The Victorian Age

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Watts for nobility of thought and conception and Stevens for grandeur of design and execution will, in all probablity, be considered by posterity to have been the two most eminent artists of the Victorian era, but though it may be less easy to find, among the painters, the outstanding giants who mark the same period in literature, the very number of names as distinguished as they as they are familiar show how active and flourishing the arts were during the Queen’s long reign. Many artists who enjoyed, and still enjoy, a wide popularity must necessarily be omitted from this Outline, but no survey, however hasty, of Victorian painting can ignore the band of Scottish artists who won fame in the south as well as in the north. Among them we may mention the historical and romantic painter John Pettie (1839-93); Peter Graham, the cattle painter; John MacWhirter, the popular painter of the Highlands; William M’Taggart, unrivalled in his delicate yet vigorous renderings of foaming seas and windy shores; and Sir W Q Orchardson, the leader of this band of Scottish students, and one of the most polished, typical, and popular of all Victorian artists. William Quiller Orchardson (1835-1910) was born in Edinburgh and came to London about 1862, and thereafter maintained and held his position as one of the most popular of Academy exhibitors. He excelled in a variety of subjects: his ‘Sir Walter Gilbey’ and ‘Master Baby’—a group of his wife and child—rank among the great portraits of the nineteenth century; ‘Napoleon on Board the Beellerophon is one of the best known and most admired of modern historical paintings; but perhaps the best loved of all his works are those paintings of contemporary life, like ‘The Tender Chord’, which, without being positively ‘anecdotal,’ yet suggest a story and convey a sentiment. It was the distinction of Orchardson that his story-telling was never crude and obvious, his sentiment was always gentle and refined, his execution was suave and accomplished, so that his pictures, often representing moods of wistful reverie, charmed the eye of the beholder and at the same time conjured up a scene which dwelt in the memory and made its own appeal to the imagination.