The Princeton University Art Museum has acquired a significant work by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Rebecca Solomon. The work, A Young Teacher (1861), shows a domestic scene in which a young girl is teaching her family’s servant how to read. It was most recently seen publicly in the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019. The model who sat for the servant figure was Fanny Eaton, a young Jamaican-born woman who modeled for a number of significant painters of the period. The painting was bought by the museum in March at Sotheby’s, where it sold for £302,400 (with fees) - or ten times its high estimate.

The William Morris Society in the United States (WMS-US) invites session proposals for the CAA 2023 conference, which is scheduled for February 15–18 in New York.
We welcome proposals for sessions that are open to a range of time periods, geographic regions, and media. We invite submissions on topics that are related in any way to the ideas and art forms associated with William Morris, including but not limited to: the history of craft, design, and ornament; interiors; architectural history; heritage preservation; medievalism; nineteenth-century art; the Pre-Raphaelites, the Aesthetic movement, and the Arts and Crafts movement; book history; word and image; labor; and social justice.
Proposals focused on historiographic and theoretical questions are encouraged.
To propose a session, please submit a title, a 250-word abstract, and a shortened CV for the chair(s) to imogenhart@berkeley.edu by April 15, 2022.
Submissions will be reviewed by a committee of WMS-US board members. The selected proposal will be announced by April 22. The WMS-US will work with the session chair(s) to submit the final proposal to CAA by the deadline of April 26. Once approved by CAA, the session will be included in CAA’s open call for papers.
Please be aware that if the proposal is selected, the chair(s) will be required to be members in good standing of CAA. The chair(s) will have the responsibility of selecting session contributors and coordinating the presentations for the conference. As a sponsor of the session, the WMS-US will work with the chair(s) to advertise the event.

In 1894 Edward Burne-Jones designed the seal of the University of Wales.
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Returning from Hampshire at the latter part of 1943, British painter Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992) took the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais’ old house and studio.
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In 1978, when Cornell University planned to add a Learning Center to the Rose Memorial Library, a dismantled window designed by Henry Holiday was unexpectedly rediscovered in a crate in the attic of the Hall of Sciences.
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Up to and during the nineteenth century there was a pigment called “mummy,”which made a lovely clear glowing brown. Now, as the story goes, it was really made out of, well, mummies. Ground up mummies. One day in 1881, Lawrence Alma-Tadema came upon his colorman at work, cheerfully grinding up Egyptian mummies for paint. Horrified and appalled, he rushed to tell his friend Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones, too, was stunned. After a moment’s thought, he hurried off to his studio and returned with a tube of mummy in hand. He wanted to give it a decent burial. “So a hole was bored into the grass at our feet,” noted Georgiana Burne-Jones later, “and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it.”
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Pop star Kylie Minogue’s music video for “Where the Wild Roses Grow” (1995) was inspired by John Everett Millais’ Ophelia.

Back in 2019, during  the Victorian Radicals tour from Birmingham, Seattle Art Museum summoned bakeries from around Seattle to create show-stopping desserts inspired by the exhibition. Participating pastry pros had one week to develop, create, and deliver their entries, which were judged on taste as well as adherence to the theme. This interpretation of Ford Madox Brown’s "The Pretty Baa Lambs” was the winning entry.

It is with deep sadness that the Pre-Raphaelite Society notes the passing of David Elliott, grandson of a Pre‑Raphaelite artist and a very special friend of the Society.
David was educated at Marlborough. He spent his National Service in Vienna. He then had a career in advertising, working in the US, Canada and the UK, and worked at a consultancy he set up until his retirement.
Many members of the Pre-Raphaelite Society will have met him through the Society events. He was the author of two important books, Charles Fairfax Murray and A Pre-Raphaelite Marriage: The Lives and Works of Marie Spartali Stillman and William James Stillman.
David was the grandson of art  connoisseur, dealer, collector, benefactor, studio assistant and painter Charles Fairfax Murray, whose expertise and gifts strengthened the collections of the Birmingham City Art Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the National Gallery. There was no one better-suited to write his biography than David. There is no memorial to David; his memorial is the mirror which Dante Gabriel Rossetti had in his home in Chelsea. His family have donated this precious historic artefact with its Pre-Raphaelite connections to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It will eventually be displayed alongside the Rossetti Sofa that his grandfather donated to the museum a century earlier. It is fitting that an item which reflects life will reflect the life of our special friend, and he will be missed.

The Autumn 2021 issue of the Review is in the post, so look for it soon!

Online / Sat 23rd October 2021

Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: Peter Rose (1927-2020) and Douglas Schoenherr (1945-2020).
2020 was a year that shook the world with a major pandemic; it was also the one that took two collector friends in Brighton and Ottawa. United in their dual love of the Pre-Raphaelite and anything Victorian, Peter and Douglas exemplified a type of collecting and way of life that is very unusual now. Formed without great financial resources, nonetheless each amassed several hundred artworks from the period 1850-1900, which for the most part each left to their favourite public collections, both in Canada and Britain. This lecture, studded with personal anecdotes, compares and contrasts these two very different collectors.
Donato Esposito is an academic and curator who specialises in 18th and 19th-century art, collecting and taste. From 1999 to 2004 he worked as Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and he was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2012-13. His monograph Frederick Walker and the Idyllists was published in 2017.

If it were not for the curiosity of Rudyard Kipling’s American guest, one of his most famous poems - "Recessional" - might have been lost to history.
Sara Norton, daughter of respected Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton and family friend of the Burne-Joneses, was visiting the Burne-Jones home in Rottingdean in 1897, where Rudyard - Edward Burne-Jones’s nephew - was working on a poem for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
He was, the story goes, unhappy with his first attempt, and threw it into the wastebasket. Sara (or Sally as she was known) retrieved it and, along with Kipling’s wife Caroline and his “Aunt Georgie”, persuaded him to complete it. He cut two stanzas, added a few lines and submitted it to the London Times, where it was published on the same page as the Queen’s proclamation in the Diamond Jubilee issue.
Rudyard gave the original page to Sara, and added along the edge “Written with Sally’s pen – R.K.” At the end of the manuscript Kipling also added: “Done in council at North End House, July 16. Aunt Georgie, Sally, Carrie, and me.”
The original sheet that Sally rescued from the trash was a treasured item in the Norton family, and passed to Sara’s sister upon her death in 1922. It was then presented to the British Museum in 1937 by Stanley Baldwin (another Burne-Jones nephew) at the Norton family’s request.

Margaret Burne-Jones (left) and
Sara “Sally” Norton, 1890 (detail)