Frederick Sandys

Frederick Sandys received his initial training from his father, a minor Norwich artist. Encouraged by Rev. James Bulwer (1820-1899), a pupil and patron of John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), he attended the Norwich School of Design from 1846. When he arrived in London five years later, he was already a skilled illustrator. Through a family connection, Sandys was introduced to George Richmond (1809-1896), one of the century's most accomplished portraitists. From Richmond he acquired the skills and taste for life-size chalk portraits. Portraiture would remain his principal means of support for the rest of his career, although for a brief period in the 1860s he practiced oil painting and designed what were arguably many of the finest book illustrations of the Victorian era, including his celebrated illustration to Christina Rossetti's poem Amor Mundi (1865). In 1857 John Everett Millais (1829-1896) had exhibited at the Royal Academy a troubadour painting, Sir Isumbras at the Ford (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), of which Sandys produced a brilliant engraved parody, substituting for the figures in the picture caricatures of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), and Hunt (q.v.)-and a braying ass, identified as John Ruskin, for Sir Isumbras's charger. This had the unexpected result of solidifying Sandys's friendship with Rossetti, with whom he later resided in Chelsea in 1866-67. Under Rossetti's influence Sandys painted his most important subject picture, Medea (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869. During that year Rossetti accused Sandys of plagiarism, thus precipitating a permanent breach in their relationship. Sandys soon after abandoned oil painting to concentrate on chalk portraits and drawings of idealized female figures, the choicest of which were derived from the features of his common-law wife, Mary Jones. Rossetti is generally credited with directing Sandys toward such Aestheticism, but Leighton's (q.v.) resplendent series of pseudonymous portraits of his model Nanna Risi, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858-59, offered an equally inspiring precedent devoid of the symbolic mysticism of Rossetti's femmes fatales.1 1. See, for example, the pictures titled Pavonia reproduced in Stephen Jones et al., Frederick Leighton, exh. cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts (1996), 112-13. In both pictures the exquisitely painted head and shoulders of the sitters are set against backdrops of decorative vegetation and peacock tail-feathers. Sandys resorted to this format repeatedly in his works of the late 1860s and 1870s.