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John William Godward Biography
English Victorian Neoclassical artist
born 9 August 1861 - died 13 December 1922
The serene beauty and astonishing
technical execution of John William Godward paintings contradict the fact that
this important artist has received virtually no critical acclaim or art
historical recognition. We know little about this artist's private life, which
is not betrayed by his art. Melancholy, kindly, reclusive, handsome, talented
and shy, his
life is still a mystery, a censored book,
protected by himself and sealed by his
family. Unlike most Olympian Classicists
before him, John William Godward preferred
anonymity and privacy. |
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Ignored by the quickly changing tastes of the art critics, the
artist
became the climatic figure of English
classicism painting as this genre
itself shriveled under the blaze of the 20th
century avant-garde. John William Godward was the best of the
last great European artists to
straight-forwardly embrace classical Greece
and Rome in their art. Herein lies his
significance to art history. With him and
his colleagues, we see the nightfall of five
hundred years of John William Godward painting
in Western art.
Desperately idealistic, the painter was one of
those artists, who at first glance, we think
we fathom completely. Since John William Godward is often
dismissed with the inadequate catch phrases:
an Alma-Tadema clone, a "too late"
Classicist, a "pedant of the brush", a
"pot-boiler" or merely the painter of an
insipid world of languorous women on marble
benches, no serious study of his art has
been undertaken. And because we are a
society that honors "firsts" rather than
"lasts" few art historians have examined the
demise of classicism paintings, of
which John William Godward is a chief exemplar. All of
these judgments, in the light of historical
distance, can be seen as unjust prejudices.
In John William Godward paintings we see the final summation
of half a millennium of Classical antique
influence on Western painting. Next to
Christianity it was by far the greatest
outside influence on European painting. It
vanished during Godward's generation -- killed, as it were, by contemporary
nihilistic philosophies. While pointed references to Classicism continued, even
unto today, the idealistic rhetoric accompanying it has died. During a period of
rapidly declining interest in Greco-Roman antiquity courageous artists from the
19th century continued, against all odds, in this field for the first third of
the 20th century. |
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