3 Greek Graces of the British Pre-Raphaelite Art Movement

 

 

Marie Spartali Stillman, Aglaia Ionides Coronio and Maria Cassavetti Zambaco were talented artists and muses of Pre-Raphaelite painters, known as “The Three Graces”, owing to their Greek heritage, beauty and intellect.

They grew up surrounded by prominent figures of the British Victorian art world, specifically the Pre Raphaelite artists, who not only influenced their lives and careers but became firm friends and even lovers.

 

 

“The three Graces”, Marie Spartali (1844-1927), Maria Cassavetti (1843-1914) and Aglaia Ionides (1834 – 1906), three dazzling and alluring Greek cousins were born and raised in England by prominent 19th-century Greek families.

Introduced to art at a young age all three girls become talented artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

In their late teens, around 1863, they became associated with the artist, James Abbot McNeil Whistler, the playwright Algernon Charles Swinburne and later other prominent artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and were regularly used as models for their paintings.

 

The Pre-Raphaelites

 

 

The Pre Raphaelites, also known as the Brotherhood or the PRB, was a secret society formed in 1884 by a group of angry, radical young men:

Five rebel English artists; William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Collinson, the sculptor, Thomas Woolner plus art critic, Frederic George Stephens and writer and poet, William Michael Rossetti.

The Brotherhood of seven was against the Royal Academy’s obsession with the work of Raphael and their unimaginative and artificial style of historical painting.

The aim of the Pre Raphaelites was to recreate the simplicity and sincerity of Italian 15th century Medieval and religious paintings from the era before Raphael, hence their name: Pre Raphaelites.

Their work, considered shocking and controversial in Victorian England, had a major influence in European painting in the 1800s which lasted until the early twentieth century.

 Like Impressionism it was also notable for being one of the first art movements in Europe in which women artists became a major influence.

 

Marie Spartali Stillman

1844-1927

 

 

Marie Spartali‘s father, Michalis Spartali (1818-1914), was a wealthy merchant; principle of Spartali & Co, who traded in objets d’arts and archaeological artifacts from the Middle East (some of which are now in the British Museum) and Consul-General for Greece in London.

He kept company with rising writers and artists for whom he threw extravagant parties, The Times newspaper in 1927stated:

“The large and varied group of cosmopolitan artists, musicians, exiles from Crete and nationalists, that Michalis Spartali brought together, united modernists like James McNeil Whistler, radical nationalists and political dissidents like Giuseppe Mazzini and Herman Muller – Strubing.”

His daughter, Marie, became a member of the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Marie Spartali, who began her artistic lifestyle as an artist’s model, went on to have one of the longest-running careers of the Pre-Raphaelites, covering almost sixty years in which time she became a highly regarded artist who would produce over one hundred and fifty paintings.

 

 

 

 

In 1864, Marie began sitting for the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti who in turn introduced her to Ford Madox Brown, who became her mentor and for the next five years, she studied under him.

Ford Madox Brown is known to have stated that she was one of the most intellectual women he had ever met.

 

 

In 1867 Marie Spartali began exhibiting her work, first at the Dudley Gallery and later at the Grosvenor Gallery.

In 1870 she decided to pursue art professionally.

In 1870, Spartali met American journalist and painter William J. Stillman, whom she married in 1871, against her father’s wishes, causing a rift that would never heal.

Marie had three children with Stillman, who already had another three children from a previous marriage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the wife of a diplomat, Marie Stillman, had a sort of nomadic life which was spent flitting between America, Italy and England.

Marie Spartali Stillman died in March 1927 in Ashburn Place, South Kensington, four days before her 83rd birthday.

She was cremated at Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.

 

 Aglaia Ionides Coronio

1834 – 1906

 

 

 

Aglaia Ionides Coronio, daughter of Alexander Constantine Ionides (1810 – 1890), art collector and Greek Consul in London from 1854 to 1866, was an embroiderer, bookbinder, art collector and patron of the arts.

She who grew up in the world of Pre-Raphaelite art, a confidante of artist William Morris and a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burns-Jones.

 

 

With the help of her family, as textile merchants, Aglaia provided unspun Levantine wool and the rare red dye, kermes, for William Morris with which he coloured his embroidery wool.

 Aglaia also worked with Edward Burne-Jones, not only as a model but as a costume designer and stylist, positioning dresses, scarves and sashes for his paintings.

