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.

Swanson noticed, however, that other private collectors and dealers were taking an interest, and that the J Paul Getty Museum in Malibu had three Godward oils, though they were seldom put on display, being “considered kitsch by their curators”. Neverthless, he predicted, “This present condition will probably change with the new millennium, bringing with it a new pattern of thinking and appreciation.”

That’s Aquarian reasoning, but Swanson is a keen defender, even as he gives generous ground to cynics.

A cheery reviewer of the day described “The Delphic Oracle”, from 1899, as a study on the unveiled mysteries of fate: “The Pythoness upon a sacred tripod sits, listening to the still, small voice that bids her satisfy or deny the agonised inquires of the pilgrims to the shrine of Pythian Apollo. The deep, straight gaze suggests the inexplicable and inexpressive workings of divine control on human destiny.”

Click the image to see a larger version.

JW’s classicism involved an imaginary world of his own invention, a meek man’s respite from social turbulence. He enthusiastically joined the legions of European artists who idealised ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt as history’s oases of halcyon perfection. In empires of old, blossoming Britannia saw its own reflection. JW’s “Beauties” fed the era’s lust for titillation: “These ‘agreeably wicked’ virgins were painted for the public’s delectation,” Swanson admits.

Then, just as the voyeurs realised that photography served their needs better, feminists assailed the fallacy of “bimbo painting”. Swanson acknowledges that it was meant “to ‘gladden the eye’ of the beholder”, but stresses that it was also designed to “exalt women as the embodiment of mythic perfection. In his own way Godward found his personal, nurturing, Freudian madonna …

“Reverie” (study)

“That his beauties exhibit no frivolous ephemerality or painful angst does not intimate they are mere mannequins in the guise of warm, sumptuous bodies. His maidens often engage the spectator’s consciousness through tender glances creating a psychological transcendentalism. That they are elevated in decorum does not render them incapable of compassion. In Godward’s case, they somehow rested the soul of the artist himself …

“Long misunderstood by many as a purveyor of prurient ’soft porn’ seduction, his art has been much maligned.” Notice, for example, that “the best elements of his paintings were usually the accessories, including drapery, flowers, fur and marble. These echoes of real life are the most convincing … While his faces are usually painted with great consideration, the hands and feet in his pictures are often given short shrift … Broadening the range of subjects would have enlivened and enriched his canvases immeasurably. But he continued to paint the ’same old, same old’ instead of introducing more elements beyond peacock fans, flowers, variegated marbles, etc.”

John William Godward was born in London on August 9, 1861, and might well have been channelled into the family life-insurance trade, as were two of his younger brothers (another, John Sidney, died in a Japanese PoW camp in Singapore). JW, though, went tangential, into art, and specifically classical art.

From William Hoff Wontner he learnedthe skill of depicting veined granite and translucent marble. Through James McNeill Whistler at the Royal British Academy he met the famous “Sisters Pettigrew” — Harriet, Lilian and Rose — whose Pre-Raphaelite looks made them the leading artists’ models of their day, and vied for their time with Sargent, Poynter and Roussel.

Godward’s “The Tiff” of 1888 was widely disseminated through magazines like Cosmopolitan, prints and reproductions securing him an income even as the critics lashed out: Godward “brings us back to the school of mere imitation — futile, unmysterious and inharmonious in art”, said one who resented “Campaspe”.

This was typical cold-shouldering at a time when even the Royal Academy was losing interest in classical subjects, but Swanson has to admit that “it was obviously apparent that Godward’s range as an artist was rather narrow”, and laments that, in the general public view, “he was not more than merely a ‘titty-rump-titty-rump’ painter of pretty bimbo women … Unbeknownst to the socially challenged Godward, he was faced with a no-win situation.”

In 1905 he began his first of two extended visits to Italy, most likely quitting his homeland because no one was paying much attention to his work. Swanson points out too, however, that the new Chelsea Football Club was noisly erecting open terraces around its pitch right behind JW’s home. At any rate, Godward got a proper look at his primary sources in Rome and southern Italy, especially Capri and Pompeii, which could only boost his art’s “authenticity” value.

In Italy, as well, he had a live-in model known as Dolcissima — “Sweetest Castaway”, whose heavy-jowled beauty provided the basis for a slew of Greek maidens in oils. But literally right outside his Roman door at the Villa Strohl-Fern too there was the howl of modernisation. Godward found himself surrounded by wild beasts — the Fauves — not to mention symbolists and futurists. Their aim was nothing less than the destruction of classical art. There was no respite, nor escape, for JW.

Seen in the Google Earth image below, the Godward residence at Numbers 410-416 Fulham Road were remodelled into communal studio set-up called the Italian Village. Nos 410/412 and 414/416 remain much as they were, adjoining villas having been torn down.

Between JW’s studio and Chelsea football grounds is the Old Brompton Cemetery, where he’s buried, not far from Emmeline Pankhurst, as irony would have it. The celebrated suffragette, beaten and starved in the battles for women’s equality that would be scarred Godward too, joined him here at rest in 1928.

The photo of the tombstone comes from FindAGrave.com.