拍品专文
'How glad ... I feel now on classical soil!' were Goethe's first words in his fifth Roman elegy. During the 19th Century, as the Atlantic Ocean gained in importance and began casting a shadow on the Mediterrenean, the Northern European countries, including Germany and Britain, started to experience both an economic and a cultural rise in global proportions for maybe the first time in their history. The Victorians, in midst of their Renaissance, adopted an awareness and a curiosity for the ancient civilizations, namely Roman, Greek and Egyptian. Flavian, exhausted by the complexities of his time, and opressed by the weight of the ancient past, states that "the most wonderful, the unique point, about the [ancient] genius ... was the entire absence of imitation in its productions" (R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Harvard University Press, 1980, p. 57). Victorians, famous for their romanticism of the past and for their escapism of the present, would base their Rennaisance on a desire to approximate the ancient empires in style. Hence the time period is famous for the Grand Tour, the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, as well as numerous expeditions to Cairo and the Nile for archeological discoveries.
An Ancient Custom, a characteristic reconstruction of the ancient world is by an artist who was, perhaps surprisingly, older than Leighton, Poynter or Alma-Tadema. Long, born in Bath, was brought up as an Independent or Congregationalist dissenter. He arrived in London in 1858 and enjoyed a highly successful career as a painter of historical subjects and portraits, so much so that he was able to comission Norman Shaw to build him not one, but two houses in Hampstead. In light of his interest in archeology, Edwin Long visited Egypt in 1874 and upon his return produced a series of paintings that would bring him great success as a master in Victorian classicism. One of his works entitled the Babylonian Marriage Market was sold at Christie's in 1882 for a sensational 6,300 guineas, then a record price for any Victorian artist.
The stone relief in An Ancient Custom is probably based on a fragment, Lions in a Garden, that was brought to the British Museum from the North Palace in the city of Nineveh dating back to 645-640 BC. King Psamtik I, ruler of Egypt during much of the 5th Century BC, improved his Empire's relations with Greece and introduced piece and economic wellfare to the region. The depicted young maiden, dressed in a linen tunic and resting on a beautiful leopard fur, is certainly a member of the upper class. A Nubian slave girl, adimiring the beauty of her mistress, is illustrated whilst carefully applying make-up to her misstress' eye brows from a jar storing coal, a Victorian practice - the Egyptians used lead sulfite. The highly polished silver mirror, the perfume bottles in the back ground and the detailed jewelry speak for Long's detailed study of the artifacts of the ancient world during and following his travels.
An Ancient Custom, a characteristic reconstruction of the ancient world is by an artist who was, perhaps surprisingly, older than Leighton, Poynter or Alma-Tadema. Long, born in Bath, was brought up as an Independent or Congregationalist dissenter. He arrived in London in 1858 and enjoyed a highly successful career as a painter of historical subjects and portraits, so much so that he was able to comission Norman Shaw to build him not one, but two houses in Hampstead. In light of his interest in archeology, Edwin Long visited Egypt in 1874 and upon his return produced a series of paintings that would bring him great success as a master in Victorian classicism. One of his works entitled the Babylonian Marriage Market was sold at Christie's in 1882 for a sensational 6,300 guineas, then a record price for any Victorian artist.
The stone relief in An Ancient Custom is probably based on a fragment, Lions in a Garden, that was brought to the British Museum from the North Palace in the city of Nineveh dating back to 645-640 BC. King Psamtik I, ruler of Egypt during much of the 5th Century BC, improved his Empire's relations with Greece and introduced piece and economic wellfare to the region. The depicted young maiden, dressed in a linen tunic and resting on a beautiful leopard fur, is certainly a member of the upper class. A Nubian slave girl, adimiring the beauty of her mistress, is illustrated whilst carefully applying make-up to her misstress' eye brows from a jar storing coal, a Victorian practice - the Egyptians used lead sulfite. The highly polished silver mirror, the perfume bottles in the back ground and the detailed jewelry speak for Long's detailed study of the artifacts of the ancient world during and following his travels.