A Duet, by G. A. Storey R.A. (1834-1919). 1869. Oil on canvas. 41 3/4 x 35 inches (106 x 89 cm). Collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no. WAG2638. Image kindly released via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC).
A Duet was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870, no. 11, accompanied in the catalogue by this quotation from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "If music be the food of love, play on." It features an attractive young couple singing a duet while accompanied by an older gentleman playing a harpsichord or clavichord. It is another of the works from Storey's "De Hooghe" period where he was influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century genre pictures, particularly in its costumes, architecture, and interior decoration. As Edward Morris has pointed out: "Despite appearances, however, this interior and those in some other of Storey's 'Dutch' paintings were derived from sketches made by the artist in the Casa Abad in Toledo, where he took lodgings from December 1862 until February 1863 during the Spanish excursion of 1862-63" (436).
The work was widely reviewed when it was shown at the Royal Academy. The Architect noted the influence of the Dutch School: "Mr. Storey confirms the impression, in his Duet (11) and Only a Rabbit (934), that he has succeeded to the traditions of the Dutch School in respect to their feeling for effects of light and the delicate discrimination of tones" (220). The critic for The Art Journal found Storey continuing in his tradition of sensitive subtlety:
Mr. Storey exercises a quiet humour and a sly satire, even in the Duet (11), which is painted up to the sentiment, "If music be the food of love, play on." In this unobtrusively simple composition, wherein the incidents fall out easily, the spectator is amused at the expense of the performers, especially of the old fellow who strums on the piano. Once more, in the management of greys and in the general diffusion of the light we see a similitude to the Dutch masters, more particularly to De Hooghe. Light streaming in at an open door – a happy effect here treated skilfully – is characteristic of the Dutch school. The pictures of Mr. Storey are seldom wanting in sensitive subtlety. [161]
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum praised Storey's depiction of a period Dutch interior:
Mr. Storey has a capital De Hooghe-like picture in A Duet (11) – a music-lesson. An old fellow is deliberately pounding away at a harpsichord; a young couple are behind, going through, but not very seriously, the ceremonies of love-making; the gentleman presses the lady's hand to his breast in an exaggerated fashion, which is capitally suggestive of the state of his heart; she is coquettishly holding the music-sheet. The treatment of light in the interior of the paved chamber is beautiful. The room is part of a Dutch house, such as Mr. Storey's antitype loved to paint. It opens, as of yore, to a courtyard. On the wall are the much-beloved mirror and black-framed landscape. [681]
Stephens's comments show that at a later date Storey has obviously modified the composition because in the painting's current state the young man holds the sheet of music in his hand and not the lady's hand to his breast.
The most extensive review of the picture came from the critic of The Saturday Review:
Among the few young painters falling under the happy guidance is Mr. Storey, whose pictures combine Dutch realism and chiaroscuro with a grace and fancy in keeping with the sentiment of modern times. 'The Duet' (11), At Holton Bank (486), Only a Rabbit (934), share that poetry of quietism which in this busy, busting age comes as a relief. The office of art nowadays is perhaps not so much to nerve or elevate as to calm and divert the mind. Mr. Storey's humour, spiced occasionally by good-tempered malice, imparts to the spectator just about as much emotion as is usually cared to be felt. Art directly didactic or deliberately serious bores the ordinary run of the exhibition-goers. Thus pictures cheerful, tasteful, and easy to be understood are likely to be popular. Moreover, Mr. Storey's colour and execution are agreeable. It may be objected that in color no difficult problems are attempted to be solved, and in execution the points chiefly commendable are a care and a reticence which approve themselves by neatness and propriety. Such art is always safe and usually satisfactory, as far as it goes, but its limits must be circumscribed. The choicest quality in Mr. Storey is sunlight managed after the manner of De Hooghe. His custom is to place figures in an interior of diffused steady light; he then opens a door or window behind his dramatis personae for the purpose of gaining an outlook into flooding sunlight. The conflict of lights thus involved calls into play nice artistic management. The cunning way in which the painter extricates himself from such pictorial perplexities is a constant source of pleasure and surprise. [642]
James Dafforne, in an 1875 review of the works of Storey in The Art Journal, once again acknowledged the painting's debt to Dutch seventeenth-century painting: "The scene is the interior of an apartment, in which an old-fashioned piano-forte, or spinet, played by an elderly gentleman, who accompanies the voices of two singers, a cavalier and a lady: it is the latter to whom the quotation is meant to apply. A favourite method of treatment with some of the old Dutch Masters, Terburg and De Hooghe, for example, is adopted here – the principal light comes into the room through a doorway; the effect is excellent" (176). Edward Morris, in fact, feels the painting relates more closely to Gerard Terborch [Terburg] than to De Hooghe, particularly to Terborch's A Woman playing a Lute to Two Men in the collection of the National Gallery in London (436). The National Gallery did not acquire this work, however, until 1871 and prior to that time it had been in the collection of Sir Robert Peel and then bequeathed to his son. Storey was not the only Victorian artist to be influenced by Pieter De Hooghe, including J. C. Horsley in the 1860s and Henry Wallis in the 1870s.
Bibliography
Dafforne, James. "The Works of George Adolphus Storey." The Art Journal XIV (1875): 173-76.
Morris, Edward. Victorian & Edwardian Paintings in the Walker Art Gallery & at Sudley House. London: HMSO Publications, 1996 436-37.
"Pictures at the Royal Academy." The Architect III (7 May 1870): 220.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series IX (1 June 1870): 161-72.
"The Royal Academy." The Saturday Review XXIX (May 14, 1870): 641-43.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2221 (21 May 1870): 680-82.
Created 23 September 2023