Acknowledgement: This is a lightly edited version of an essay that first appeared in the PRS Review special edition, ‘Forgotten Pre-Raphaelites,’ 31:3 (Autumn 2023). Reproduced with permission of the author and editor. — Simon Cooke

Frederic George Stephens was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who worked productively as an artist in the 1850s, yet his works are largely unfamiliar even to dedicated Pre-Raphaelite scholars. This article presents the first detailed examination of his only completed painting, The Proposal of 1850–1. Although it has been sporadically exhibited at Tate Britain and included in three Tate exhibitions – notably The Rossettis in 2023 – as a standalone work it has been neglected. Previous art historians dismissed the work as ‘rigid and uninspired’ and ‘painfully laboured and contrived’ (Macleod 30). This essay challenges that perception, reconsidering the painting as a legitimate contribution to the Pre-Raphaelite cause during the first phase of the movement. Published and unpublished primary sources have also allowed the painting’s creation to be mapped out in detail for the first time.

Stephens’s The Proposal.

The Proposal depicts a scene from ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which is set in Saluzzo and describes the peasant girl Griselda’s marriage to a cruel marquis named Walter (a tale originally told in Boccaccio’s Decameron). Walter subjects Griselda to a series of gruelling trials to test her faithfulness to him, but she remains patient and obedient throughout, eventually regaining his trust. Chaucer’s concluding message is not ‘that wives should / Imitate Griselda […] But that everyone, whatever his degree, / Should be as steadfast in adversity / As Griselda’(Chaucer 310).

Stephens portrays the moment early in the poem when Walter proposes to Griselda in her home. He has been talking with her father, Janicula, and has just turned on his chair to stop Griselda on her way to the door (she holds her hat behind her back, indicating her desire to be outside). He speaks while she and Janicula listen. On the floor, a rooster raises his foot threateningly at a cowering white hen, foreshadowing future violence in the story. The surrounding interior and autumnal landscape outside were painted in minute detail in accordance with early Pre-Raphaelite principles, as will be explained below.

William Michael Rossetti recorded in his diary on 2 February 1850: ‘Stephens has made a desig<>n from the story of Griseldis of the Marquis’s interview with the father; he means to set about painting the subject forthwith, and swears he will have it ready for the Exhibition’. A few days later, Stephens showed W. M. Rossetti and Thomas Woolner a second design from ‘The Clerk’s Tale,’ ‘Griseldis parting from her child,’ which was never executed (W. M. Rossetti 50–51). Stephens began The Proposal before 14 February, drawing the design onto the canvas but ‘greatly alter[ing] the design, so much so as almost to make it a new thing’ (Rossetti 53). No preliminary studies for it have survived. Stephens used a canvas from John Reeves, a colourman in Tottenham Court Road who also supplied canvases to Ford Madox Brown (Tate Picture Files). The model for the Marquis was a friend of Stephens named Bassett (Rossetti 60). Janicula resembles Stephens’s father Septimus, a portrait of whom Stephens exhibited at the Academy in 1854.

Stephens’s Dethe and the Riotours.

The Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in Chaucer dates back to Brown’s The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry, a small triptych begun in 1845 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). The Brotherhood included Chaucer in their list of ‘Immortals’; he may even have been added at Stephens’s suggestion, given his enthusiasm for the poet. He was the first PRB member to illustrate Chaucer: in the summer of 1848, he began a large pen-and-ink drawing depicting a scene from ‘The Pardoner’s Tale,’ entitled Dethe and the Riotours (Wilkes, ‘Reading and Drawing’ 52–54). The Proposal was therefore his second Chaucerian subject. ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ clearly fascinated him, as he also mentioned ‘the glorious tale of Griselda’ in one of his essays for The Germ, ‘Modern Giants,’ written at the same time as the painting (‘Laura Savage,’ 169–73).

