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Epsom & Ewell - the pre-Raphaelite connection
The Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodThe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in September 1848. There were seven founder members - William Holman Hunt, aged 21; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 20; John Everett Millais, 19; F.G. Stephens - an aspiring artist who afterwards turned to writing; Thomas Woolner the sculptor; James Collinson the painter; and the Rossettis' younger brother, William. They were art students at the beginning of their careers, impatient with their elders, and all of them ambitious. Three of the seven turned out to be enterprising and gifted young men: they felt that English art was at an all-time low, and that it was up to them to do something about it. Holman Hunt and Millais both had strong connections with Ewell and the Hogsmill river, which they would use for some of their best-known pictures. While lodging here, they were visited by Charles Allston Collins, who had been turned down as a member of the Brotherhood, and the painter Arthur Hughes. Emily Hunt, William's sister, was a competent artist, and Millais' younger brother William was sometimes present. It was not until 1851, when they were planning some of their most famous paintings, that Millais and Hunt realised they had a common connection in Ewell. Hunt wrote 'Arriving on a visit to this favourite spot, while I was getting my canvas from the train, the gentleman known to me by sight as Captain Lempriere introduced himself, inquiring politely about my work, and referring to his young friend John Millais as a student whom I should be sure to know, and who, he added, frequently visited him. It will easily be understood how the delights of this locality afterwards became a frequent theme of enthusiastic appreciation between Millais and myself'. Holman Hunt wrote of his visits to his Ewell with great fondness. His walks along the Hogsmill began by passing the Upper Mill, where 'the pulsing wheel drew one's attention and enticed one's steps along a road to the face of a mill where whitened men bearing sacks of four descended and ascended planks between an upper doorway and the vans'. He had a wide knowledge of nature and the birds and flowers around the local countryside, as is shown in great detail in both his and Millais' painting along the river Hogsmill. 'Here the kingfisher arrowed his way, the wild pigeon chattered and cooed, and the cuckoo voice noted the season'. One of Hunt's pictures, painted in 1851, shows scenes around a pool or pond very much like his drawings of the Hogsmill. This was called The Haunted Manor, and may have been painted at Ewell, though others have suggested Wimbledon Park. The building at top right does look very much like Fitznells. William Holman Hunt was connected to Ewell though his aunt and uncle. His mother's brother, William Hobman, farmed at Rectory Farm in Church Street. His farmhouse, a seventeenth-century building clad in white weather-boarding, was demolished in 1905 - the site is now occupied by the middle section of St Mary's churchyard, and one building, a barn, remains behind houses on the opposite side of Church Street. William Hobman played his role in village life as a vestryman and churchwarden, and was in close touch with the wealthy Glyn family who were his landlords. He and his wife were the rich relations of the Hunts; they had no children, and in a piece of baptismal sycophancy the Hunts had intended to christen their boy William Hobman Hunt. Unfortunately the clerk spelt the name wrong on the baptismal certificate, and when the artist found that he was officially Holman Hunt he was happy to adopt this new version. All his life he hated hypocrisy. In an early visit to his relations in 1847, Holman Hunt painted the old church, of which only the tower now stands. The vicar, Sir George Glyn, passing through the churchyard and seeing him busy at work, offered to buy the picture if it was done well. The figures were added later. The architectural details are accurately recorded, and Hunt may have known that the building was threatened - it was to be demolished a year later. He did allow himself a little artistic licence with his signature, which can be found on the third gravestone from the right in the foreground. After its purchase by Sir George Glyn, the painting went missing. The last member of the family, Margaret Glyn, had built up a museum of musical instruments at the Malt House in Church Street, and on her death in 1946 the building was sold on to Kathleen Warner who converted it into the spiritualist church of St Michael. Inside this building, stuffed into a vent in the wall in the old malting oven, the painting was found. It had suffered some damage, but it was repaired in time to be shown at the Tate Gallery in their Pre-Raphaelite exhibition of 1984. Holman Hunt did a number of drawings of Rectory Farm, including a view of the kitchen with his aunt at work over the stove and