Edith Martineau's Touching the Strings (1886) [Click on all the images to enlarge them, and for more information about them.]
Despite being such a beautiful example of Edith Martineau's work, Touching the Strings has not been enough to establish this artist as an important participant in the Aesthetic trend. Perhaps this is because the bulk of her work in this vein has disappeared from view; and perhaps this, and the larger question of her neglect, have something to do with the fact that they are all in watercolour, the medium Martineau eventually specialised in and was recognised for in election to membership of the Old (Royal) Watercolour Society in 1888. Yet watercolour lent itself well to the kind of Aestheticism Martineau favoured, deriving from the Pre-Raphaelite style of the 1850s with its belief in minute observation, brilliant colour and unidealised human figures, and she made a good name for herself in the production of such pictures in the last quarter of the century.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
Blue Bower (1865).
Works such as Touching the Strings are habitually traced back to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Blue Bower, painted in 1865 within a suite of works featuring sumptuous female half-lengths invoking the Venetian painting tradition. The Blue Bower, commissioned by the art dealer Gambart and purchased immediately by a private collector, was exhibited for the first time in the Rossetti memorial show included in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1883, and drew attention there. Its companions in Rossetti's oeuvre – including A Christmas Carol (1867), Veronica Veronese(1872) and La Ghirlandata(1873) - were, equally, unfamiliar up till then to those beyond his circle of acquaintance, although such a work as Marie Spartali's Fiammetta singing, shown at the Grosvenor Gallery of 1879, gave a hint of them for those alert to making the connection. But it is important to note that both Spartali and Martineau refuse the sensuality now acknowledged as essential to Rossetti's work, and in this respect Touching the Strings might be linked more profitably to his rather less hot-house composition The Bower Meadow (1871-2), which has two women seated further from the viewer playing music outdoors while another two dance.
Two works by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. Left: Laus Veneris (1872-73). Right: Love Song/Chant d'Amour (1878).
Equally instructive in contextualising Martineau's picture as an example of Aestheticism is the work of the other artist in whom the public was encouraged by the 1880s to see Pre-Raphaelitism's legacy, Edward Burne-Jones – who had remained far more visible to the gallery-goer since the style's first phase, after Rossetti's refusal to exhibit confined knowledge of his work to friends, agents and patrons. The playing of music by female figures creating mood or atmosphere notably occurred in Burne-Jones' Laus Veneris (1872-3), Love Song/Chant d'Amour (1878), and The Hours (1882), the last of which was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in the same year as Rossetti's exposure at the Academy, 1883 – a year in which Martineau had a definite reason to visit these shows as she was herself exhibiting at both venues. While the figure of Saint Cecelia, the patron saint of music, had a certain currency within Pre-Raphaelitism, these musicians are anonymous and play their instruments (more likely stringed than the keyboard often given by artists to Saint Cecelia) with an air of secular otherworldliness matched by their costumes and, where it occurs, their landscape setting.
If Martineau appeared in 1886 to have borrowed the motif from Burne-Jones and Rossetti, however, examination of her oeuvre soon reveals that the figure of a female musician whose playing evokes a mood of reflection had been an interest of her own from very early on. An apprentice picture called The Music Lesson (1868) is a period piece in which an Elizabethan gentlemen listens as (it can be presumed) his adolescent daughter seated by him plays the lute. Ten years later, and the instrument of the moment was the violin, as it usurped the harp to join the pianoforte as the most attractive option for musical women – a trend anticipated in Watts's forceful depiction at the 1878 Grosvenor Gallery show of Blanche Lindsay wielding the bow. While the musician in Martineau's Tuning up (1878) was male, she soon produced a string of female musicians reflecting the Musical Times' observation in 1882 that "now the violin is being cultivated by women as an ordinary instrument" ("The Feminine in Music," 26). What shall it be? (1880) was followed by The Two Violins (1881), A Prelude (1882), and A Doubtful Passage (1883). A more archaic instrument made an appearance in her 1883 composition The Garland, which could be called Grecian in style, evoking the lyre, versions of which had been seen in proto-Aesthetic works such as Burne-Jones' The Lament (1866) and Moore's A Musician (1867). In The Harp-Lute, exhibited in 1885, Martineau continued the motif which seems, then, in Touching the Strings to reach its consummate expression.
Left: Burne-Jones The Lament (1866). Right: Albert Moore's A Musician (1867).
Touching the Strings was shown at the Royal Academy in 1886, but attracted little attention there; its next outing was to the autumn art exhibition at the Castle Museum Nottingham; Martineau then sent it to Manchester for the annual autumn exhibition 1887, where it found a buyer; and it resurfaced on the London art market several years ago. Many of her works named above are yet to re-emerge from the shadow of history, but it is evident that they were followed with more variations on the theme. Something of a family likeness amongst them all can be assumed from critical observations. The protagonist of What shall it be?, for instance, was described in the press as "a serious, if not sad, violinist in a rich deep-red gown" and In Sweet Music... (1888) as "another beautiful figure study of a young girl with her violoncello." A later iteration still that is available for at least a degree of appraisal is Heard melodies are sweet (But those unheard are sweeter), that appeared at the OWS annual exhibition of 1892. Reproduced in the Illustrated London News' account of the show that April ("Art Notes," 541), it also formed a full-page illustration in the Girl's Own Paper the following spring (11 March 1893, 376). In an interior this time, the musician stands lost in thought as she idly fingers her instrument. Once again, the artist's skill in distinguishing textures is to the fore, while the patterning on the wall behind the figure sets off the rich surfaces of what could easily be the same dress.
Martineau's Heard melodies are sweet (But those unheard
are sweeter) (1888), as reproduced in the Illustrated
London News of April 1892.
The attractive female musician whose play evokes pleasant recollections or deep thought, presented decoratively with a hint of the exotic, be that medieval, Italianate, Grecian or Orientalist, was a trope developed within Aestheticism from Pre-Raphaelite beginnings, gathering freight as the Paterian idea of all art aspiring to the state of music gained ground. Edith Martineau seems to have been a significant participant in this trend, as at least one spectator of the Nottingham showing of Touching the Strings noticed: "Miss Edith Martineau sends two pictures which deserve to be carefully studied. One is entitled A Prelude and the other Touching the Strings. They could truthfully be bracketed as a couple of 'love-sick maidens' out of Gilbert's 'Patience'..." in the Nottinghamshire Guardian of September 1886. It is to be hoped that more evidence of her contribution to this trend in later Victorian art will emerge to substantiate and further illustrate this notion.
Link to related material
Bibliography
"Art Notes." Illustrated London News. 30 April 1892: 541.
"The Feminine in Music." Musical Times. 1 October 1882: 26.
Gerrish Nunn, Pamela. "A Plaited rope: Aestheticism's Debt to Pre-Raphaelitism." In Aesthetic Lives. Edited by Bénédicte Coste and Catherine Delyfer. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2013. 19-36.
Girl's Own Paper. 11 March 1893: 376.
Nottinghamshire Guardian, 17 September 1886: 7.
Created 7 October 2022