Stephens’s plan to complete his picture in time for the 1850 Royal Academy exhibition proved too ambitious. Work on it was paused while he undertook a commission from James Wyatt Jr. of Oxford to paint a copy of Hans Holbein’s portrait of Archbishop William Warham, between February and June (Wilkes, Hidden Pre-Raphaelite 60–65). Stephens resumed The Proposal in October, taking it with him to Sevenoaks in Kent, accompanied by Holman Hunt, who wanted to paint the background of Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1850–1; Birmingham Museums Trust) in nearby Knole Park. The artists lodged with one Mrs Hearnden on the High Street in Sevenoaks. They were later joined by D. G. Rossetti, who wanted to make his first (and last) attempt at outdoor landscape painting. While his friends worked outside, Stephens set up his canvas in Mrs Hearnden’s house and began to paint. In an unpublished letter to his stepmother Dorothy, he wrote: ‘The Lodgings we have are very comfortable indeed, […] I am painting in the Washhouse of the house which is convenient’(Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent, 2015,47.105.7). The resulting interior is meticulously executed, capturing the interplay of light and shadow throughout the room and the varying textures of stone, wood and fabric. The Kent autumn landscape and cloudy sky visible through the door and window are very finely painted. Stephens therefore locates Chaucer’s characters within a believable domestic environment.

Holman Hunt’s Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus.

In a letter to John Lucas Tupper on 27 October, Hunt reported that Stephens ‘is painting his background most industriously, which improves his picture extraordinarily’ (Coombs 33). Another letter from Stephens to Dorothy a few days later provides an additional account of the trip’s convivial atmosphere, published here for the first time:

Rossetti you know is down here and is now lying on the sofa asleep, Hunt is smoking with his heels on the hobs, we find it bitterly cold[.] Hunt is painting in the open air, mostly under an umbrella, and continues to sustain himself with wine. [...] [T]hey come home at five o’clock and we dine at six; our old woman [Mrs Hearnden] feeds us jollily, hot dinners every day and pies, meat for breakfast. I paint in the wash-house place and enjoy […] a prime through draft [sic] into the bargain; [...] I pour out at breakfast and tea, and am major domo in general in consequence of being always at home. [...] I have got a fine subject for another picture for which I shall make a design while here. [30 October 1850, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, 2015-47.105.22]

This was a happy time for Stephens, surrounded by his friends and working under the shared principles of painting carefully and directly from nature. His reference to a ‘prime through draft’ indicates that he kept the back door of the house open while he painted, despite the rain and cold – such was his commitment to the Brotherhood’s methods.

The artist returned to London on 10 November, leaving Rossetti and Hunt at Sevenoaks (Rossetti 82). On 2 December he called on W. M. Rossetti, who noted that ‘he has painted a little on his picture since getting back’(Rossetti 84). Three months later, when he unveiled The Proposal at a PRB gathering on 9 March 1851, the head and torso of Griselda were incomplete; evidently, he had been unable to find a model and doubted if he could finish it (Rossetti 89–90). Robert Upstone has suggested Elizabeth Siddal as the model for Griselda, although this cannot be confirmed by documentary evidence (Upstone 40). While the heads of Walter and Janicula are highly finished, Griselda’s features appear doll-like and disproportioned, making it difficult to comfortably confirm the likeness. Her hair colour and downturned eyes can be said to resemble Siddal’s, and she modelled for other Pre-Raphaelite paintings at this time, notably Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia. Stephens probably rushed this part of the painting before submitting it to the Academy exhibition that opened on 5 May (he did so under a pseudonym, ‘Brown,’ for reasons unknown; Rossetti 91). The work was rejected.

From left to right: (a) Holman Hunt’sThe Awakening Conscience; (b) Millais’s A Huguenot; and (c) Holman Hunt’s Claudia and Isabella.

