GOODMAN'S THE PRINTSELLER'S WINDOW

The Printseller's Window

GOODMAN’S THE PRINTSELLER’S WINDOW

By Peter O. Brown

What inspired Englishman Walter Goodman (1838-1912), a sometime portrait painter, writer and promoter, to go to his easel in 1883 and paint a large and highly complex trompe l’oeil masterpiece? The artist had experimented with super-realism before in more modest still lifes (A Kitchen Cabinet, 1882, private collection) and a view, over a window box, of a maid polishing the panes from within (Morning Work 1876, whereabouts unknown), but the scale, artistic virtuosity and intellectual challenge presented in this painting set it apart, both as an example of his work and as a trompe l’oeil painting.

Goodman was the son of portrait painter Julia Salaman (1812-1906) and the only one of her seven talented children to pursue a career as an artist. His mother saw to his receiving a classical education, with study at the Royal Academy followed by two years in Italy. There Goodman developed a wanderlust which led him to Spain and Cuba. Along the way he pursued his passion for the theatre, painting scenery, applying actors’ make-up and even translating an English farce into Spanish. Siding with the rebels in the ten-year Cuban Revolution, he was ultimately forced to flee the island. Returning to London by way of New York and Paris, he published a series of humorous articles about his adventures, later assembled into a book, The Pearl of the Antilles, Or An Artist in Cuba (1873).

He resumed his portrait painting, capturing the likenesses of numerous stage personalities and even two of Queen Victoria’s sons (Alfred and Leopold), but rarely worked on commission. He was forced to rely instead on crayon sketches and posthumous portraits from photographs for income, moving in with his caring mother and several of his siblings for extended periods. A number of years were spent with his sister, Alice, and her husband, Edmund Passingham, portrait photographers, who ran a studio in their home.

Through membership in London’s bohemian Savage Club, founded by critic and gadfly George Sala and his theater subjects, such as actress Mary Ann Keeley, Goodman gained tangential access to the upper tier of Victorian artists, many of whom he chose to portray in  The Printseller’s Window. The art world had been evolving away from the enjoinder of Sir Joshua Reynolds, co-founder of the Royal Academy to study the old masters, ever since critic John Ruskin had begun publishing his multi-volume treatise, Modern Painters, in 1843. In this work Ruskin urged artists to go directly to nature. The critic left little doubt about how he viewed trompe l’oeil painters, comparing them to jugglers in their attempts to deceive and to pin-makers in their imitative artistry!

Goodman placed Ruskin’s photograph stage-center in The Printseller’s Window, accompanied by a magnifying glass and surrounded by the photographic calling cards (cartes-de-visite) of well-regarded European artists of the day, mechanical

                                                          

                                                      

                                                              

reproductions of prints by old masters and other artists, a photograph of his friend George Sala, and a variety of

manufactured goods, many of which can be recognized as traditional vanitas objects. In this latter respect, Goodman is

tipping his hat to the seventeenth century still life painters, particularly David Bailly, whose 1651 Self-portrait with

Vanitas Objects is partially draped like Goodman’s (a reference to the trompe l’oeil painting contest between Parrhasius and Zeuxis) and contains representations of coins, books, pearls and crystal, all of which were considered by Dutch still-life painters to be futile and transient possessions.

Identified prints in the painting include, at the upper left, Carlo Dolci’s Santa Cecelia (Dresden) and just below it, Peter Paul Rubens’ portrait of his sons Albert and Nicholaas (Vaduz). On the lowest level can be seen Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Self-portrait in the Style of Rembrandt (London) and Anthony Van Dyck’s Cornelius van der Geest (London).

According to contemporary press accounts, The Printseller’s Window attracted crowds wherever it was exhibited. Goodman intended that his viewers guess the identities of the artists portrayed, namely (from left to right): Fortuny y Marsal, Gustave Dore, William Powell Frith, John Everett Millais, Thomas Webster, Rosa Bonheur, Frederick Leighton, Elizabeth Thompson, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Thomas Landseer, W. Calder Marshall and Mikaly von Munkácsy. He provides us with the names of the Spaniard, Fortuny, and the Hungarian, Munkácsy, who would have been relatively unknown to the British public.

Behind this complicated offering the luminous presence of the printseller holds a broken terra cotta figure of a child in his hands. Will he add it to or delete it from the scene? If all of the other images in the painting are of real artists and works, why not the printseller himself? Ray Goodman, the artist’s grandson, has suggested that the printseller bears a strong resemblance to Charles Darwin, who died just a year before Goodman exhibited his masterpiece and was well known for his theory of natural selection.

In The Printseller’s Window the painter Goodman appears to be challenging the ability of the critic Ruskin to determine artistic success. Popular taste, here represented by the mass-produced lithographs of bygone artists and reproductions of classical objects, will determine lasting fame. If the painting is an allegory, the printseller’s controlling presence personifies that choice.

Goodman placed a high price (£315) on The Printseller’s Window and retained the painting for at least fifteen years, during which time he exhibited the work as frequently as possible. Ironically, he had a print made of his masterpiece, which he then sold to interested viewers.