BRITISH ARTISTS IN THE mid- to late nineteenth century tended to occupy a social circle that included fellow artists who were simultaneously friends and rivals, more established artists whom they regarded as mentors, and current or potential clients. Those who lived in London networked with one another through personal contacts, common suppliers of materials, and shared workspaces, using each other's studios in turn as fortune favoured or expelled an owner. The practical, day-to-day details of their individual approaches to painting often took second place in their diaries and correspondence to discussions about whose work was accepted for exhibition, whose had sold, how much effort and revision the painting in hand was taking, and how much time and mental energy were being devoted to family obligations or concerns about health. Hence, The Boyce Papers provide clear and unique insights into the trio's artistic world, and their serious strivings for artistic excellence and also recognition, but a sketchier sense of the practicalities of their painting practice, on which this chapter will shed some light.

Joanna Mary Boyce exemplifies the fleeting nature of mentions of technical matters in The Boyce Papers: in the early to mid-1850s domestic demands and family relationships account for a larger percentage of the word count and hence have greater weight in her letters to her brother, George Price Boyce, and suitor and later husband, Henry Tanworth Wells, than in their letters to her. Following their marriage, domestic arrangements dominated her correspondence with Wells: nonetheless, we find, at times, that she wrote a few sentences about technical matters that sound like the continuation of a verbal discussion now articulated with more measured thought. Partly because Wells destroyed many of his own letters, what is missing from her writings is a dimension of live discussion; just as biographers today must miss a significant dimension of contemporary personality that is expressed on social media, never backed up and all too soon deleted from memory too. Thus, we are reliant on documentary scraps from her writings and two precious surviving paintboxes, rare surviving items amongst much now lost.

AT BINSEY, NEAR OXFORD (Plate 8.1) is a scene bathed in the soft sunlight of a warm September. It picks out the top edges of a wooden post and rail fence, the sunflowers beyond, the roofline of a barn; it illuminates the grass at our feet, turning it yellow against the deeper green of the shadows cast by the trees. The composition is more complex than it first appears. As we look into the watercolour, we notice that there is a further, picket, fence behind the post and rail, and beyond the barn, a stone farmhouse with red brick chimneys. The thatched roof of the local pub, the Perch, is just visible on the right. Pollarded willow trees create a lacy screen against the sky. They are joined by an apple tree, ripe with fruit. As we trace its slanting trunk, we notice a mother and her baby, sitting peacefully on the soft grass. Guinea fowl peck about on the left, small birds sit in the willow branches, pigeons perch on the roofs and around a dovecote, and more birds splash in a birdbath. The contrasts between sunlight and shade are perfect; the scene vibrates with life and interest. Painted in September 1862, At Binsey, near Oxford is a classic statement of the Pre-Raphaelite love for the English countryside. George Price Boyce submitted this beautiful watercolour to the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1863, and it was rejected.

The qualities of this work and its fate at the Royal Academy are typical, both of Boyce's unique artistic vision and of the difficulties he encountered in his career. Sympathetic contemporaries appreciated his poetic feeling, his fidelity to truth, his choice of ‘uncomposed’ and ‘subjectless’ landscapes, his fondness for the contrasting textures and colours of old buildings. By depicting shallow spaces, full of quirky details, he gives the viewer a sense of intimacy. Years of painstaking study in the open air enabled him to create authentic tonal values and effects of sunlight, the kind of achievement we now admire so much in the works of the Impressionists.

HAD SHE LIVED A longer life, Joanna Mary Boyce (later Wells) would have made a notable mark on the fine art of her time – not just because of her talent, nor because of her connection with some of the most notable mid-Victorian artists, but because the time was right. Born in 1831, she grew up into a period dominated by the ‘woman question’, and, while all three of the painters to whom this book is dedicated operated in this matrix of social, political and economic challenge, debate and change in relation to women's professional roles, it was she for whom this moment was meant. This was the point at which a talented, capable and articulate middle-class woman could break through and come to the fore, claiming her just reward. So, resisting the temptation provoked by her untimely death to ponder on what Boyce might have been, this essay examines what she was – a woman of her time (Figure 10.1).

Perhaps it goes without saying that middle-class women's lives in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were shaped by their families, and specifically by the ambitions of their parents, the company their parents kept and the opportunities for experience that were allowed in their journey from infancy to adulthood. In imagining Boyce as a child, one amongst five children in a financially comfortable household, we see her father George John Boyce, fond and encouraging, who was glad to help her talents develop, but who died when she was only twenty-one; and her mother Anne Boyce (née Price), whose grand-daughter wrote of her ‘emotional and uncontrolled nature’ and whom the family's latter-day biographer, Sue Bradbury, describes as ‘of an emotionally demanding disposition’. A good marriage was perhaps the chief point on which the parents’ aims for their two daughters would have agreed.