the chickens hunting over the floor for food. His picture of a cornfield at Ewell was painted in 1849, 'at his uncle's farm' according to the label, and is taken from a deliberately low vantage point, so he must have been sitting in the field with the oil panel on his lap. In A Day in the Country he shows a couple who have just got off the coach to visit an old lady. The building in the background is Rectory Farm. Perhaps the people are Hunt and his wife visiting his aunt. Rectory Farm was in fact set much further back from Church Street than in the picture, though the London coach would have passed along that road. The other building in the distance may be another view of Rectory Farm, turned around to face the viewer from the other side of the road, though it has some resemblance to the King's Head which stood in Church Street opposite the Well House. John Everett Millais had Ewell friends in the Lemprieres, who like the Millais family had come to England from Jersey. As a boy, Millais stayed with Captain Lempriere and his large family in Cheam Road; just across the road was his father-in-law, Sir John Rae Reid. The Manor House, which stood where Staneway turns out of Cheam Road, was one of the largest houses in Ewell, becoming comfortably rambling as Capt. Lempriere added an extra room each time a child was born - or so it was said. Millais made a record of this family life in two drawings. One is a rough sketch of the family watching Harriet cutting a twelfth night cake; Mary has her pull-along horse on the bare floorboards while the family dog sits waiting for a titbit. The other is a more worked-up version; it shows the family in a more formal way and was possibly done as a gift for them. From left to right they are: George, Fanny, Arthur, Isabella, Harry, Captain William, Harriet, Percy, Elizabeth, Herbert, Emily, Mary and William. Arthur Lempriere became a great friend of Millais and posed as the model for a Huguenot in one of Millais' paintings. He later recalled that 'Millais' power of observation even when a boy was marvellous. After walking out with him and meeting people he would come home and draw an exact likeness of almost anyone he happened to meet. He was also well up on the anatomy of horses knowing where every vein and bone should be, and was very fond of drawing them'. This skill can be seen in the drawing of the family out for a drive in their carriages. Their importance can be see in the local man touching his cap as they pass by. Two other drawings show Philip Raoul Lempriere, William's uncle, and Elizabeth Lempriere. In 1846, while staying with this family, Millais was invited to a dance held by the Gadesdens at Ewell Castle. Gadesden, who came from Scorland, had invited a fellow Scot called Gray to come and bring his family. In this way Millais met Euphemia (Effie) Gray, the girl whom he was eventually to marry - after an interlude in which she met and married John Ruskin, then left him and in May 1847 returned, older and wiser, to Ewell Castle. A year after the annulment of her marriage in 1854 she was able to marry Millais. At the end of June 1851, Hunt and Millais came down to Ewell to find backgrounds for two new paintings which they had in mind - Ophelia for Millais, and The Hireling Shepherd for Hunt. At first they took lodgings at Surbiton Hill, but this was four miles from where they were working, and after Charley Collins joined them they moved to Worcester Park Farm. The farmhouse stood close to the crossroads of the Avenue, Royal Avenue and Delta Road. An old timber-framed building, it had been a keeper's lodge in Nonsuch Great Park and was surrounded by gardens and orchards. 'Nothing can exceed the comfort of this place', Millais wrote to a friend. 'It is situated on one of the highest hills in the county. In front of the house is one of the finest avenues of elm trees I ever saw'. The two young men set out down the river Hogsmill to find suitable sites for their paintings. Hunt chose the meadows looking north towards the fields of Ewell Court Farm, while Millais continued downriver for two miles towards the slopes beneath Old Malden church. Both Millais and Hunt painted well into November, and had to build a kind of sentry-boxes out of hurdles padded with straw in order to keep warm. Hunt had great problems in painting his sheep - in desperation he hired a young lad to hold them down, and sometimes Millais was called in to help as well. A Mr Young introduced them to the best way of controlling the sheep, which was to lift it up and drop it suddenly, pulling out large amount of wool in the process. Millais and Hunt had arranged to meet at a stile each evening after work. They stayed on to chat to local girls, one of whom, Emma Watkins, agreed to act as model for the young woman in The Hireling Shepherd. Emma (nicknamed the Coptic because of her dark complexion) obtained her mother's permission to stay in London while she was painted by Hunt, and the other Brothers teased him mercilessly about this. Finding out that she was engaged, they