Dr Temple, The Archbishop of Canterbury by William Nicholson

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Dr Temple, The Archbishop of Canterbury

William Nicholson

c. 1898

Chromolithograph after the original woodcut

10 7/8 x 10 in. (27.7 x 25.6 cm.)

Collection: Liss Fine Art

Provenance: The William Heinemann Archive 2004.

See commentary below

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Frederick Temple (1821-1902), was a controversial English divine whose appointment by Gladstone as Bishop of Exeter in 1869 raised a clerical storm. In 1885 he was translated to London and in 1896, at the age of seventy-six, he accepted the see of Canterbury. Dr Temple appeared as No 5 in Nicholson's first series of Twelve Portraits, published by William Heinemann in 1899.

The Twelve Portraits series was published in September 1899 in two editions: a portfolio of hand-coloured woodcuts and a portfolio of lithographic reproductions mounted ready for framing. The majority of the prints had initially been conceived as individual works, and it was expedience alone that brought them together in a set; but the series in its published form is not without homogeneity. Certainly it fulfilled its aim of portraying a representative selection of the most notable men and women of the day. 'A few years hence,' claimed a reviewer in the 9 December 1899 issue of Literature, 'Mr Nicholson's portfolio of Twelve Portraits ... will be of undoubted historical value.' Perhaps this was going too far, but mans- critics believed that Twelve Portraits contained Nicholson's best work, and indeed it was this series that was to earn the artist a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

Early in 1901 a second series of 12 portraits was proposed. Heinemann sent Nicholson a list of suggested sitters in July, but work on the project proceeded very slowly and it was not until the summer of 1902 that the portraits were finally delivered. Nicholson, always ready to re-use existing material, commandeered his Lord Kitchener (1898) and William 11 (1899) for this series (the latter was published in a slightly revised form), and also made use of studies of Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain made in New York in the autumn of 1900. The remaining seven portraits were conceived and executed in 1901/2: Queen Alexandra [104], Joseph Chamberlain (Colonial Secretary at the time of the Boer War), Li-Hung Chang (the Chinese statesman), Henrik Ibsen (whose plays Heinemann published in English translations), Sada Yacco (the Japanese actress who modelled for Rodin), Eleonora Dose (the great Italian tragedienne), and Pope Leo XIII.

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Last modified 2 April 2013