draw to Spain, his father’s country, would resonate throughout Calderon’s career, and is reflected in the present picture. Night… was one of eight paintings Calderon executed for the residence of the civil engineer Sir John Aird (1833-1911) of Wilton Park, Beaconsfield, to be hung in the ‘Calderon Room.’ It was exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1884 along with two decorative panels for the ambitious scheme, which would take him five years to complete. The painting was popular, mentioned in The Building News and Engineering Journal as ‘thoughtful and calm…a beautiful personification’ while The Athenaeum magazine lauded Calderon’s subject, which was ‘treated with exceptional élan.’ The title is taken from Lust's 'Dominion', or 'The Lascivious Queen', a tragedy set in Spain at the death of Philip II in 1598, by Thomas Dekker: Fair eldest child of love, thou spotless night, Empress of silence, and the queen of sleep, Who with thy black cheek’s pure complexion, Mak’st lovers’ eyes enamour’d of thy beauty. Clearly influenced by his close friend Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, Night… is a classical beauty, languidly resting on a marble bench, her diaphanous robes and ivory skin faintly glowing against the backdrop of the deep blue evening sky. Calderon mixed copal oil with his pigments to give them extra fluidity, ideal for this sort of creamy paint application, beautifully picked out in the velvety blue folds of her skirt. The partly obscured inscription on the bench reads ΕΥΑΙΩΝ, an epithet invoking the well-being of sleep, and the laurels in the background and around the original frame are symbolic of peace. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Henry Payne was a watercolourist (and designer of stained glass windows) who belonged to the Cheltenham Group of Artists. For many years he lived in Amberley, where he organised exhibitions of Cotswolds Arts & Crafts. This particular picture is one of several versions of The Reader, first exhibited as a watercolour in 1932/3, and in tempera in 1935: “a woman lying in bed reading ... the last gleams of daylight seen outside the window are contrasted with the dusk within the room, the head of the recumbent woman hiding the bedside light” (Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1935). Our oil version, perhaps the final, elegiac iteration before the artist’s death the following year, was painted in in 1938. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    The subject is taken from 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel'by Sir Walter Scott - here is Scott's own desription of his six canto poem: The Poem, now offered to the Public, is intended to illustrate the customs and manners which anciently prevailed on the Borders of England and Scotland. The inhabitants living in a state partly pastoral and partly warlike, and combining habits of constant depredation with the influence of a rude spririt of chivalry, were often engaged in scenes highly susceptible of poetical ornament.... ... the Poem was put into the mouth of an ancient Minstrel, the last of the race, who, as he is supposed to have survived the Revolution, might have caught somewhat of the refinement of modern poetry, without losing the simplicity of his original model. The date of the Tale itself is about the middle of the sixteenth century, when most of the personages actually flourished. The time occupied by the action is Three Nights and Three Days. The scene here depicted is from the poem-in-a-poem by Fitztraver, in the last Canto: XVI 'Twas All-soul's eve, and Surrey's heart beat high; He heard the midnight bell with anxious start, Which told the mystic hour, approaching nigh, When wise Cornelius promis'd, by his art, To show to him the ladye of his heart Albeit betwixt them roar'd the ocean grim Yet so the sage had hight to play his part That he should see her form in life and limb And mark, if still she lov'd, And still she thought of him. XVII Dark was the vaulted room of gramarye, To which the wizard led the gallant Knight, Save that before a mirror, huge and high, A hallow'd taper shed a glimmering light On mystic implements of magic might; On cross, and character, and talisman, And almagest, and altar, nothing bright: For fitful was the lustre, pale and wan As watchlight by the bed Of some departing man. XVIII But soon, within that mirror huge and high, Was seen a self-emitted light to gleam; And forms upon its breast the Earl 'gan spy Cloudy and indistinct, as feverish dream; Till, slow arranging, and defin'd, they seem To form a lordly and a lofty room, Part lighted by a lamp with silver beam, Plac'd by a couch of Agra's silken loom, And part by moonshine pale, And part was hid in gloom. XIX Fair all the pageant: but how passing fair The slender form which lay on couch of Ind! O'er her white bosom stray'd her hazel hair; Pale her dear cheek, as if for love she pin'd; All in her night-robe loose she lay reclin'd, And pensive read from tablet eburnine Some strain that seem'd her inmost soul to find: That favor'd strain was Surrey's raptur'd line, That fair and lovely form, The Lady Geraldine. XX Slow roll'd the clouds upon the lovely form, And swept the .goodly vision all away-- So royal envy roll'd the murky storm O'er my beloved Master's glorious day. Thou jealous, ruthless tyrant! Heaven repay On thee, and on thy children's latest line, The wild caprice of thy despotic sway, The gory bridal bed, the plunder'd shrine, The murder'd Surrey's blood, The tears of Geraldine! The magician in the tale, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was born of minor noble birth in Cologne September 15, 1486. In 1509, he taught at the University of Dole in France, lecturing on Johann Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico; as a result, Agrippa was denounced, behind his back, as a "Judaizing heretic." Agrippa's vitriolic response many months later did not endear him to the University. In 1510, he studied briefly with Johannes Trithemius, and Agrippa sent him an early draft of his masterpiece, De occulta philosophia libri tres, a kind of summa of early modern occult thought. Trithemius was guardedly approving, but suggested that Agrippa keep the work more or less secret; Agrippa chose not to publish, perhaps for this reason, but continued to revise and rethink the book for twenty years. During his wandering life in Germany, France and Italy he worked as a theologian, physician, legal expert and soldier. He was for some time in the service of Maximilian I, probably as a soldier in Italy, but devoted his time mainly to the study of the occult sciences and to problematic theological legal questions, which exposed him to various persecutions through life, usually in the mode described above: He would be privately denounced for one sort of heresy or another. He would only reply with venom considerably later. Contrary to much received opinion, there is no evidence whatever that Agrippa was seriously accused, much less persecuted, for his interest in or practice of magical or occult arts during his lifetime, apart from losing several positions. According to his student Johann Weyer, Agrippa died in Grenoble, in 1535. While no other evidence places Agrippa clearly after 1534, there is little reason to doubt Weyer. After Agrippa's death, rumors circulated about his having summoned demons. In the most famous of these, Agrippa, upon his deathbed, released a black dog which had been his familiar. This black dog resurfaced in various legends about Faustus, and in Goethe's version became the "schwarze Pudel" Mephistopheles. In the nineteenth century, Mary Shelley mentioned him in some of her works. In her gothic novel Frankenstein, Agrippa's works were read and admired by Victor Frankenstein. In her short story The Mortal Immortal, Agrippa is imagined as having created an elixir allowing his apprentice to survive for hundreds of years. Agrippa also receives mention in the first of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. On Harry's first journey aboard the Hogwarts Express train, Ron Weasley tells Harry he is missing two cards from the complete set of collectible 'famous witches and wizards' cards found inside boxes of Chocolate Frogs. The cards he is missing are Ptolemy and Agrippa. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896)

    Flaming June

    The Maas Gallery, 1962-3 - Museo de Arte de Ponce

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