William Stott: The Oldham Artist Who Impressed the French

A couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves getting increasingly exasperated by a late Victorian painting superstar, Edward Burne-Jones, in a show at Tate Britain that was full of knights in shining armour and damsels in distress. But British art was getting more modern. In the 1870s, James McNeill Whistler was already "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." And then a couple of years later, William Stott of Oldham came along.

William Stott? Not exactly a household name, but he did paint one rather influential picture that's seen as key in the move to Impressionism and naturalism in British art in the 1880s. It's called Le Passeur (The Ferryman), and it was bought by the Tate last year for £1.5 million. This beautiful work is now touring the country, and it's currently at Southampton City Art Gallery in a small but very well done (and free) exhibition called Beneath the Surface. It's well worth seeing.

Confusingly, there seem to have been three painters named William Stott born in the 19th century, but our man was born in Oldham in 1857 into a family in the cotton trade. He studied at Manchester School of Art and then headed straight for Paris in 1878, exhibiting at the Salon there. Along with other expatriate artists, Stott was drawn to Grez-sur-Loing, a village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau with a picturesque 12th-century bridge, and it's Grez that's depicted in Le Passeur.

Two young girls with their backs to the viewer look across the river to a small ferry boat that's just setting off from the far bank. The houses on the opposite side of the river are reflected in the water that glows with a pink evening light, echoing the small strip of sky across the top. The brushwork is quite broad and loose, something you notice particularly in the reeds along the bank.

It's reminiscent of the French realist painter Jules Bastien-Lepage and also highlights the influence of Japanese art, then very much coming into vogue. This painting, more than 2 metres across -- is a very restful one, with its air of introspection and contemplation; a brilliantly positioned bench in front of the canvas makes you feel you're sitting on the bank of the Loing just behind the two girls. You're drawn in to this picture, unlike so many of those pseudo-medieval Burne-Jones paintings.

But like Burne-Jones, Stott has a lot of symbolism at work. The river was often used in Victorian art to represent the passage of life, and the older girl in blue seems to be gazing straight at the ferryman, a possible reference to Charon, who rowed the dead across the River Styx to the underworld in Greek mythology.

There's one other Stott painting in this show, also painted in Grez, but the year before, with the bridge over the river in the background. It seems to portray the same girl in blue, again looking into the distance away from us, leaning on a broken fence. This time the title of the picture is more suggestive: Prince or Shepherd? (Prince ou Berger?). Will she marry someone rich and escape the village? Or will it be love on a farmboy's wages? 

The freshness of Stott's work was a hit in Paris. He won a medal for Le Passeur at the 1882 Salon, and the painting was bought by flour merchant John Forbes White, a key figure in the establishment of Aberdeen Art Gallery. Bastien-Lepage and Stott were among the painters who influenced the Glasgow Boys, Scotland's first modernist art movement.

This show also features three paintings by George Clausen, who was a little older than Stott but also went to France and admired Bastien-Lepage. Brown Eyes, dating from about a decade after the two Stott pictures, is a portrait of a local girl from the village of Cookham Dean in Berkshire, Rose Grimsdale. It's a very soft work, apart from the eyes, which really are piercing.

The paintings by Stott and Clausens and other early British naturalist painters from the same period are complemented by a selection of works from Southampton's own collection by French and British Impressionists. There's Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley (an unexpectedly green Barbizon School-like Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud), and Claude Monet, in the shape of The Church at Vétheuil, a painting that may be familiar from the recent Monet show at the National Gallery.

But as so often, how much more fun to discover something completely unexpected. Here's a neo-Impressionist country scene, with a bridge and some trees and buildings behind. Which French or possibly Belgian painter might this be, we wondered. And somewhere in Normandy or Brittany, perhaps?

It's actually by Robert Polhill Bevan, later to be a bit better known as a member of the Camden Town Group along with Walter Sickert, and depicts Mydlow Village in Poland, from where his wife, also a painter, came. An English artist in Poland in the early 20th century. Who would have thought it?

And one of the most striking Impressionist works in Southampton's collection is also by a lesser-known name, Jean-Louis Forain: The Fisherman, with its bold diagonal apparently inspired by a Japanese print. There's hardly anything to it, but it's an image that sticks in the memory.

There are just 20 works in this Southampton show, but it's really worth a visit if you get the chance. There's also a lot of pleasure to be had in the adjacent room, where Defining and Defying Convention celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy with works from academicians in the gallery's own collection, starting with Joshua Reynolds and going right up to the present day (there's also a display of new paintings by RA President Christopher Le Brun). As with the Stott show, the curators must be commended for their detailed explanatory labelling on the walls, giving plenty of interesting and curious facts. 

Among the highlights: a delicate Distant View of Southampton drawn by John Constable, and nearby there's JMW Turner's Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore in Squally Weather, very appropriate for a port city. On the opposite wall, LS Lowry painted Southampton's Floating Bridge across the River Itchen in 1956. A rather unlovely modern bridge spans the river now.

Two 1930s portraits stand out: Gerald Brockhurst's Portrait of a Girl, very precise in the face yet fading round the edges, and Augustus John's Brigit. Two of the most eye-catching contemporary works are by Michael Craig-Martin: Intimate Relationships: Handcuffs and Safety Pin.

Practicalities

Beneath the Surface and Defining and Defying Convention are both on at Southampton City Art Gallery until January 12. Admission is free, but be wary of the gallery's limited opening times: 1000 to 1500 Monday to Friday and 1000 to 1700 on Saturday. It's closed on Sundays. The gallery is in Southampton's 1930s Civic Centre, with the entrance on the north side facing Commercial Road, just a few minutes' walk from Southampton Central railway station.

From Southampton, Le Passeur continues its national tour with a stop at Gallery Oldham in the artist's home town for a show called William Stott of Oldham: Great Painters Are Rare, from January 26 to May 11. It's due to travel on later to Aberdeen Art Gallery, which is currently in the course of redevelopment.

Images

William Stott of Oldham, Le Passeur (The Ferryman), 1881, Tate. Image courtesy Tate/Southampton City Art Gallery
William Stott of Oldham, Prince or Shepherd? (Prince ou Berger?), 1880, Tate. Photo: Tate
George Clausen, Brown Eyes, 1891, Tate. Photo: Tate
Robert Polhill Bevan, Mydlow Village, Poland, 1907, Southampton City Art Gallery
Jean-Louis Forain, The Fisherman, 1884, Southampton City Art Gallery
Michael Craig-Martin, Intimate Relationships: Handcuffs, Intimate Relationships: Safety Pin, 2001, Southampton City Art Gallery