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| Howard Somerville, Miss Nora (sic) Baring, n.d., Oil on Canvas, 125 x 99 cm., Gallery Oldham, England |
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| Howard Somerville, Norah, Oil on Canvas, n.d., 124.5 x 100 cm., The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Hanley, England |
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| Actress Norah Baring Publicity Photo |
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| Actress Norah Baring Publicity Photo |
UPDATE, 8/26/2016 (edited a couple of times, enough already)
I've recently learned that a comprehensive biographical article on Howard Somerville has been written by Geoffrey Fleming, executive director of the Huntington (West Virginia) Art Museum, which has the Somerville portrait titled Joyce in its collection: http://www.askart.com/artist/Howard_Somerville/11268140/Howard_Somerville.aspx His article proves that it takes a fully committed scholar to examine the life of an interesting artist from ages past who has been consigned to the dustbin of history. And Mr. Fleming's research reveals that Mr. Somerville was indeed highly acclaimed for his portrait work during his most productive years. He was not an unknown artist, as my initial Internet research seemed to suggest.
My only quibble with the article is when Mr. Fleming maintains that Somerville worked from live models for many of his portraits. I don't know. I've only seen his work in reproduction. Mr. Fleming's research indicates that Mr. Somerville didn't start painting portraits until his early 30s, and his first portrait was exhibited in 1908 when he was 35 years of age, quite late for a successful portrait painter in those days.
With all due respect, I still maintain that Somerville's models may have been employed primarily for being photographed and for clarifying the local color as the work progressed. That's just the way it seems to me,. having painted a number of portraits and studied the subject for many years. I concede that Somerville gets a nicely blanched cinematic light effect on his portrait faces. But I'm always suspicious that photos have been used when the random distribution of accessories and transitory patterns of light and shadow instantly captured by photography are faithfully reproduced in a finished painting without any apparent attempt to edit them for aesthetic purposes
For example, in that elegant painting titled Nora Baring shown above, the carefully modeled but clumsy folds of the skirt near the bottom contribute nothing to understanding the body below. And in the second portrait titled Norah, Somerville has cautiously copied the random fringe pattern of the shawl by the wrists. And he cuts off the elegant pose just below the knees, considered a no-no by most portrait painters. In lighter versions of the painting on the Internet, you can see that he spent a lot of time painting the knees, not a subject worthy of artistic attention in this context. Would extending the dress to the bottom to further highlight the face have been a wiser choice? Yes, but only if you are not a slave to the original photograph. And now that I think about it, Norah seems to be sitting on her knees, with her back ramrod straight, a pose I should think she could hold for only as long as it took to take the photograph! .
Nevertheless, if you are curious about Mr. Somerville, as I certainly was, I highly recommend that you read Mr. Fleming's article. If you are not an Askart subscriber, you can read the full article for free on Fridays. And if you are in the vicinity of the Huntington museum, take a look at Joyce and decide for yourself whether the artist might have gotten a little help from a photograph. The painting is said to be a big hit with museum visitors. Remember, even Vermeer has been "accused" of using the camera obscura in his highly polished paintings, which also display no evidence of brushstrokes in the finished work. And remember also that the general public loves portraits in oil that look "just like a photograph."
Here's my original blog post, written without having the benefit of Mr. Fleming's painstaking research:
Come along boys and listen to my tale and I’ll tell you of my troubles on the Somerville trail, come a-ti yi yippi yippi yay, yippi yay, come a-ti yi tippi yippi yay.
The curious case of Howard Somerville is driving me a little
nuts. The first I ever heard of this early
20th Century portrait artist was in a recent post by Matthew D.
Innis on his very comprehensive representational art blog called Underpaintings. As noted by Innis, there is absolutely no
biographical information readily available about this British/Scottish artist,
other than the apparent fact that he was born in Dundee,
Scotland in 1873 and died
in 1952. And yet he is well represented
in the collections of museums throughout the United
Kingdom.
Innis even had an email exchange with a curator at one of the museums
who admitted she knew nothing further about this artist.
So I looked a bit closer at the original source for this
unearthing of the unknown Somerville’s work, the two-year-old BBC website Your Paintings, which displays images of
35 of his paintings housed in museums or other public institutions throughout
Great Britain. It is the website’s
intention to “show the entire UK
national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and
where to see them for real. It is made
up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around
the country.”
This noble endeavor is impressive and will solve some
mysteries but create others, as in Somerville’s
case. There are absolutely no “stories
behind” his paintings. When you click on
“additional information,” all you get is a brief notation on how the painting
was acquired. Of the 35 Somerville
paintings in public collections, 19 were gifts, six were purchases, four were
transfers from other institutions two were commissions and there was no
information at all for the remaining four works. And eight of the gifts were described variously
as “bequeathed by Miss Adamson, 1953”; “gift from the Misses Adamson, sisters
of the artist, 1955”; “gift from the Misses Adamson, sisters of the artist,
1957”; “gift from Miss Winifred Adamson, 1957”; “gift from Miss Adamson, 1955”;
“gift from the Misses Adamson, 1965”; “presented by the Misses Adamson, 1955,”
and “gift from Miss Adamson.” I had no
luck searching for information about the sisters Adamson, either, although I
thought I was getting close a couple of times.