Marriage was one of the most prominent topics in the emerging discourse on the position of women: referred to as the ‘woman question’, this was fairly established by the end of the 1840s as a huge contemporary issue. No family of financially comfortable, literate, sociable Londoners such as the Boyces could have failed to notice this matter as it shifted from an element of radical conversation to a central plank of modernity.

FROM THE BEGINNING OF his artistic career, Henry Tanworth Wells was a successful painter who produced commissions in both miniature and chalk. Leo R. Schidlof, an expert in miniature painting, deemed him to be ‘a very good miniaturist’. Miniatures originated as a discrete art form in Britain and France in the sixteenth century, and were derived from techniques employed in illuminated manuscripts in the preceding centuries. Miniature painting was regarded as a gentleman's art. In the nineteenth century, many women became amateurs, but in professional circles it remained a male dominated field. By the eighteenth century, portrait miniatures were popular across Europe as, in the pre-photographic period, they provided portable likenesses that were, by virtue of their scale, personal objects. It was a highly popular mid-nineteenth-century genre. Portrait miniatures were Wells's mainstay, although he also produced subject paintings in miniature. Only a handful of his miniatures survive today, a common problem with miniaturists of this period, and there is very little in the letters and diaries that form part of The Boyce Papers about his artistic practices in this field, even though it was the primary focus of his work throughout the period of the documents.

Wells began his professional career as a portrait miniaturist, having learned the techniques while apprenticed from the age of fourteen to the publisher, print-seller and photographic agent Joseph Dickinson (1780– 1849) who had a fine art business at 114 New Bond Street, London. His initial training was as a lithographic draughtsman, and while it is unclear what precipitated the transition to miniature painting, it is evident that the young Wells had a natural aptitude for this exigent practice. Between 1848 and 1860, Wells exhibited upwards of seventy works at The Royal Academy, the majority portrait miniatures. The Boyce Papers make it clear that this figure was a fraction of Wells's output in the medium. Indeed, if his productivity accorded with that of fellow miniaturist Sir Charles William Ross, then the leading exponent of miniature painting, it is possible that Wells could have painted in the region of fifty miniatures a year.

THIS CHAPTER PLACES INTO context the art educational experiences of Joanna Mary Boyce, Henry Tanworth Wells and George Price Boyce. The different opportunities and ambitions of the three are reflected in the individual courses they steered at a crucial time when educational ideals and institutions were evolving at an ever-quickening pace in response to the professionalisation of the art world in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was now acceptable for middle-class men to become artists. While women continued to be encouraged to pursue art for recreational purposes, many women desired to become professional artists themselves and though conditions were largely unfavourable, as Pamela Gerrish Nunn argues in this volume, opportunities were developing. The Boyces were sufficiently well off financially to be able to support such ambitions, with a £400 annual income from the family businesses in 1857, to cite one year in particular. Wells was similarly placed, socially, albeit less wealthy as the son of a landowner of the same name who failed as an investor. Joanna Boyce's application to her art training not only tells us of her assiduousness but is no doubt indicative of the supportive attitudes of both her brother, George Price Boyce, and future husband, Wells. She pursued every type of learning activity available at the time, aware of her own talents and potential, and the impediments that married life would impose on her professional ambitions as an artist. The following discussion, therefore, explores the experiences of these three young artists, in order to better understand the opportunities and limits contemporary art students faced in London around the middle of the nineteenth century.

FAMILIAL ENCOURAGEMENT, PRIVATE TUITION, AUTODIDACTICISM AND INDEPENDENT STUDY

The Boyce family gave artistic encouragement to their children. George John Boyce, for example, took his daughter Joanna Boyce to lectures and exhibitions. He also provided access to networks of important friends for artistic introductions and knowledge. Spencer Hall (1805–75), the librarian at the Athenaeum Club from 1853, displayed his ‘kindly interest and desire to open his young friends’ minds to Art and Knowledge’ in his letters to the Boyce siblings.

