Dali House

“Ionian Dancing Girl” from 1902 depicts a woman, biographer Vern Swanson writes, “whose voluptuous body, hardly hidden behind a sheer gown, radiates a ‘take it or leave it attitude’”. Click the image for a closer look.

There are those who believe that, in terms of “true art”, the suicide of JW Godward 85 years ago marked the end of civilisation, the final surrender. The classicist, just back in London after a few years in Italy, had long suffered from a peptic ulcer, insomnia and melancholia, all attributable — in the sentimental sense, at least — to modern art’s shattering of all he held dear. Not only was his brand of academic “realism” being decried as irrelevant, his own sub-genre, known as “Beauties”, was being lambasted as mere “bimbo art”, its serene grace and technical skill notwithstanding.

So, on Wednesday, December 13, 1922, with a blank canvas watching helplessly from its easel, Godward taped his most recent royalty cheque (£125 for a painting called “Contemplation”) to the door of his home and studio at the rear of his brother’s house at 410 Fulham Road, scrawled “gas” on the reverse as a warning, lay down with his head covered with a coat and inside a packing case, and succumbed to the carbon monoxide emanating from his coal stove. The coroner ruled it “suicide whilst of unsound mind”.

He was 61. He’d recently told a neighbour that a man ought not to be expected to live beyond 60. It’s been “reported” elsewhere that JW left a note saying there wasn’t enough room in the world for both him and Picasso, but this seems just daft.

His relatives, who lived well beyond that, felt disgraced as a respectable middle-class family. His mother, who would receive a telegram of congratulations from Buckingham Palace on her 100th birthday, cropped him out of the family photographs.

Vern Grosvenor Swanson’s lengthy biography “JW Godward: The Eclipse of Classicism”, written about 1980, is reproduced online by the Art Renewal Center (ARC), that great champion of 19th-century classicist painting and leading advocate behind its current revival. The essay is a studious work, but lively with its provocative notions about JW’s place in history and the shifting times in which he lived.

“With Godward’s death,” Swanson wrote, “art inched closer to the triumph of Modernism. One by one the small enclaves of beauty vanished with age or suicide, the encroachment overwhelmed them.”

JW was, the author says, “Melancholy, kindly, reclusive, handsome, talented and shy …
Ignored by the quickly changing tastes of the art critics, Godward became the climatic figure of English classical-subject painting as this genre itself shrivelled under the blaze of the 20th-century avant garde. He was the best of the last great European painters to straightforwardly embrace classical Greece and Rome in their art. Herein lies his significance to art history. With him and his colleagues, we see the nightfall of 500 years of Classical subject painting in Western art.”

A bit of a stretch even if you want to be kind, I’m afraid. Despite the best efforts of the ARC, which has dozens of hi-res images of JW’s paintings, his detractors are still ready and willing to pounce. When Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber paid £361,000 a few years ago for Godward’s “Dolce Far Niente”, the Daily Telegraph likened the painting to “an Edwardian Page 3″ girl, dismissed JW as an artist “who gave semi-respectable gents a thin excuse to hang upon their billiard room walls a parade of scantily-draped ladies”, and said it would have been tough to sell for £15,000 a decade earlier. “Is not this the craziest price we are likely to see this year?” the newspaper wondered. See the rest.