In return Burn-Jones taught her how to bind books and equipped her with embroidery thread.

The painting below shows a couple of versions of a dress created by Coronio.

 

 

On 20 August 1906, the day after the death of her daughter, Aglaia took her own life by stabbing herself in the neck and chest with a pair of scissors.

 

Maria Cassavetti Zambaco

1843-1914

 

 

Maria Cassavetti Zambaco, who became an artist and model, was the daughter of a wealthy Greek merchant, Demetrios Cassavetti.

Maria moved in the same artistic circle as her two cousins, Marie Spartali Stillman and Aglaia Ionides.

Upon inheriting her father’s immense fortune in 1858 she became much more independent than most women of Victorian Britain.

Maria Cassavetti, femme fatale of the Pre-Raphaelites, sat as a model for artists George Frederick Watts, James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti before becoming an artist herself.

 

 

 

Cassavetti studied at the Slade School in London under Alphonse Legros, French painter, etcher, sculptor and medallist and also under Auguste Rodin in Paris.

Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887 and at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London in 1889.

She also exhibited at the Paris Salon and The British Museum holds several of her medals.

 

 

 

In 1860, aged eighteen, Maria Cassavetti married Dr. Demetrius Zambaco and went to live in France.

The couple had two children, the marriage, however, was not a success and she moved back to her mother after six years.

In 1866 she met Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833 -1898), 1st Baronet, an English artist and designer, the last of the Pre-Raphaelites, when he was commissioned by her mother to paint Maria.

As the subject was left to him he chose Cupid and Psyche, the greatest love story in ancient Greece

 

 

Maria Cassavetti became the lover, muse and model for Burn-Jones, who was married and ten years her senior.

Their tumultuous affair was to last until at least January 1869.

 

 

 

Burne -Jones treated Cassavetti as an equal; she trained as an artist under him and sat as a model, appearing as a sorceress or a temptress,for some of his most iconic paintings including “The Beguiling of Merlin” and the controversial, “Phyllis and Demophoön”, which was removed from display at the Royal Watercolour Society causing Burne-Jones to resign his membership.

 

 

Cassavetti repeatedly tried to persuade Burne-Jones to leave his wife but to no avail.

It seemed he wasn’t as free – spirited as he made out to be and fretted about his social standing and what people would say and so he refused.

In a moment of madness they both took an overdose of laudanum by the canal in London’s Little Venice.

The attempt failed and the police were called and what was already a public scandal become the talk of London.

The affair ended but they remained friends and Burne-Jones continued to use her as a model in his paintings.

 

 

 

 “The Wine of Circe” By Edward Burne-Jones

 

So enamored was Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Burne-Jones’ painting, “The wine of Circe”, where Maria Cassavetti depicts Circe, witch and enchantress of Greek mythology, he was inspired to write the following poem titled for “The Wine of Circe” By Edward Burne-Jones, for his book: “The 1870 Poems”.

In a letter to fellow artist, Barbara Bodichon Rossetti wrote, in 1870:

 “I have tried in the first lines to give some notion of the colour, and in the last some impression of the scope of the work, taking the transformed beasts as images of ruined passion, the torn seaweed of the sea of pleasure. You will remember that in the picture the window shows a view of the sea and the galleys which bear the new lovers and victims of the enchantress”.

 

For “The Wine of Circe” By Edward Burne-Jones

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 

Dusk – Haired and gold-robed o’er the golden wine

She stoops, wherein, distilled of death and shame,

Sink the black drops; while, lit with fragrant flame,

Round her spread board the golden sunflowers shine.

Doth Helios here with Hecaté combine

(O Circe, thou their votaress!) to proclaim

For these thy guests all rapture in Love’s name,

Till pitiless Night give Day the countersign?

Lords of their hour, they come. And by her knee

Those cowering beasts, their equals heretofore,

Wait; who with them in new equality

To-night shall echo back the sea’s dull roar

With a vain wail from passion’s tide-strown shore

Where the disheveled seaweed hates the sea.

 

 

Maria Cassavetti Zambaco died in Paris in 1914.

Her body was returned for interment in the family sarcophagus at the Greek Orthodox Cemetery at Norwood.

 

 

 

And their spirits live on

 

Sadly, today, these three headstrong Greek women,who paved the way for female artists, a profession not deemed suitable for Victorian women, are mostly forgotten.

Their spirits live on in the exceptional works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters to which they lent so much beauty.

 

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