Marie Spartali Stillman

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Marie Stillman (née Spartali) (Greek: 10 March 1844–6 March 1927) was a British member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's second generation. She had one of the longest-running careers in Pre-Raphaelites, spanning sixty years and spawning over five hundred and fifty works. Despite the fact that she began as a favorite model, she soon trained and became a respected painter, earning Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others' praise.

Personal life

Marie Spartali was Michael Spartali's eldest child, founder of the company Spartali & Co, and Greek consul general based in London from 1866 to 1879. He had migrated to London about 1828, where he married Euphrosyne Varsini, the daughter of a Greek merchant from Genoa. The family split time between their home in Clapham Common in London and their country home on the Isle of Wight. Spartali's father, who was fond of lavish garden parties, hosted up-and-coming writers and artists. It was at one of the first major events in which Marie would be introduced to the art world for the first time.

Spartali met American journalist and painter William J. Stillman in 1870. Both the couple had previously posed for Rossetti in his famous Dante pictures, but it's not clear if that is how they met. Interestingly, although her husband was an artist in himself, Marie never waited for him as a model. The pair married in 1871 against her father's wishes, triggering a rift that would never fully recover.

The couple split their time between London and Florence (1878-1883), then Rome (1889-1896), as her husband was a foreign correspondent for The Times.

The couple had three children of their own who were raised alongside William's other three children from a previous marriage. Marie Stillman died in March 1927 in Ashburn Place, South Kensington, four days before her 83rd birthday, and was cremated at Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, Surrey. She and her husband are interred there.

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Art and career

Spartali and her cousins, Maria Zambaco, and Aglaia Coronio, were regarded as "the Three Graces" by Greek mythology scholars, who were known collectively as "the Three Graces" after the Charites of Greek mythology (Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia). Marie was quite tall, and cut an imposing figure in her later years, wearing almost entirely black and purposefully attracting a lot of attention throughout her life.

Marie first met artist James McNeill Whistler and playwright Algernon Swinburne in Tulse Hill, south London. Swinburne had been reported to have said, "She is so beautiful, that I want to sit down and cry."

Whistler introduced Spartali to Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1864. She began assisting him, and when Spartali expressed an interest in learning to paint, he referred her to Ford Madox Brown. The two couples developed a close, almost familial friendship over the next five years. Spartali was "the most cerebral," Brown said of his models, and they shared a deep admiration for her work. Spartali had already decided to pursue art as a student, and her mentor encouraged her to sell her first 40 guineas.

Brown, Burne-Jones (The Mill); Julia Margaret Cameron; Rossetti (A Vision of Fiammetta, Dante's Dream at the Time of Beatrice's Death, The Bower Meadows); and Spencer Stanhope.

Marie Stillman is often identified as part of the second generation of the movement, due to her close ties to the Brotherhood. "She inherited the origins and the tone of the original PRs, but she has embraced her roots by virtue or natural association," Henry James said. She is a spontaneous, sincere, naive Pre-Raphaelite."

However, there is still some academic debate over whether this is 100% correct. For example, Robert de la Sizeranne of Le Corcoran said that this current generation of Pre-Raphaelites, including Marie Stillman, had enough in common with the Symbolists to be classed as one. Marie Spartali Stillman's figure could be a symbolism candidate because her figures "... have an immobility, a stuttering, and a stumbling block in their rare walks, making them resemble sleepwalkers." Rossetti himself credited Spartali for her ability to use her figures with emotion, rather than mere photographs.

Both her teenage daughter, Euphrosyne, and her sister Christina became sick in 1873, according to Ford Madox Brown, who said she was preoccupied with their health and that she was "too weak to paint." She later admitted that whenever she did work she found herself imagining her sister in a difficult situation. She took some time off painting because of this, but Madox-Brown never claimed that she stopped painting due to her husband's jealousy over her career and his continued friendship with him.

Stillman and her husband lived in Florence, Italy, for many years. She got a lot of inspiration from the city around her, which can be seen most prominently in her subject matter. She portrayed several scenes from the Divine Comedy while living in Dante Alighieri, concentrating in particular on the romance between Dante and Beatrice.

Despite being alienated from her peers, Stillman maintained her contact with the PRB and Rossetti, especially because she told her that Dante is her favorite.

Female figures from Shakespeare, Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio; also Italian landscapes; her paintings were typical of Pre-Raphaelites: female figures; scenes from Shakespeare, Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio. She appeared at the Dudley Gallery in 1875, later at the Grosvenor Gallery and its successor, the New Gallery, and several galleries in the eastern United States, including the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, Stillman displayed her work at the Palace of Fine Arts. In 1982, a retrospective exhibition of her work appeared in the United States, followed by another in 2015 at the Delaware Art Museum. The latter exhibition, which opened in Compton, Surrey, from March to June 6, 2016, was shown in the United Kingdom by Watts Gallery.

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