Although I was sceptical about this blog when first persuaded to start it nearly two years ago, I cannot chirp loudly enough about the benefits it has brought the project. There is our amazing follower Katy George, who came upon an important letter of Kittie’s inside a book bought at a charity shop and contacted me through the blog, then discovered ANOTHER one online, in Tasmania, concerning George and Tahiti. (Letters from Kittie are very rare and both were acquired for the Calderon archive.) There are the expanses of fresh contextual information followers have contributed, the new angles they have brought to events, and the enriching dialogues I have had through the Comments channel, particularly about George’s character and our national commemoration of World War 1. Not to mention the unexpected but satisfying challenges of writing a ‘blography’ of George and Kittie almost every day for a year, followed by the current blog in a different genre.
Most recently, I received an email from our subscriber Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Greville Corbett, at the University of Surrey, with a photograph he had taken that morning at the Watts Gallery at Compton, near Guildford, of the top half of this painting, which he said ‘jumped off the wall’ at him:
P.H. Calderon by G.F. Watts (by kind permission of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village)
Well, it sprang off the screen at me, too. I gasped! Because it solved in one blow a question that had intrigued me and others for about thirty years (almost a ‘phantom fly in amber’). Facing page 30 of Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) is what we had always taken to be the photo of an engraving captioned ‘Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A., father of George Calderon’. Three-quarters of it, I would say, is almost black. Beneath it, in extremely small print, are the words ‘G.F. Watts, R.A., O.M., pinxit’. The word ‘pinxit’ (‘painted’) was taken to be figurative for ‘engraved’ and it was thought Watts might have produced it from a photograph now lost. Above all, though, because the figure looks like an old man, and far more Spanish than P.H. Calderon’s own photographs, it was seriously doubted that the ‘engraving’ was of P.H. at all — perhaps Kittie had miscaptioned it and really it was of P.H.’s father, Revd Juan Calderón, who had emigrated to Britain in 1845 and become Professor of Spanish at King’s College, London?
I cannot do better than quote Watts Gallery’s own description of the painting in their care, which they have kindly emailed me:
G. F. Watts, P. H. Calderon, 1871, Oil on canvas, 63.5 cm x 51 cm, Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Full-length male portrait in three-quarter profile; portrait most likely intended for Watts’s series of portraits of eminent Victorians presently known as the ‘Hall of Fame’. Philip H. Calderon (1833-1898) was born in France but became a naturalised British subject in 1873. He first studied to become a civil engineer but in 1850 he enrolled at the James Matthews Leigh Art School in London, where he studied painting and drawing. As an artist, Calderon shared Watts’s circle of friends. The two painters often discussed artistic techniques. Watts was extremely pleased with the results of his portrait and commented on it to Calderon: ‘I am immensely pleased with it. It is so luminous and bright, so dead in surface, that I feel for the first time in my life I am on my way to a good thing. No more oily surface but a bright fresco-like appearance.’ It was around this time that Watts began building a new house and studio and was financially committed to accepting portrait commissions. The portrait of P.H. Calderon accompanied other portraits sent to represent his best work in Paris 1878.
This leaves no doubt, since Juan Calderón died in 1854, that the original of the portrait in Percy Lubbock’s book about George Calderon is of George’s father P.H., and that this original is a painting. The other tiny words beneath it, ‘Emery Walker ph. sc.’, therefore presumably mean ‘Emery Walker [Arts and Crafts engraver, photographer and printer] made this photograph’ of Watts’s original.
But if P.H. Calderon was 1871 minus 1833 equals thirty-eight years of age when Watts painted this portrait, why does he look at least sixty, why are his moustache and beard far more luxuriant than in photographs, and his nose and eyebrows greatly accentuated in size and shape? The answer, I speculate, is in the combination of P.H. Calderon’s character with Watts’s approach to painting. ‘Old P.H.’ loved dressing up as a Spanish grandee straight out of a picture by Velazquez (there is a photograph by David Wilkie Wynfield of him in this guise), and Watts declared that he painted ‘ideas, not things’. I feel, then, that Watts understood the ‘idea’ that P.H. wanted to project of himself, and created it in paint, rather than producing a naturalistic portrait of the lively, successful, thoroughly anglicised Hispano-Frenchman sitting before him.
P.H. Calderon was the acknowledged leader of a group of painters known as the ‘St John’s Wood Clique’ (they included G.A. Storey, whose sister Calderon married, W.F. Yeames, G.D. Leslie, H.S. Marks, Wynfield and others). In my ignorance, I had assumed Watts was also a member of the group, but he wasn’t; he was much older than them and ploughed his own furrow. Nevertheless, paintings by the St John’s Wood Clique share Watts’s slide into allegory and symbolism. This painting by P.H. Calderon is a fair example:
‘Captain of the Eleven’ by P.H. Calderon, 1882
When in 2012 this painting came on the market for the first time since 1925, Bonhams Director of 19th Century Paintings, Peter Rees, described it as ‘the perfect image to represent the Victorian view of children as models of truth and honesty’. I would say that it is also an iconic image of the ‘straight bat’ (it now hangs in the Long Room at Lord’s). It became familiar to everybody after Pears Soaps published it in their Christmas Annual for 1898 and mass-reproduced it on posters, prints and presentation cricket bats throughout the twentieth century. The boy is completely unlike George, but there is a certain facial resemblance to his brother Fred, born in 1873. Even so, what Rees called the ‘clear complexion and cherubic face’ make it less of a real boy than a romantic trope. ‘Captain of the Eleven’ sold in 2012 for £289,250, a new world record for a Calderon painting.
