Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's "Uncounted Hours," by Pamela Garrish Nunn

Uncounted Hours

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, ROI, RWS 1872-1945

Signed with monogram

1901

Watercolor

41.2 x 27 cms

Present whereabouts unknown

Source of present image: Sparrow 33

See below for commentary [mouse over the text for links]

Formatting by George P. Landow and caption material by Landow and Pamela Garrish Nunn. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Internet Archive and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Commentary by Pamela Gerrish Nunn

One of the forty-five exhibits at the artist’s 1901 solo show at the Dowdeswell Galleries (no. 32), Uncounted Hours takes it title from the well-known poem by Christina Rossetti, "The Prince’s Progress" (1866). Its narrative, drawn from traditional ballads of love, pursuit and loss, suited the artist’s taste for Arthurian or medieval courtly culture. Hence the knight, who recklessly gives in to the desire for a respite from his travails when he should be pressing on with his mission to return and claim his lady-love; and the Vivien-like siren whose music beguiles him into this costly relaxation, a poised and inscrutable lady whose blandishments he should have withstood: “Slip past, slip past/ Uncounted hours from first to last/Many hours till the last is past....” In the distant background stands the castle where his sweetheart awaits him still, and where he will eventually find that he has arrived too late.

While this work is known only from the black-and-white reproduction in the 1901 Studio profile of Fortescue-Brickdale written by Walter Shaw Sparrow (except for anyone who can recall seeing it in the 1972 centenary exhibition of Fortescue-Brickdale’s work), reviews of the exhibition reveal that its colouring was autumnal, with the yellow, brown and azure of the costumes set off by the grey of the beech trunks. Once again, the artist’s fascination with patterning is on show, in the blanket that covers the daydreaming knight, his shield, and the curtain of beech-leaves behind the figures; and the foreground detail of wild mushrooms offers an additional touch of Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelite observation.

The medieval was the setting for numerous works in the 1901 show, with knightly figures playing leading parts in several other compositions (Thy gifts are rare/The Goal of Love (no. 1), Grief and the Two Enemies (no. 30), The World’s Travesties (no. 34), The Reward (no. 39). Of the artists who might have influenced Fortescue-Brickdale’s vocabulary of forms and subjects, Watts and Burne-Jones should be noted as staunch champions of the knight in armour as a protagonist of moral messages. The success of this exhibition prompted subsequent opportunities to give this inclination full rein, such as the commission to illustrate Tennyson’s Poems (London: George Bell, 1905), which later still she built on in his Idylls of the King (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911).

Links to related material

Bibliography

Sparrow, Walter Shaw. "On Some Water-colour pictures by Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale." The Studio [London]. 23 (June 1901): 33. Internet Archive. Web. 27 February 2012.

Created 27 February 2012

Commentary added 14 October 2022