The Proposal belongs to a series of Pre-Raphaelite images from the early 1850s which portray emotional interactions between male and female figures, such as Millais’s A Huguenot (1852; private collection), Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience and Claudio and Isabella (1850; Tate, London) and Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–50; Tate). Stephens’s work on the latter picture a few months earlier, marking out the perspective on the canvas for Rossetti, may have influenced his own painting, with its sloping floor, juxtaposition of standing and seated figures and psychological air of reluctance as Griselda recoils from Walter’s touch (Rossetti 33). Stephens was also familiar with Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) which had been purchased by the National Gallery in 1842 and had a significant impact on the PRB (see Smith & Bugler). The perspective recession, the joined hands at the centre of the canvas and the interior painted with a minute exactitude all echo van Eyck. Stephens expressed his knowledge of the painting in a short story, ‘The Reflection in Van Eyck’s Mirror,’ likely written in the spring of 1850 and published in the Crayon in New York six years later (Wilkes, Hidden Pre-Raphaelite 137–147).

Van Eyck,The Arnolfini Portrait. © National Gallery, London

In addition, aspects of Stephens’s design may have been inspired by a Quattrocento Italian painting acquired by the National Gallery in 1848, which scholars have already identified as an influence on the PRB: Lorenzo Monaco’s San Benedetto Altarpiece, which was visually quoted by Rossetti and Millais in their paintings of 1849, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (Tate) and Isabella (Warner 3–5). Stephens also seems to have referred to the two saints dressed in white and yellow when portraying Walter and Griselda: the former seated sidelong to the picture plane in sharp profile, Griselda standing beside him with her head lowered. As Elizabeth Prettejohn has indicated, Rossetti and Millais incorporated the ‘right-angle juxtaposition’ of the two saints into their paintings for different narrative purposes: Mary’s ‘obedience to her mother’s teaching’ and the ‘complexity of the social interactions’ in Isabella (Prettejohn 105–106). Stephens also uses this right-angle orientation in The Proposal to emphasise the class divide between Griselda and Walter.

Fraught relationships between men and women from ‘disparate stations in life’ were represented in Pre-Raphaelite modern-life subjects like Hunt’s The Awakening Conscienceand Rossetti’s Found (the earliest design dates from 1853; see Barringer 92). Millais’s Isabella explores similar class conflicts in a historical setting: the romance between the high-born Isabella and a man of lower status, Lorenzo, and the disapproval of Isabella’s brothers (Lorenzo’s employers) which leads to Lorenzo’s murder. Like Millais, Stephens set his scene beside a humble dinner table. Walter is presented as a physically ineffectual aristocrat who has been indulgently drinking wine and must lean on his sword for support; his frailty is the result of a life of sensuality and idleness, in contrast with Chaucer’s description of Walter as ‘handsome’ and ‘strong’ (Chaucer 280). This may relate to Stephens’s ascetic view, expressed in his other article for The Germ, that ‘Sensuality is a meanness repugnant to youth, and disgusting in age: a degradation at all times’ (‘‘The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,’ 63). In one of his Sevenoaks letters, Hunt joked that Stephens ‘wanders about in an abstracted manner saying “Sensuality is a means so disgusting to age &c,”’ and that he would be giving a lecture ‘on ethical morality’ back in London (Coombs 33). Clearly, he was occupied with social concerns while working on The Proposal, and it was probably anti-aristocratic in feeling.

Millais, The Woodman’s Daughter.

This becomes even more apparent when the painting is compared with Millais’s The Woodman’s Daughter, which was produced concomitantly with The Proposal in 1850–1. The paintings have a formal and thematic symmetry; even their compositions are mirror images of one another. Evidently, Stephens watched Millais at work on the painting in Wytham Woods near Oxford in the summer of 1850 (Millais, 1: 111). It was shown at the 1851 Academy exhibition, although its morbid subject, based upon Coventry Patmore’s 1844 poem of the same title, repelled potential buyers. Both Stephens and Millais were illustrating narratives which describe the cruel treatment of poor women by wealthy men: Griselda by the Marquis and the woodman’s daughter Maud by the ‘rich Squire’s son’ who eventually seduces and abandons her. Maud drowns their baby in a pool. Millais depicts an early encounter between the two characters and foreshadows the poem’s tragic outcome through the symbolically suggestive strawberries offered by the boy and the blood-red of his tunic (echoing the Marquis’s red tights in Stephens’s painting). The whip-like twig in his other hand, juxtaposed with stray feathers at his feet, hint at unseen animal cruelty.

