ave Thomas (as he is generally known) is probably best remembered today for his association with the Pre-Raphaelites although, in general, his art was much more influenced by The Nazarenes. One of his most enduring friendships was with Ford Madox Brown, another artist who early on had fallen under the spell of The Nazarenes. In 1848, the year that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded, the two artists were sharing a studio together. On 7 February 1848 Brown commented about Thomas in his diary: "He for the first time explained to me his views on beauty & the explanation thereof. Wonderful fellow I hardly know what to make of him his talents are so wonderful & varied" (Brown 29). In the 1840s the two friends would meet regularly, dining together, going for long walks around Regent's Park and Primrose Hill, going to the theatre together, and discussing art and just about everything else. This was at a time when both artists were struggling financially. These activities are meticulously recorded in Brown's diaries and it is very apparent that both artists advised upon each other's art. Whilst working upon The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry (Ashmolean Museum), Brown records in his diary for 27 November 1847: "Have called on Thomas – he has dissuaded me from changing the large work'. On 28 June 1848, Brown records that "Thomas has begun working by night in my studio." Over the years, Brown's diary mentions several pictures that Thomas was working upon, including his designs for the Mercers' Company chapel and some of his Royal Academy exhibits, like Thomas's The Heir cast out of the Vineyard – a painting that he admired. In a letter of 7 October 1893 from Thomas to William Michael Rossetti, he reminisced about his friendship with Madox Brown: "During a friendship of more than fifty years, we have never had a disagreement" (Codell 39 n.2).
Thomas's relationships with D. G. Rossetti, however, did not go as smoothly. On 20 May 1855, Brown reprimanded Dante Gabriel Rossetti for his harsh criticism of one of Thomas's paintings entitled Rivalry: "Rossetti after much desultory conversation began abusing Cave Thomas's picture, but so spitefully & unfeelingly that at last I lost my temper & accused him of venom & spite & delighting to set friends against each other" (Brown 137). In reading Brown's diary it is quite obvious that the relationship between Rossetti and Thomas was not always cordial. Brown's diary for 20 April 1856 records a dinner at his place which was attended by Thomas and the Rossetti brothers: "William had told me that Gabriel was coming for the pleasure of having a pitch into Thomas & I feared between them any thing but a pleasant afternoon, however they were both very amiable & so a kind of reconciliation takes place" (Brown 170). According to Helen Rossetti Angeli, Rossetti's niece, Gabriel did not much care for Thomas (43).
Rivalry, by William Cave Thomas (1820-1896), an engraving of 1857.
William Michael Rossetti records in his diary on 10 November 1891 that Thomas modelled for one of the figures in Ford Madox Brown's mural of The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal in Manchester Town Hall (Peattie 547n.). At the top centre section of the mural, Thomas can be seen in the guise of the eighteenth century engineer, James Brindley, pouring a drink for his employer the Duke of Bridgewater, and wearing what Rossetti describes as "a last century wig." In the absence of any known portraits or photographs of Thomas, this serves as a welcome record of the artist's likeness, and provides additional evidence that he and Brown had remained friends for the best part of fifty years.
Thomas in historical costume as the engineer James Brindley, in Ford Madox Brown's mural of The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal.
Thomas's most recounted interaction with the Pre-Raphaelites is that he was responsible for suggesting the name The Germ for their literary magazine. W. M. Rossetti recorded in his diary that on 4 December 1849 Thomas presented him "with a list of no less than 65 alternative titles" (Rossetti, Præraphaelite Diaries, 240). Possible suggestions included names like The Seed, The Accelerator, The Precursor, The Advent, The Harbinger, The Innovator and The Ant (Hill Letters, 65-68). At the end of the list was a note from Thomas which reads: "As your brother Gabriel was speaking of christening the journal, I've sent you all that I can think of, which may perhaps suggest something to you or yours which may be much better than anything I've thought of. It is an important matter. There is something in a name." As recorded in W. M. Rossetti's diaries the final title of the magazine was voted upon at a meeting on 19 December 1849: "in Gabriel's study, where, besides the whole P.R.B., the two Tuppers, Deverell, Hancock, and Cave Thomas as being persons interested in the magazine, were present" (Rossetti, Præraphaelite Diaries, 239). The magazine was duly published with the title The Germ for the first two issues. It was renamed Art and Poetry, however, for the remaining two issues, a title suggested by Alexander Tupper the co-manager of the firm that printed the journal. Thomas also wrote an opening address for the first issue of The Germ, which was set in print, but later withdrawn, in which he "attempted to moderate the extreme views" of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Fredeman 193, n.27.2). Others in the Pre-Raphaelite circle had obviously objected to the views that Thomas had put forward.