SO WROTE JOANNA MARY Boyce's obituarist, Alexander Gilchrist. Boyce's artworks confirm that, in her attention to the ‘spirit’ as opposed to the ‘letter’ of early Pre-Raphaelite painting, she saw through the detail to the bigger picture. Indeed, her innate intellectual and creative independence made her more than a ‘young Pre-Raphaelite’. Pioneering scholarship by Pamela Gerrish Nunn successfully reinserted Boyce into art historical conscience in the 1980s and furthered her reputation in the 1990s by giving focus to her connections with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. My reassessment examines the breadth of Boyce's pursuit of her own individual style, which was not fully realised until shortly before her premature death. Indeed, by exploring diverse visual allusions to early Pre-Raphaelite paintings and intersections between Pre-Raphaelitism and emerging Aestheticism in her work, as well as her knowledge of traditional teachings of the British and French academies of art, contemporary French juste milieu style of painting, British and French social realism and historic Venetian painting, it is possible to appreciate her engagement with diverse sources within but also beyond Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Boyce's oeuvre is critical to our understanding of British art movements from the 1850s to early 1860s. In particular, her work reveals the genealogy of a shift towards Aesthetic art in a period when the intersection of separate categories in painting, Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, became fraught. Indeed, Boyce became one of the earliest, and purest, Aesthetes. Her position in a varied milieu of artists – today associated with Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, academic art and social realism, for instance – can only be appreciated in the light of her immersion in the mid-nineteenth-century British art world as a social scene in which men, and women, networked and came to know one another's art work.

In late medieval Europe, a new type of hospital based on a charitable mission within society became prominent. As already outlined, these hospitals were often governed by apostolic principles that focused on healing a cross-section of the population, including those that were not explicitly ill, such as orphaned children, the poor and elderly. The growth in popularity of these institutions constituted a part of what André Vauchez has termed ‘une véritable révolution de la charité’, which led the clergy to involve themselves more heavily in secular society. There was also a shift in attitudes towards the sick poor. While the poor and ill were somewhat stigmatised – especially when some were suspicious that beggars were able bodied and thus undeserving of assistance – Adam J. Davis has demonstrated that there was a change of ‘collective attitudes’ in which poverty and illness were increasingly regarded as signs of divine election. This was particularly the case in the tradition of the pauperes Christi, the poor of Christ, which, according to theologians such as Jacques de Vitry, included the involuntary poor, hungry, leprous, those with disabilities and those who were sorrowful. This change in attitude encouraged the foundations of an increased number of hospitals for the sick poor, with their mission of caring for the pauperes Christi.

The staff of hospitals for the sick poor adopted a charitable and faith-based approach to care. Nun-nurses or canoness-nurses stayed in residence to assist in medical procedures, wash bed sheets and oversee all aspects of their patients’ convalescence or palliative care. Hospitals for the sick poor were not organised around the treatments of physicians, but rather the daily care provided by nurses. Where some hospitals had physicians as members of staff, the majority would only hire a physician when they had a patient that required specialist treatment. Nevertheless, the outbreak of plague called for more specialist treatment, and consequently some nurses were required to take on more medical responsibilities and care for an increased number of patients.

Alongside the increased need for medical care was an equal need for spiritual treatment, and again nurses were called upon. Michael Leahy has referred to this joint effort of spiritual and physical care as constituting an ‘institutional imaginary’ that governed both religious and medical institutions of the late medieval period.

DURING HIS LIFETIME, PRE-RAPHAELITE landscape artist George Price Boyce assembled a substantial art collection, as revealed by a series of newly published photographs of the interior of his dining room at 35 Glebe Place, Chelsea, where he lived from 1871 until his death. His wide-ranging collection, from pencil drawings to watercolours and works on canvas, was sold in its entirety at Christie's auction house, London, following his death in 1897. By analysing the photographs and auction catalogue – a copy of which is held in the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art Collection, London – along with the recently published Boyce Papers and existing sources, in this chapter I demonstrate how Boyce's position in the art world assisted him in assembling one of the most significant art collections of the mid-nineteenth century.

Boyce acquired the artworks for his collection by a variety of different means. Not only did he purchase works on sight during his travels, but he also commissioned paintings from his artist friends, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. To investigate his collecting habits, I have undertaken a detailed examination of the different methods of acquisition of three items selected from his collection, about which I share my findings here. The first is Bocca Baciata, commissioned from Boyce's close friend Rossetti and completed in 1859, the second Do I Like Butter? painted in 1859, a small but significant painting by Boyce's sister Joanna Boyce, later Wells, and the final, a watercolour, The Sphynx at Gizeh, painted in 1856 by fellow artist and travelling companion Thomas Seddon. George Boyce had a very personal connection with all three of these artists, as he did with many other artists he purchased from, as revealed by close examination of the primary source material. Where appropriate, I also offer a statistical analysis of the contents of the auction catalogue to evaluate Boyce's collection.

