J.W. Waterhouse Exhibitions
Hidden Treasures: The Sena Collection
Following the successful launch of the Victorian Imagination in 1999, our second major touring exhibition for museums in Japan, one of the lenders offered the University the long-term loan of their collection of paintings that had been in storage for over twenty years, and have never previously been exhibited together as a collection.
In addition to two typical Victorian landscapes by Sidney Richard Percy 1821-1886 and Alfred Vickers 1786-1868, the group contains notable figure pieces by Henry Nelson O’Neil 1817-1880 and Albert Ludovici jnr 1852-1932 , as well as the extraordinary ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by the ‘fairy’ painter John Simmons. The three most significant works in the collection are those by Henrietta Rae 1859-1928, Frank Bramley 1857-1915 and John William Waterhouse 1849-1917. Two of these are rediscoveries; the Rae being an oil sketch ‘Psyche Before the Throne of Venus’, formerly in the McCulloch Collection, while the Bramley has been recently identified as the sketch for ‘Saved’, his Royal Academy exhibit of 1889, now in the National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town. The most important picture in the group is however, ‘Study for Nymphs finding the Head of Orpheus’ by the Edwardian Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse. This relates to the lower portion of a larger composition of 1900 and it is an exceptional example of the artist’s mature style.
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