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拍品专文
First exhibited in 1900, this picture is a rarity. Although he was one of the most important members of the Birmingham School, Gaskin painted very few subject pictures, much of his creative energy being channelled into book illustration, enamelling and metalwork. Only some half-dozen of such pictures are known. They include Kilhwych, the King’s Son, exhibited 1901, in the Birmingham City Art Gallery, and The Nativity and The Twelve Brothers Turned into Swans, two much later examples dating from the 1920s which were seen in the Last Romantics exhibition held at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989 (cat. nos. 76, 77). All Gaskin’s subject pictures are in egg tempera, a slow laborious technique which partly accounts for their scarcity. Together with Walter Crane, J.E. Southall, J.D. Batten and others, he was a founder-member of the Society of Painters in Tempera which exhibited for the first time as a group at the New Gallery in 1901.
The picture shows Psyche, abandoned by Cupid after she has disobeyed him by looking on him as he slept, disconsolately leaving her palace to face a series of trials in the world at the hands of his mother, Venus, whose jealousy has been aroused by her beauty. As the inscription on the back indicates, Gaskin’s inspiration was ‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’ in William Morris’s Earthly Paradise, published 1868-70 and already the subject of a long series of designs by Edward Burne-Jones. These had been executed in 1865 when a lavishly illustrated edition of Morris’s cycle of poems was contemplated, and had subsequently served the artist as the basis not only for a number of easel paintings but for a scheme of murals in the London house of George Howard, Earl of Carlisle. In treating an incident from the story Gaskin was affirming his allegiance to Morris and Burne-Jones, both of whom had a profound influence on the Birmingham School and were known to him personally. Indeed he had carried out two sets of illustrations for Morris’s Kelmscott Press in the 1890s. The first, for Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, was published in 1896, shortly after Morris’s death. The second was for Morris’s own prose romance The Well at the World’s End and was particularly rich and inventive. For some reason, however, the designs were rejected, and the book appeared in 1896 with four illustrations by Burne-Jones.
The picture shows Psyche, abandoned by Cupid after she has disobeyed him by looking on him as he slept, disconsolately leaving her palace to face a series of trials in the world at the hands of his mother, Venus, whose jealousy has been aroused by her beauty. As the inscription on the back indicates, Gaskin’s inspiration was ‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’ in William Morris’s Earthly Paradise, published 1868-70 and already the subject of a long series of designs by Edward Burne-Jones. These had been executed in 1865 when a lavishly illustrated edition of Morris’s cycle of poems was contemplated, and had subsequently served the artist as the basis not only for a number of easel paintings but for a scheme of murals in the London house of George Howard, Earl of Carlisle. In treating an incident from the story Gaskin was affirming his allegiance to Morris and Burne-Jones, both of whom had a profound influence on the Birmingham School and were known to him personally. Indeed he had carried out two sets of illustrations for Morris’s Kelmscott Press in the 1890s. The first, for Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, was published in 1896, shortly after Morris’s death. The second was for Morris’s own prose romance The Well at the World’s End and was particularly rich and inventive. For some reason, however, the designs were rejected, and the book appeared in 1896 with four illustrations by Burne-Jones.