In 1871 Alexander Tupper's brother, the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor and writer John Lucas Tupper, penned a five-page article on Thomas for the English Artists of the Present Day series in The Portfolio. In this Tupper writes: "He is a correct and unhesitating draughtsman, a learned anatomist, a master of the laws of composition, all of which we must be to be a great artist." Tupper also mentions that Thomas had been a master at the Working Men's College, of which John Ruskin was an art teacher and member of the college council in its early days. Other artists who gave classes at the college included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Valentine Cameron Prinsep, Arthur Hughes, and Ford Madox Brown. Thomas and Brown also taught at The North London School of Drawing and Modelling in Camden Town, along with Thomas Seddon and their close friend Charles Lucy.
Many young artists began their studies under the direction of Thomas. In his Reminiscences, the artist Henry Holiday records that in the early 1850s: "My kind parents had made the acquaintance of Mr. William Cave Thomas, an able painter, but in particular a good draughtsman, who, on their consulting him, undertook to teach my sister and myself… Mr. Thomas began by giving us reliefs. One of them was a classic decorative griffin. I asked him the name of the animal, and he said he believed it was a Nonconformist. I am afraid I did not see the joke. Then I did some infant Bacchanalians, and was soon promoted to a bust of Flaxman; this was much more difficult, but I felt encouraged when Madox Brown, then a young man came in, and looking over my shoulder, praised the work as if he meant it" (Holiday 16).
A decade later one of Holiday's early canvases, Dante and Beatrice (present whereabouts unknown), featured in the same Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy as Thomas's Petrarch's First Sight of Laura. Holiday later revisited the subject in 1883 to critical acclaim, and it was purchased by the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool the following year. Thomas's reputation as both a teacher and scholar were such that in 1906 W. M. Rossetti wrote about him: "He is a man of theory as well as practice…in Germany he would long ago have found his proper level and recognition in some professorship of art" (Reminiscences, 138).
Holiday was not the only artist within the Pre-Raphaelite circle to gain instruction from Thomas. D. G. Rossetti, in a letter dated 12 September 1872 to Thomas Gordon Hake, stated that he had advised his assistant Henry Treffry Dunn to study drawing at the Working Men's College. He suggested that Dunn "secure the teaching of its present excellent master, Cave Thomas. This class I myself instituted long ago & conducted for 3 years, since which several of our set have kept it going – Thomas having now been long in office" (Rossetti Correspondence, 266-67).
As well as teaching, Thomas found time to write treatises and instructional books on art. His opinion of the Pre-Raphaelites is outlined in his 1860 treatise Pre-Raphaelitism Tested by the Principles of Christianity: An Introduction to Christian Idealism. William E. Fredeman states that in this work, the author "sought to examine the movement as purely a religious phenomenon and to identify Pre-Raphaelitism with moral and ethical values, rather than with artistic ones" (Fredeman, Bibliographical Study, 10). In his treatise, Thomas argues, amongst other things, that allegorical figures should embody the height of beauty, and that figural imagery within religious paintings should not be represented by the everyday unidealised figures that feature in so many Pre-Raphaelite pictures. According to Codell, Thomas's diatribe may have been prompted by the exhibition of William Holman Hunt's The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple in 1860, and that F. G. Stephens's pamphlet on Hunt's painting, published later that year, is in essence a response to Cave Thomas's treatise (32). Despite his criticisms, Thomas's paintings appear to follow many of the doctrines of Pre-Raphaelitism, although the underlying beliefs that fuelled his vision are markedly different and personal.
Bibliography
Angeli, Helen Rossetti. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His Friends and Enemies. London. Hamish Hamilton, 1949.
Brown, Ford Madox. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown. Ed. Virginia Surtees. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
Codell, Julie F. "William Cave Thomas - Pre-Raphaelite Defector or Educator?" The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies VII (May 1987): 25-40.
Fredeman, William E. Pre-Raphaelitism – A Bibliographical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Fredeman, William E. The P.R.B. Journal. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Hill, George Birbeck. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham 1854-1870. London: T. F. Unwin, 1897, pp. 65-68.
Holiday, Henry. Reminiscences of My Life. London: William Heinemann, 1914.
Peattie, Roger W. Ed. Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1990.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Chelsea Years. Ed. William E. Fredeman. Volume V, 1871-72. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005.
Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. London: Brown Langham, I, 1906.
Created 1 February 2024