Nativity
Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Eleanor Siddal, Mrs Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Holborn 1829 – Chatham Place, London 1862)
Category
Art / Drawings and watercolours
Date
Unknown
Materials
Order this imageCollection
Wightwick Manor, West Midlands
NT 1291776
Summary
Black chalk drawing of Mary kneeling before the Christ child, with barn animals watching. Large cream card frame.
Full description
Black chalk drawing of Mary kneeling before the Christ child, with barn animals watching. Large cream card frame. In this version Siddal includes animals who watch the Virgin Mary and Christ Child. The closeness of Mary to the animals speaks to the humble nature of the scene, with Christ laying on a simple table in the stable. Christian themes were an important part of Pre-Raphaelite art. As with St Agnes' Eve, Siddal focuses religious devotion on the feminine. Her focus on Mary (Christ is barely an outline of a figure) whilst an acceptable subject for a female artist, also speaks to 'mariolatry'- an excessive veneration of the Virgin Mary, and a focus on women's place in the Bible. Early Pre-Raphaelite painting was preoccupied with religious piety and drawing the Holy Family in a naturalistic manner, such as Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) and Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849). A sequence of artworks depicting the life of Christ was a popular Victorian theme and Lizzie may have wanted to create a sequence of the life of the Virgin Mary. This composition of the Nativity seems to have been abandoned by Lizzie in favour of another stable scene, showing the Virgin Mary cradling Christ attended by an angel, which was worked up into a watercolour. Studies and sketches were created for an Annunciation, two Nativity scenes, a Madonna and Child, a Deposition and The Maries at the Sepulchre. Only two of these images were completed in watercolour: Virgin and Child and Angel and Madonna and Child- where an infant Christ stands on his mother’s knee. This drawing is recto-verso with 1291775.
Provenance
Probably Charles Fairfax Murray; by descent to his son Arthur R. Murray; purchased Sotheby's 15 February 1961, part of lot 6 (an album of drawings and sketches mostly by Elizabeth Siddal); purchased by Sir Geoffrey Mander, c.£120-170 the lot; (Sir Geoffrey Mander later sold 6 of the pictures in the purchased lot to Jeremy Maas, including Siddal's Lady of Shalott); transferred to the National Trust on the death of Rosalie Glynn Grylls, Lady Mander (1905 - 1988)
Makers and roles
Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Eleanor Siddal, Mrs Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Holborn 1829 – Chatham Place, London 1862), artist