There can be no possible doubt that P.H. Calderon was an accomplished painter. He has a unique Victorian palette. However, when George wrote to Kittie on 10 February 1899 ‘I am undermined in all my actions by the desire to please an audience; it is the worst of vices, of the gentler sort’, he may well have had his father in mind too. In order to support a family of ten, P.H. needed to earn good money. He therefore developed subtle ways of pleasing his Victorian, especially male audience. To quote the Art Renewal Center Museum website: ‘Calderon was a skilled painter of attractive young women, and had the ability to show their emotions in a way which appealed to Victorian sentiment and was regarded as chivalrous.’ His obituary in The Times of 2 May 1898 described it as ‘a happy art in painting the charms in womanhood’.
In 1891 P.H.Calderon almost went too far with the following painting depicting a saint:
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calderon-st-elizabeth-of-hungarys-great-act-of-renunciation-n01573
It offended Catholics, opponents of ‘Parisian’ nudity in Victorian art, and public opinion that objected to the Royal Academy buying up paintings for the nation from its own summer exhibition through the Chantrey Trust which the Academy administered (P.H. was paid £1260 for it). Controversy about the painting raged for weeks in the press and even Parliament, but P.H. Calderon seems to have kept his counsel. To the modern spectator the painting may seem voyeuristic and tacky, but root as I might I have never found the least suggestion that P.H. was ‘Bohemian’ or led a double life. He was simply what Watts portrayed: an eminent Victorian. He counted Dickens and Trollope among his friends, had a reputation for humour, histrionic singing and practical jokes, and was beloved by the students he taught as Keeper of the Royal Academy from 1887.
I am extremely grateful to Dr Beatrice Bertram, Curatorial Fellow of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, for providing the full-length image of P.H. Calderon’s portrait and informing me about it. I have immensely enjoyed browsing through Watts Gallery’s excellent website. Watts proves there to be a fascinating, even controversial Victorian/Edwardian. As a theatre person, I was particularly interested in his brief 1864 marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, who in 1911 George Calderon was hoping would play the lead in a London production of his translation of The Cherry Orchard. Watts Gallery was established by G.F. Watts and his second wife in 1904 and I believe it was the first gallery in Britain to be dedicated to a single artist. I can’t wait to visit it in the flesh.
Heartfelt thanks to Professor Corbett for inspiring this post!
Related
George Calderon, 1912
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon c.1901
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Captain of the 11
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
‘Old P.H.’
Although I was sceptical about this blog when first persuaded to start it nearly two years ago, I cannot chirp loudly enough about the benefits it has brought the project. There is our amazing follower Katy George, who came upon an important letter of Kittie’s inside a book bought at a charity shop and contacted me through the blog, then discovered ANOTHER one online, in Tasmania, concerning George and Tahiti. (Letters from Kittie are very rare and both were acquired for the Calderon archive.) There are the expanses of fresh contextual information followers have contributed, the new angles they have brought to events, and the enriching dialogues I have had through the Comments channel, particularly about George’s character and our national commemoration of World War 1. Not to mention the unexpected but satisfying challenges of writing a ‘blography’ of George and Kittie almost every day for a year, followed by the current blog in a different genre.
Most recently, I received an email from our subscriber Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Greville Corbett, at the University of Surrey, with a photograph he had taken that morning at the Watts Gallery at Compton, near Guildford, of the top half of this painting, which he said ‘jumped off the wall’ at him:
P.H. Calderon by G.F. Watts (by kind permission of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village)
Well, it sprang off the screen at me, too. I gasped! Because it solved in one blow a question that had intrigued me and others for about thirty years (almost a ‘phantom fly in amber’). Facing page 30 of Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) is what we had always taken to be the photo of an engraving captioned ‘Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A., father of George Calderon’. Three-quarters of it, I would say, is almost black. Beneath it, in extremely small print, are the words ‘G.F. Watts, R.A., O.M., pinxit’. The word ‘pinxit’ (‘painted’) was taken to be figurative for ‘engraved’ and it was thought Watts might have produced it from a photograph now lost. Above all, though, because the figure looks like an old man, and far more Spanish than P.H. Calderon’s own photographs, it was seriously doubted that the ‘engraving’ was of P.H. at all — perhaps Kittie had miscaptioned it and really it was of P.H.’s father, Revd Juan Calderón, who had emigrated to Britain in 1845 and become Professor of Spanish at King’s College, London?
