Everything about Frederic George Stephens totally explained
Frederic George Stephens (
1828 -
9 March,
1907) was one of the two 'non-artistic' members of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and an
art critic.
Stephens was born to Septimus Stephens of
Aberdeen and Ann (née Cooke) in
Walworth, London and grew up in nearby
Lambeth. Because of an accident in 1837, he was physically disabled and educated privately. He later attended
University College School,
London. In 1844 he entered the
Royal Academy Schools where he first met Sir
John Everett Millais and
William Holman Hunt. He joined their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, often modelling for them in pictures including Millais's
Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849) and
Ford Madox Brown's
Jesus Washing Peter's Feet
(1852-6). There is a pencil portrait of
Stephens by Millais dated 1853 in the collection of the
National Portrait Gallery. He was so disappointed by his own artistic talent that he took up art criticism and stopped painting. He claimed to have destroyed all his paintings in 1850 but three of them are still at the
Tate Gallery,
London:
The Proposal (The Marquis and Griselda) (circa 1850),
Morte d'Arthur (circa 1850-55), and
Mother and Child (circa 1854) along with a pencil drawing of his
mother (1850).
He communicated the aims of the Brotherhood to the public. He became the art critic and later the art editor of the
Athenaeum while writing freelance for other art-history periodicals on the continent and the United States including
Art Journal and
Portfolio (magazine). His contributions to the Brotherhood's magazine
The Germ were made under the pseudonyms Laura Savage and John Seward. During this time he was heavily influenced by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whom he allowed to write reviews of his own work under Stephen's name.
Stephen's first work of art history,
Normandy: its Gothic Architecture and History was published in 1865, and
Flemish Relics, a history of Netherlandish art, appeared in 1866. Monographs on
William Mulready (1867) and on
Edwin Landseer (1869) followed. In 1873 he started writing series of almost 100 articles on British collecting for the
Athenaeum; these treated major collections and small collectors alike thus encouraging middle-class art patronage and the growing Victorian interest for contemporary art.
He was also Keeper of the Prints and Drawings in the
British Museum and wrote most entries in the first volumes of the
Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division I: Political and Personal Satires, from 1870 onward. In 1875, Stephensbegan to characterise himself as an art historian rather than a criticand in 1877 he started to write contributions for the
Grosvenor Gallery catalogues, which he continued to do until 1890. When Rossetti died Stephens co-wrote his obituary for the edition of
Athenaeum dated
April 15,
1882 and left the Brotherhood. He began to write more neutral accounts of their work and criticized Holman Hunt's
Triumph of the Innocents {1885) for its mixing of hyper-realism and fantasy. Almost twenty years later Hunt retaliated by launching a scathing attack on Stephens in the second edition of his
Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1914). In 1894, Stephens published a
Portfolio monograph on Rossetti. He contributed essays on art to
Henry Duff Traill's
Social England: a Record of the Progress of the People (1893–7) placing Pre-Raphaelitism in a continuing tradition of British art. This contradicted the Brotherhood's view that they'd flowered uniquely from a pallid past. In 1895 he published a book on
Lawrence Alma-Tadema and his review of the posthumous exhibition of Millais in 1898 took the painter to task for poorly thought-out works.
Other
artists about whom he wrote include
Thomas Bewick,
Edward Burne-Jones,
George Cruikshank,
Thomas Gainsborough,
William Hogarth,
Edwin Landseer,
William Mulready,
Samuel Palmer,
Joshua Reynolds,
Thomas Rowlandson, Sir
Anthony Van Dyck, and
Thomas Woolner.
Stephens' conservative views on modern art and his strong dislike of
Impressionism ended his forty-year association with the
Athenaeum.
Stephens married the artist
Rebecca Clara Dalton in 1866. They had a son
Holman Fred Stephens (1869-1931) and at the time of the 1881 census the family was living at 10 Hammersmith Terrace,
Hammersmith. Stephens died at home on
March 9,
1907 and is buried in
Brompton Cemetery. Much of is collection of art and books was auctioned at Fosters in 1916, after his widow's death, but his son bequethed several works of art to the Tate Gallery
He is sometimes cited as the great exponent of
writer's block: He started to write a political
sonnet for the first number of
The Germ magazine. On
October 13,
1849 he'd completed 11½ lines, which he showed to
James Collinson, who said they were "the best of all." By
November 12 it had "attained the length of 12 lines, with the reservation of a tremendous idea for the final two." The magazine appeared in January 1850 but the poem was never published.
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