Judging from the unevenness of Somerville’s work, ranging
from very precise photographic renditions of elegant women done in the style of
Sir William Orpen to awkward, amateurish painting in his self-portraits and some
figure studies, I get the feeling that the sisters just started cold calling
every museum in the UK after their brother died, asking if they wanted to add
one of his paintings to their collection, and some did. When you start looking for explanations as to
how museums great and small grow their collections, you are bound to
find yourself tumbling down some giant rabbit hole in pursuit of the truth.
It’s my belief that Somerville
was a largely self-taught artist who painted from photographs in a style he
picked up when he was hand-coloring black and white photographs for illustrated
magazines. A website devoted to issues
of the Illustrated London News lists a "Howard Somerville"
as one of three men who “tinted” photographs for the Christmas 1911 issue
of the magazine. Somerville
would have been 38 years old at that time, a bit late to be doing such
work, don’t you think, if he had been a reasonably proficient graduate of
Orpen’s alma mater, the Slade School of Fine Art in London?
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Howard Somerville, The Artist and Model, 1912, Oil on
Canvas, 74.9 x 61.9 cm., The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate,
England
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Shortly afterward, in 1912, the first Somerville painting
entered the collection of a museum, a presumed self-portrait that couldn't possibly be the work of an academy trained professional
artist in terms of paint handling and design of the pictorial space, not to
mention the horrendous rendering of the nude model in the background. The attitude struck by Somerville
reminds me a great deal of one of Orpen’s self-portraits.
So how did this merry prankster acquire Somerville’s painting and how did he convince the Mercer Art Gallery to purchase this mediocre work by a painter who must have had no reputation to speak of, at least without a bit of hyperbole? Maybe this isn't really a self-portrait. I don't know what Somerville looked like. Perhaps this painting was represented to the gallery as the portrait of a famous artist, maybe even Orpen himself? Just another wild guess on my part.
The most puzzling aspect of the Somerville story for me, however, is his painting of two elegant photographic portraits of the well-known British actress Norah Baring (1905-1985), who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 movie Murder and appeared in 12 other films before retiring from the screen in 1934 after only six years in the business. It seems she originally studied art and wanted to become an artist before becoming an actress. The portraits Somerville painted of her are fine examples of precise copying of photographs mimicking the style of oil portraits painted from life by his famous contemporaries. Those paintings from life by Sargent, Orpen and any number of excellent portrait painters in Somerville’s day convey a sense that the subject is a living, breathing, three-dimensional human captured on canvas. Somerville’s are flat as a photograph. Somerville employs the same background drapery arrangement used by Orpen in several of his portraits. There is no evidence of any brushwork when the images are enlarged greatly on the computer screen, no modeling of the form with color and values, and no particular emphasis on any element of the painting. In other words, just like the detached evenness of a photograph throughout the canvas. Compare Somerville’s paintings to a similar Orpen portrait and you can immediately see what I’m talking about.
The art world of the day would have seen these portraits for what they are -- big colored photographs, or else there would have been some envious chatter about Somerville among other artists. But I’m sure you won’t find his name in the index of any biography of the leading artists of the time. I came across a couple of black and white publicity head shots of Miss Baring that resemble the difficult tilts of Miss Baring’s head that Somerville chose for his two portraits, another indication of the use of photographs to accomplish the paintings. Sitters won’t strain their necks long enough to be painted with photographic precision from life. He did not copy those still photos exactly, and may have taken liberties by combining elements from several different head shots, so who knows if Somerville achieved perfect likenesses of Miss Baring. Did Miss Baring actually pose for photographs taken by him or did he work from some long-ago black and white studio publicity shots? Did he put her head on someone else’s body? Who knows?
But maybe these large-scale paintings Somerville created of the famous actress Norah Baring were never shown to the public during his lifetime. No dates are given for their execution. He may have done them purely for speculation or for his own amusement in the privacy of his own studio, and they went unnoticed until he died and his sisters got on the telephone with the museums to donate them. Miss Nora (sic) Baring was donated in 1955 to Gallery Oldham in Greater Manchester, England and Norah in 1965 to The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley, England.
There was also some mystery surrounding the life of Miss Baring, with one website claiming confidently some years ago that she was killed in an auto accident in 1944 when she would have been just 39 years of age. It was later determined that Miss Baring, who married three times, the last time in 1946, did, in fact, die in 1985, at the age of 79, in Surrey, England.
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| Howard Somerville, The Late Reverend Theodore Bailey Hardy (1863-1918), 1919, Oil on Canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm., Imperial War Museums, UK |
Mystery solved? I doubt it. But at least now I can rest easy and get back to my painting, unless and until some member of the Somerville family comes forward to clarify the matter. Howard Somerville painted from photographs and probably got very little attention from the public during his lifetime and is getting none in posterity, other than from curiosity seekers like me. Painters working from life in the old days were often mentioned in memoirs of their famous sitters, who described in some detail their experience of sitting for their portraits. When you work from photographs, what can the famous client say about you? Nothing! You will be in good company with Howard Somerville.
