John William Waterhouse RA, An Orange Garden, 1889-90

Today we are meeting my friend Peter Trippi. Peter is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine and a world-renowned authority on 19th century British art. Our gallery just acquired a newly rediscovered canvas by John William Waterhouse. Peter wrote the biography on Waterhouse and recently co-curated a major exhibition on the artist. Peter is going to tell us a little bit about our new painting. An orange garden is not your typical Waterhouse. There are no romantic maidens, no big emotional story, but I was drawn to this painting. The colors, the balance of composition, the busy concentration of the three women harvesting oranges, the intimate simplicity captivates me. This picture was painted in Cadbury. Yes. Is that right? That's exactly right, in the summer of 1889, and it was completed back in London. It's just so delightful to see a Waterhouse that is absolutely from his prime, but not what we expect when it comes to the subjects of legend, myth. Those are great, and yet here we have a man who is enchanted by the verdant nature of Cadbury, at the very same time that he's making pictures like the Lady of Shalott, now at Tate, or Ophelia. This is interesting to me, that he's able to go in a different direction because he's got a vacation underway. He and his wife, a flower painter, and you can imagine how happy she was in Cadbury. Any flower painter is happy there. They're on holiday. They've done their big opening back in London in May of 1889, and here they come to Cadbury, having already been there almost certainly the year before. An orange garden and two other Cadbury pictures from this period are Waterhouse's first known juxtapositions of two women at work in nature, reaching up and leaning down to collect fruits or flowers. This motif reflects the traditional view that women enjoy a harmonious relationship with nature, and it's been addressed by artists for centuries. Waterhouse used this motif more and more from the 1890s onward, culminating between 1906 and 1914 with a group of paintings inspired by the myth of Persephone picking flowers in the Vale of Anna. Two years after an orange garden, he painted Gathering Flowers in a Devonshire Garden at his best friend's vacation home. Waterhouse's output through the 1880s proves that he was familiar with what was happening in Paris, the capital of the art world. It's likely he went to see the Annual Salons and the Musée Luxembourg, the greatest museum of contemporary art on earth. The rock star of French naturalism was Jules-Bastien Lepage. I hope you can see how his popular peau fauvette is relevant to our picture. Look how photograph-like the face of the little girl is here, and ditto for the youngest girl in Waterhouse's An Orange Garden. Then notice how comparatively brushy the passages of nature are. Waterhouse was reading British periodicals that paid close attention to France, and he knew members of the New English Art Club, newly founded to introduce Impressionism to British art. Sargent was very much a kindred spirit. Both men exhibited at the Royal Academy, and Sargent's Ricordi de Capri shows him experimenting there a decade earlier with his own outdoor staircase adorned with young women. She's moving up, and then she's moving down. She's even stepping. You feel the weight that she's going down. It's heavy for a little girl like that to be carrying so many oranges. The notion of the staircase as a unifying device. It connects the top and the bottom of the painting. It drives our eye up and down very effectively. Waterhouse learned this from someone that he admired very much, Lawrence Albatadema, but he took it in his own direction. He did not copy the classical interests of Albatadema. He was more interested in this rustic life, and so what we've got here are the girls arranged on the staircase, and another unifying factor, those beautiful pinks and mauves. He really loved the lake pigments, and he used them very sensitively. So we see here, for example, the skirt of the tallest girl, if you will, the one who's reaching up, is driving our eye up and down because there are vertical folds. It was very fashionable in the late 1880s to paint whites on whites. The idea of showing your virtuosity as an artist. What we see here are flashes of white all over the picture, but in particular, look at the way Waterhouse has been able to convince us that there are heavy oranges inside that wet fabric that's being held by the girl. That is really good talent. I also love the idea of various levels of completion, that some of this is meticulous, the photograph-like face of the girl. It is so believable that he's looking closely at her, and maybe even he was photographing her as a reference later, you know, when he went home to London. Then we see over here on the far right, toward the bottom, an area that is virtually unfinished because he needs to acknowledge that there is masonry down there, but he doesn't want to drive our eye in that direction, so he just leaves it floating. And that is not about carelessness. That's called non finito, the Italian principle of not bothering. I love the idea that these professional models, who were famous for their beauty and charm in Capri, almost certainly were speaking with the artist in Italian. What was his nickname throughout his life? Nino. Giovannino, right? John. So he kept that name all his life, Nino, in letters even in old age. Peter, how would Waterhouse have painted this? Would he have done this plein air, or would he have done this in a studio? We have sketchbooks now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which show him thinking about this motif at this time. The fact is that he certainly would have been making those drawings at the same time as he's looking at this canvas. Moving the figures around, just like we were saying, like, let's have the wall over here, let's have the stairs over there, he gets to work then on the actual canvas. This painting was sold by Agnews in 1890, and I guess they sold it right away. Right away. It went to a fascinating man called Dr. Alfred Palmer. Palmer's was the leading biscuit maker. Now, we would say cookies here in America, but biscuits. He was an engineer by training. He had gone to university. His father was the creator of the business. His father also an art collector. George created the machinery that was needed to make all those biscuits. It was the largest biscuit factory in the world in Reading, England. Jack, I brought you a little surprise. This is kind of fun for me because it's actually quite moving. This is a book called Baedeker's Southern Italy, and every smart traveler would carry along a book like this. This is the Southern Italy and Sicily book that J.W. Waterhouse himself had when he was painting this picture in Capri. Peter, thank you very much for coming here to tell us something about this painting. It's fascinating. Thank you for inviting me. An orange garden usually hangs in my office across from my desk, and I look at it every day. It is a quiet painting by an artist who usually sings in a much louder voice, but each day as I listen and look, I see a little more, and it turns out that this small painting is not so quiet after all.