hammered at the door, pretending to be the angry fiancé. After trying life as an artist's model, Emma returned to Ewell and married her sailor boyfriend. Hunt had found the background he needed in the fields of Ewell Court Farm. We know from Millais' letter of 2 July to Mrs Combe that Hunt had started work on the project, and it was not until October 31st that Millais was able to report to Rossetti: 'Hunt has finished to day all the landscape part of his picture'. To this he added a shepherd, who by the look of his rosy cheeks and his cider keg is probably drunk, leering after a shepherdess for whom Emma Watkins was acting as model. Meanwhile his sheep are left unattended and without guidance. At the same time, religious imagery has been introduced into the Ewell countryside. The lamb represents vulnerable youth, who will die from eating the green, unripe apple (poisonous doctrine). The neglected sheep stand for Protestants who might be converted to Rome, and are at risk from being overfed on the corn - indeed three animals in the left middle ground have already died in this way. In the latter part of this year Hunt and Millais decided to head down to Ewell and in particular the River Hogsmill to find backgrounds for their paintings. Hunt states in his autobiography just how hard it was to find the right setting for Millais painting. They walked down the meandering river 'until he (Millais) well-nigh felt despair, but round a turn in the meadows at Cuddington we pursued the crystal driven weeds with reawakening faith, when suddenly the 'Millais luck'(a phrase which became a proverb) presented him with the exact composition of arboreal and floral richness he had dreamed of, so that he pointed exultantly, saying Look!'. All the plants and flowers of the Hogsmill became charged with symbolic significance for Millais' painting. The willow, the nettle growing amongst its branches and the daisies near Ophelia's right hand, symbolise forsaken love, pain and innocence. The pansies Millais shows floating on the dress in the centre comes from an earlier scene shortly before her death. The forget-me-nots at the mid-right and lower left edges of the composition carry their meaning in their name. Even the robin in the upper left corner may refer to one of the snatches of songs Ophelia sings. But perhaps most chilling of all: immediately above the forget-me-nots at the right edge, there is a configuration of light and shade like a skull, representing Ophelia's death. Millais was busy painting Ophelia, and reported that 'I sit tailor-fashion under an umbrella throwing a shadow scarcely larger than a halfpenny for eleven hours, with a child's mug within reach to satisfy my thirst from the running stream beside me'. Not all the locals appreciated his presence; he was threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing and damaging the hay. The figure of Ophelia (modelled by Lizzie Siddal) was added later; she had to pose floating in a bath, kept warm by candles, and caught a nasty cold. In the autumn he began painting the wall around the orchard of Worcester Park Farm, which was to form part of the background for A Huguenot On St Bartholomew's Day. From October to December, keeping warm in an improvised hut, Millais worked outdoors in the garden. The model for the Huguenot's head was Arthur Lempriere of Pit House, who had volunteered for the demanding job of standing still all day holding the famous beauty Anne Ryan in his arms. The painting's full title gives away the meaning of the piece: A Huguenot, On St Bartholomew's Day, Refusing To Shield himself From Danger By Wearing The Roman Catholic Badge. You can see the Catholic girl trying to bind a white cloth around his arm, while the Huguenot insists that he would rather die than deny his faith. Flowers are used indicate the feelings of both characters. Ivy can stand for 'friendship in adversity,' Canterbury Bell for 'constancy' and 'faith' and though apparently included before the subject was chosen, the nasturtiums could at least fit the theme, signifying 'patriotism' and here perhaps the Huguenot's loyalty to his religion. Hunt was now busy working on The Light Of The World. Following the course of the Hogsmill, he had found an abandoned hut once used by workers at the Worcester Park gunpowder mills. 