I cannot do better than quote Watts Gallery’s own description of the painting in their care, which they have kindly emailed me:
This leaves no doubt, since Juan Calderón died in 1854, that the original of the portrait in Percy Lubbock’s book about George Calderon is of George’s father P.H., and that this original is a painting. The other tiny words beneath it, ‘Emery Walker ph. sc.’, therefore presumably mean ‘Emery Walker [Arts and Crafts engraver, photographer and printer] made this photograph’ of Watts’s original.
But if P.H. Calderon was 1871 minus 1833 equals thirty-eight years of age when Watts painted this portrait, why does he look at least sixty, why are his moustache and beard far more luxuriant than in photographs, and his nose and eyebrows greatly accentuated in size and shape? The answer, I speculate, is in the combination of P.H. Calderon’s character with Watts’s approach to painting. ‘Old P.H.’ loved dressing up as a Spanish grandee straight out of a picture by Velazquez (there is a photograph by David Wilkie Wynfield of him in this guise), and Watts declared that he painted ‘ideas, not things’. I feel, then, that Watts understood the ‘idea’ that P.H. wanted to project of himself, and created it in paint, rather than producing a naturalistic portrait of the lively, successful, thoroughly anglicised Hispano-Frenchman sitting before him.
P.H. Calderon was the acknowledged leader of a group of painters known as the ‘St John’s Wood Clique’ (they included G.A. Storey, whose sister Calderon married, W.F. Yeames, G.D. Leslie, H.S. Marks, Wynfield and others). In my ignorance, I had assumed Watts was also a member of the group, but he wasn’t; he was much older than them and ploughed his own furrow. Nevertheless, paintings by the St John’s Wood Clique share Watts’s slide into allegory and symbolism. This painting by P.H. Calderon is a fair example:
‘Captain of the Eleven’ by P.H. Calderon, 1882
When in 2012 this painting came on the market for the first time since 1925, Bonhams Director of 19th Century Paintings, Peter Rees, described it as ‘the perfect image to represent the Victorian view of children as models of truth and honesty’. I would say that it is also an iconic image of the ‘straight bat’ (it now hangs in the Long Room at Lord’s). It became familiar to everybody after Pears Soaps published it in their Christmas Annual for 1898 and mass-reproduced it on posters, prints and presentation cricket bats throughout the twentieth century. The boy is completely unlike George, but there is a certain facial resemblance to his brother Fred, born in 1873. Even so, what Rees called the ‘clear complexion and cherubic face’ make it less of a real boy than a romantic trope. ‘Captain of the Eleven’ sold in 2012 for £289,250, a new world record for a Calderon painting.
There can be no possible doubt that P.H. Calderon was an accomplished painter. He has a unique Victorian palette. However, when George wrote to Kittie on 10 February 1899 ‘I am undermined in all my actions by the desire to please an audience; it is the worst of vices, of the gentler sort’, he may well have had his father in mind too. In order to support a family of ten, P.H. needed to earn good money. He therefore developed subtle ways of pleasing his Victorian, especially male audience. To quote the Art Renewal Center Museum website: ‘Calderon was a skilled painter of attractive young women, and had the ability to show their emotions in a way which appealed to Victorian sentiment and was regarded as chivalrous.’ His obituary in The Times of 2 May 1898 described it as ‘a happy art in painting the charms in womanhood’.
In 1891 P.H.Calderon almost went too far with the following painting depicting a saint:
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calderon-st-elizabeth-of-hungarys-great-act-of-renunciation-n01573
It offended Catholics, opponents of ‘Parisian’ nudity in Victorian art, and public opinion that objected to the Royal Academy buying up paintings for the nation from its own summer exhibition through the Chantrey Trust which the Academy administered (P.H. was paid £1260 for it). Controversy about the painting raged for weeks in the press and even Parliament, but P.H. Calderon seems to have kept his counsel. To the modern spectator the painting may seem voyeuristic and tacky, but root as I might I have never found the least suggestion that P.H. was ‘Bohemian’ or led a double life. He was simply what Watts portrayed: an eminent Victorian. He counted Dickens and Trollope among his friends, had a reputation for humour, histrionic singing and practical jokes, and was beloved by the students he taught as Keeper of the Royal Academy from 1887.
I am extremely grateful to Dr Beatrice Bertram, Curatorial Fellow of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, for providing the full-length image of P.H. Calderon’s portrait and informing me about it. I have immensely enjoyed browsing through Watts Gallery’s excellent website. Watts proves there to be a fascinating, even controversial Victorian/Edwardian. As a theatre person, I was particularly interested in his brief 1864 marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, who in 1911 George Calderon was hoping would play the lead in a London production of his translation of The Cherry Orchard. Watts Gallery was established by G.F. Watts and his second wife in 1904 and I believe it was the first gallery in Britain to be dedicated to a single artist. I can’t wait to visit it in the flesh.
Heartfelt thanks to Professor Corbett for inspiring this post!
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