The Music Master, 1893. Watercolour on paper, 8¾ x 13½ inches (22.2 x 34.3 cm). Private collection. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
The subject of this watercolour was unknown until it appeared at the auction of the Peter Rose & Albert Gallachin Collection at Lyon and Turnbull on November 30, 2021, lot 122. It features two standing male youths listening to the “Music Master” seated and playing an ancient Greek stringed musical instrument. This appears to be a type of lyre, perhaps a kithara, whose form Wallis may have copied from decorations on ancient Greek vases. One of the youth holds a similar instrument and is undoubtedly receiving lessons from the master.
Reviews by critics when it was shown at the Old Water-Colour Society, Winter Exhibition, in 1893, no. 313, unfortunately gave no hint as to its composition. F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum mentions only: “The Music Master (313), too, is attractive from its charming colour and graceful figures” (83). In retrospect it might have been possible to suspect that it was a work influenced by ancient Greek pottery decoration, similar to another work Erinna that Wallis showed at that same exhibition. Stephens said of this work:
Mr. Wallis, who is always alive to what is really fine art, has been attracted by the delicacy of certain painted Greek vases of the purest taste, which have been of late more studied than they used to be, and are justly admired for the elegant draughtsmanship of their figures, the charms of their expressions and attitudes, and especially for the beauty and brilliance of their colours, which are mainly rose, rich brown, and red, upon white grounds. In Erinna he has added life and brightness, enhanced the tender colours, and made good the ravages of time in the models he has thus adopted; he has also eliminated as light stiffness and archaism the Greek decorator conceived himself bound to accept, and he has imparted that lucidity which is possible in modern water-colour art, though distemper could not attain to it. [813]
Wallis greatly admired and was certainly knowledgeable about the work of the ancient Greek pottery decorators. In 1896 his book Pictures from Greek vase, the white Athenian lekythi was published by J. M. Dent. His watercolours A Study of a Greek Vase, A Study of the Ornamentation of a White Athenian Lekythos, and A Study of the Ornamentation of a Greek Vase that he exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society, Winter Exhibition, of 1896, nos. 261, 265, and 271 were examples of the original drawings made by Wallis for this recently published monograph.
The Music Master resembles similar watercolours from the period by artists like Henry Ryland or George Bulleid, but they were inspired by the works of contemporary painters of classical life like Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter rather than Greek vase painters.
Bibliography
Lessens, Ronald and Dennis T. Lanigan. Henry Wallis. From Pre-Raphaelite Painter to Collector/Connoisseur. Woodbridge: ACC Art Books, 2019, cat. 220, 180-81.
Stephens, Frederic George. “The Society of Painters in Water Colours, Winter Exhibition of Sketches and Studies.“ The Athenaeum No. 3450 (December 9, 1893): 813-814.
Wallis, Henry. Pictures from Greek vase, the white Athenian lekythi: a series of twelve polychrome plates representing the paintings on typical examples of the white Athenian lekythi. London: J.M. Dent, 1896.
Last modified 15 October 2022