VISUALISING THE COLLECTION

The historic photographs depict around 10 per cent of Boyce's collection in situ in the dining-room of his Chelsea home. Despite the early photographic methods used for producing these prints, the quality is such that it is possible to identify many, although not all, of the works on display, particularly those by members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

FOR ARTISTS, TRAVEL HAS long been a powerful source of inspiration, but in the early nineteenth century it became something more. The mountains, coasts and landscapes of rural Britain were already feeding romantic longings for nature and the sublime, and the advent of the railways in the 1840s made those landscapes much more accessible. In addition, as William Vaughan has written: ‘There really was a time … when to be a Romantic meant more than to be a dreamer or a love-sick youth;’ and travel, both in Britain, Europe and beyond, was central to the philosophy of the Romantic movement in art from the late eighteenth century onwards.

In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, sites which had been so familiar to the affluent and aristocratic Grand Tourists of the previous century, opened up to middle-class travellers. By the middle of the century more far-flung destinations, such as Egypt and the Middle East, hitherto largely the preserve of explorers, merchants and archaeologists, were attracting artists hungry for adventure, inspiration and enlightenment.

The rich contribution of Joanna Mary Boyce, George Price Boyce and Henry Tanworth Wells to the artistic history of the mid-nineteenth century came to light recently, and their descriptions of their travels, in particular, stand out for two main reasons: first, the 1840s and 1850s were relatively early for this kind of middle-class travel, and second, the three of them hardly ever travelled together. Instead, they recorded their experiences in detail, largely for the delectation of each other. Their letters, diaries and sketchbooks – all three were insatiable sketchers from an early age – paint (in some cases literally) vivid accounts of the places they visited and the art, architecture and landscapes they saw. Many artists have left records of their European adventures – among them Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), John Ruskin (1819–1900) and Anna Mary Howitt (1824–84), with all of whom the Boyce/Wells trio were familiar – but none, perhaps, have left quite such a lively picture of the actual business of travelling. Trains, public carriages, steamers and sledges over the Alps; the sleeping arrangements; the dangers to health; the political upheavals and even an earthquake – all were faced with admirable stoicism and equanimity.

The end of the De bono mortis, written by Jan of Jenštejn, archbishop of Prague, features the story of a wealthy woman named Elizabeth who suffered from convulsions that left her paralysed and unable to speak. Her illness began after she had stopped taking daily communion administered by her confessor Matthew of Krakow, master of the University of Prague. This was not the first time she had been ill in this manner, as Jenštejn explains:

Physicians and members of the clergy failed to diagnose her illness and cure her, and it was only after she received communion that her great discomfort started to cease. However, this time, Elizabeth did not recover, but died, after directly interacting with Christ:

In the high and late Middle Ages, the structure of the Church was theorised according to an organological model in which it was depicted as a living human body.1 While the clergy served as its members, the pope directed and controlled the Church as its head. However, the body became monstrously deformed during the Great Western Schism, where there were two and at one point three competing heads. Dissidents and Church officials alike treated the Schism as a crisis that had broad implications for every Christian. Wycliffites and Hussites argued that the competing popes led to a lack of accountability among the clergy, who exploited the situation for their own benefit. The exploitative priests and friars that they described caused spiritual wounds and illnesses in the body of the Church that only Christ's faithful preachers could treat. Church officials, by contrast, felt that dissident groups sought to spread their pernicious heresies at a time when the Church and its congregations were most vulnerable.

Issues of direction and control were addressed at the councils of Constance and Basel, which attempted to end the Schism and stop the spread of heresy. At these councils, the Church faced significant opposition from Hussites who questioned the authority and legitimacy of the papacy. In fact, certain Hussites, especially after Hus's death, believed the papacy to be the seat of the Antichrist. This suggestion went far beyond the anticlerical criticisms of other theologians and pushed the council fathers to act against them. Hussite preachers attacked the structure of the Church, characterising the once healthy body of the ecclesia as rife with disease and in urgent need of purgation. Their treatments sought to turn the Church from its present state, a multi-headed beast that was full of corruption, back into a body that had Christ as its singular head.

One of the most pervasive images of the Hussite organological conception of the Church was that corrupt clergymen were waste or excess humours that destabilised the balanced complexion of the body. Drawing on the apocalyptic theology of John Wyclif, Jan Milič of Kroměřiž and Matěj of Janov,2 Hussite theologians argued that the papacy had been infiltrated (or would soon be infiltrated) by the Antichrist.