Aspasia on the Pnyx. 1888. Oil on canvas, 35 x 46 inches (89 x 117 cm). Collection of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, London, accession no. 086534. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
In 1885 Holiday visited Greece for the first time and was deeply impressed by the visit. He had reached Athens in time
to be at the Temple of Theseus and see the Acropolis at sunrise, the time of the Panathenaic procession - that is to say, at the time and point of view of my picture. It would be difficult to express the feelings with which I dwelt for the first time on this scene, with every point of which I was already intimate, and the whole of which was crowded with associations. The rock of the Acropolis towering over the town, with the Proylaea on its extreme right, the Erechtheion on on the brink of the precipitous face of the rock in front, and the Parthenon rising behind and above it…It seemed as if no other scene could be so beautiful and so profoundly interesting as this. [300]
Holiday later described the years 1886 and 1887 as having “a strong Greek flavour about them” (310). He devoted himself to an intensive study of ancient Greek literature and joined the Hellenic Society. This interest in Greece was the obvious impetus for his picture of Aspasia on the Pnyx. Aspasia of Miletus was a scholar and philosopher and the consort of the Athenian statesman Pericles. She could not become the lawful wife of a citizen of Athens because she was a foreigner. She was a woman of great intelligence who influenced many of the writers, rhetoricians, and philosophers of her time.
The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888. The Pnyx is the hill southwest of the Acropolis that was the official meeting place of the Athenian democratic assembly in classical times. As Holiday explains in his Reminiscences: “I began an Athenian picture…representing Aspasia reclining on a stone seat on the Pnyx, contemplating the recently completed buildings on the Acropolis with a young girl companion seated at her feet” (312). The companion sits to Aspasia’s right holding a peacock feather fan in her left hand. Holiday states that Aspasia’s features were modelled from that of Kathleen Douglas-Pennant, who soon after became Lady Falmouth. The younger woman’s head was painted from Miss Hilda Urlin, who later became the wife of the eminent Egyptologist Professor Flinders Petrie. Cormack has pointed out that: ”The picture is a splendid example of Victorian Classicism, Holiday’s personal tribute to the artistic tradition which he regarded as supreme. Appropriately, the pose of Aspasia recalls that of the goddess Aphrodite in the east pediment sculptures of the Parthenon, the drapery in particular echoing the “wet-fold” style of Phidias’s figures” (15).
When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy it was not widely reviewed. F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum complained that he did not know the purpose for the auxiliary female figure:
The learning and taste that are not to be found in this assembly of tawdry and vulgar girls are present in Mr. Holiday’s Aspasia (594), where that lady sits on a bench of marble, in a ‘free-and-easy’ attitude of considerable elegance; her graceful form is clad in appropriate saffron, and she looks at the Parthenon in the distance. Her drapery is designed and painted with rare taste and knowledge of the right sort, and highly finished; near her feet is a wanton-looking woman awkwardly posed on the ground and holding a fan. The design lacks a purpose and subject, and is more elegant than ardent or vigorous. The composition is weak, and we do not understand what the minor figure is about. [732]
Stephens, who obviously hadn't done his homework, didn’t know his Greek history.
Bibliography
Cormack, Peter. Henry Holiday 1839–1927. London: William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, 1989, cat. 85, 15.
Holiday, Henry. Reminiscences of My Life. London: Heinemann, 1914, 312-13.
Stephens, Frederic George. “The Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum No. 3163 (June 9, 1888): 731-33.
Last modified 16 January 2023