'On the riverside was a door locked up and overgrown with tendrils of ivy, its step choked with weeds'. Hunt visited the hut at night-time to capture the effects of moonlight - and was suspected by the village policeman of being a ghost. It was not his first encounter with the uncanny in Ewell. Five years before, arriving at East Ewell station on the last train, Hunt had made his way back to the village in the company of the station master, who had a lantern. Under the dark trees they saw something white approaching them; as it got nearer, it took on the appearance of a tall man wrapped from head to toe in white drapery. The two men stood, fixed to the spot, as the figure marched around them and paced onwards. Hunt ran on towards the lights of the village, where a couple of men were standing beside the road, but they had seen nothing. While staying at Surbiton, Hunt proposed - 'for a lark' - painting the door of the cupboard beside the fireplace. The subject was to be a mermaid (perhaps an allusion to the watery fate of Ophelia) and it was completed in an evening. The landlady was furious - the door had just been varnished - but on the next day a lady visitor so admired the painting that she was prepared to take it, door and all, leaving in exchange the beautiful Indian shawl that she was wearing. The landlady was satisfied with this, and the exchange was made. Before the artists left Ewell, their friends the Lemprieres, Sir George Glyn, the Hobmans and other local worthies came to the farm to view their paintings. There was much laughter over a water rat that Millais, with the Pre-Raphaelite attention to meticulous realism, had included in Ophelia. It looked far too large, swimming in the river away from the flowers on the bank, and after Hunt's uncle had ventured twenty different guesses as to its identity, without coming near the truth, the young visitor reluctantly agreed to remove it. The Light Of The World, like The Hireling Shepherd, is full of religious imagery. Hunt originally did not want any explanation to be given and wanted instead for picture to be looked at as a work of art, but later glossed over the symbolism as follows: 'physical light represented spiritual light - a lantern, the conservator of truth; rust, indicated the corrosion of the living facilities: weeds. The idle affection: a neglected orchard, the uncared for riches of God's garden: a bat (at the top of the door) which loveth darkness and ignorance; a blossoming thorn, the glorification from suffering - a crown, kingly power etc…' James Collinson showed initiative as a young man - he was a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and he got engaged to Christina Rossetti. Unfortunately, nothing in his later life quite lived up to this early promise. He is best known for multiple versions of a picture known as For Sale, The Empty Purse or At The Bazaar. Another of his pictures, called Off To The Derby (also The New Bonnet) may date from the 1860s when he moved into Epsom. The Pre-Raphaelites sometimes came out from London for a day at the races - Millais was there in 1853 and left a sketch of a little tragedy which he had observed - 'a woman crying bitterly in a carriage, evidently a paramour of the man who was languidly lolling in the cushions flushed with drink, and trying to look unconcerned at the woman's grief. This was probably caused by a notice that his losses that day obliged him to do without her society for the future'. In 1858, after breaking off his engagement to Christina Rossetti over religious differences, Collinson married Eliza Wheeler. Among those present were a couple, the Wickwars, who were friends of Eliza's and lived at Epsom. Collinson already knew the town, and the year before he had exhibited a painting called The Mineral Spring which seems to have been a view of the Old Wells on Epsom Common. Now as a married man he set up home here - Epsom was one of the few rural areas with a Catholic church, since St Josephs had just been built. The Collinsons rented Woodcote Villas at the southern end of Woodcote Road. They lived in modest circumstances, with only one servant (Jane Hayward, from Ewell). Eliza had a baby boy, Robert, who was baptised at St Josephs on July 1859 - only the second baptism to take place at the church. By 1864 Collinson was looking for a new house. His last painting done at Epsom was A Sparrow's Nest, sent to the Royal Academy in 1864. After that, he and his family moved to Holloway. By 1861 Collinson had taken up photography, in the hope that this would give him accurate details from which to work in his portraits. A photograph of one of his subjects survives: it shows Tom Worsfold, a local character from Church Street. Worsfold was blind, but as he knew the town well this did not inconvenience him, and he used to earn money showing visitors the way to their lodgings - much to their surprise when they found that they had been guided by a blind man. His main trade was basket-weaving, the basis for a painting The Blind Basket Maker, exhibited in 1862 but now lost. Another local character was Edward Scott from Pikes Hill, who had trained as a bailiff and land agent. He lived off a small army pension in Pikes Hill, and earned money carrying letters - his son-in-law was a postman - and took care of the grandchildren; Collinson painted a portrait of him feeding his grand-daughter Jane or Harriet, under the title Too Hot. This picture is also lost, but is known from a cheap printed version of it issued by a magazine. The background shows what the furnishings of a well-off working-class home were like in Epsom at that time. This page (and others)kindly provided by the Bourne Hall Museum Photographs included in the exhibition
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