Father figures are present in Stephens’s and Millais’s works, but they express degrees of indifference about their daughters’ futures. Janicula, whom Stephens shows gazing wistfully at Griselda, agrees to give his daughter away to the abusive Marquis, despite his suspicions of Walter’s intentions. The woodman Gerald in Millais’s picture is oblivious of the relationship unfolding behind him while he swings his axe – another hint of violence within the scene. Later in Patmore’s poem, Gerald coldly rejects his daughter’s plea for help after her seduction and abandons her. In an early study for Stephens's painting, he looks over at the children with an expression almost of approval, lending weight to the idea that Maud’s fate is governed by the two principal men in her life, as with Griselda.

The Proposal also relates to Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, begun two years later in 1853. Like The Woodman’s Daughter, its similarities with Stephens’s painting are visual and thematic. Stephens and Hunt depict lower-class women being subjugated by their wealthy suitors. The two paintings contrast seated male and standing female figures within claustrophobic domestic interiors, with prominently placed windows (reflected in a mirror in Hunt’s picture). Animals appear in the lower-left corners of both works: Stephens included a rooster threatening a hen, while in The Awakening Conscience a cat toys with a bird, its paw raised in a similar gesture. These motifs are similar enough to suggest that Hunt was influenced by Stephens.

After The Proposal was rejected by the Academy, it remained in Stephens’s possession. Some eighty years later, in 1932, it entered the Tate’s collection as part of a posthumous bequest by the artist’s only child, Lt. Col. Holman Fred Stephens. The bequest included three other oils by Stephens: two subject pictures, Morte d’Arthur (1849) and Mother and Child (ca. 1854–6), and a portrait of Charles Bridger (1855; see Wilkes, ‘A Lost Portrait,’ 598–601). The Proposal has suffered over the years – physically, when it received water damage from a burst pipe at the Tate Gallery in the 1950s, and critically, having been cited merely as an example of Stephens’s perceived artistic incompetence (Tate Archives). Yet it is more sophisticated than it initially appears and deserves its place in the canon of early Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Links to Related Material

Bibliography

Artist File, F. G. Stephens, Tate Britain, London.

Barringer, Tim, Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith. Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. London: Tate Publishing, 2012.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. David Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Coombs, James H., et al., eds. A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship: The Correspondence of William Holman Hunt and John Lucas Tupper. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986.

Macleod, Dianne Sachko, ‘F. G. Stephens, Pre-Raphaelite Critic and Art Historian.’ The Burlington Magazine 128 (June 1986):398–403.

Millais, John Guille. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. 2 Vols. London: Methuen & Co., 1899.

Payne, Christiana. Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours . Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2021.

Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

Rossetti, W. M, The P.R.B. Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1849–1853. Ed. William Fredeman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

’Seward, John’ [Frederick George Stephens]. ‘Laura Savage.' The Germ 4 (1850): 169–73.

_____. ‘The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art.’ The Germ 2 (February 1850): 58 –62.

Smith, Alison, Caroline Bugler and Susan Foister. Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

Stephens, F. G. MS letters in the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent, UK.

Tate Picture Files, Tate Britain, London, UK.

Upstone, Robert. The Pre-Raphaelite Dream: Paintings and Drawings from the Tate Collection. London: Tate Publishing, 2004.

Warner, Malcolm. ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and the National Gallery.’ Huntingdon Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 1–11.

Wilkes, Robert. The Hidden Pre-Raphaelite: The Art and Writings of Frederic George Stephens from 1848–70. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Oxford Brookes University, UK, 2019.

_____. ‘A Lost Portrait by F. G. Stephens.’ The Burlington Magazine 162 (July 2020): 598–601.

_____. ‘Reading and Drawing: The Pre-Raphaelite Sources in English Literature.’ Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours . Ed. Christina Payne. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2021. 51–66.


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Created 12 February 2024