Marie Spartali Stillman – Three Anglo-Hellenic Graces – Scarborough

Marie Spartali Stillman (self-portrait)

I was delighted to learn earlier this week that English Heritage are to instal a Blue Plaque in honour of the memory of Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927) “at the house where she first began to realise her ambition of becoming a painter” (this is presumably the Spartali family home, known as The Shrubbery, now situated behind St Barnabas’s Church on Clapham Common North Side).[1] Spartali Stillman was born into a prosperous family of London Greeks in the middle of the nineteenth century. Her father, Michael, was one of the heads of Spartali & Co., an import business, and served for several years as the Greek consul-general in London.  

Spartali Stillman became associated at an early age with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1864, she sat for him and, telling him that she herself wanted to learn to paint, took lessons from Ford Madox Brown. From 1867, she started to exhibit her work professionally, while continuing to model – for Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and John Spencer Stanhope among others. In 1871, she married the American Pre-Raphaelite painter and journalist, William James Stillman. The last retrospective of her work was at the Delaware Art Gallery in 2015/16 [2]. 

 

Spartali Stillman is being honoured, of course, in her own right. But in the London Greek community of the day, she was simply the most talented of three cousins who were closely associated and collectively known as ‘the Three Graces’ because of their striking beauty and presence and their role as models and muses for the Pre-Raphaelite artists of the second generation. Alongside Spartali Stillman, Maria Zambaco (née Kassaveti) (1843-1914) was the mistress and model of Edward Burne-Jones; Aglaia Koronio (née Ionidi) (1834-1906) was one of William Morris’s great confidantes.[3] All three were artists. In this last year, I have found myself increasingly thinking about their milieu because of the church in which I am now worshipping: St Martin’s on the Hill in Scarborough. 

 

St Martin's on the Hill

St Martin’s has one of the most important and complete collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in any English church. Built in 1861-3 by the architect George Frederick Bodley, it has one of the three earliest schemes of decoration by the first company founded by William Morris, along with his Pre-Raphaelite friends: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Together with Bodley himself, the company decorated ceilings and walls in the church, and also provided a nearly full set of stained-glass windows, an elegant painted reredos, a decorated organ screen and a beautifully painted pulpit. The designs and work are by Morris, Philip Webb, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Stanhope, Peter Paul Marshall and the company’s principal glass painter George Campfield.[4]

It is one of the features of work by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. that their ecclesiastical art no more disguises the identities of the models for their murals, images and stained glass than do the paintings by individual members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The images of several saints and angels in the stained glass at St Martin’s are portraits of Pre-Raphaelite “stunners”: the non-PC term given by Rossetti and friends to the several tall, striking and beautiful women who posed for them and became entangled in their lives as lovers, wives and friends. A lovely window by Morris and Burne-Jones is devoted to the ‘three Marys’ (the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany) with the images based on Georgiana Macdonald, who married Burne-Jones; Lizzie Siddall, the wife of Rossetti; and Annie Miller, one of Rossetti’s many lovers. We have, I think, no window modelled on Spartali Stillman. But one of the most intense windows, designed by Burne-Jones, daringly depicts his mistress Zambaco variously as St Dorothea, St Theophilus and an Archangel, with gorgeous flaming wings. This is certainly a connection I didn’t expect to find, mediated by the personalities and practices of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, between the London Greek community of late Victorian England and the High Church circles of then fashionable Scarborough.

 

English Heritage has not yet announced the date for unveiling the plaque in honour of Marie Spartali Stillman. But I hope that today’s London Greek community will get involved and that an image of the plaque is soon widely available. It is good to have this opportunity to recall and celebrate particularly Spartali Stillman’s work as a painter, but also the broader artistic influence of the renowned women of the Kassavetis-Spartalis-Ionidis clan. 

 

John

28 January 2023

 

[1] See the English Heritage announcement here.

 

[2] A book was produced to accompany the exhibition: Margaretta S. Frederick & Jan Marsh (ed.), Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2015).

 

[3] There is an excellent overview of the milieu of 'the Three Graces' in Victoria Solomonidis-Hunter's article (in two parts) for the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery: 'Aglaia Coronio née Ionides (1834-1906)', at https://www.fownc.org/pdf/newsletter103.pdf (pp.6-8) and https://www.fownc.org/pdf/newsletter104.pdf (pp.6-8). An image gallery, giving biographical details and illustrations, of the Three Graces and their work is available here (thanks to Victoria for sharing this link with me). 

 

[4] The Friends of St Martin’s have produced a good website and several guides and booklets exploring different aspects of the church and its Pre-Raphaelite heritage.