Joanna Mary Boyce Wells
(1831 - 1861) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Joanna Mary Boyce Wells |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1831 |
| Death: |
1861 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
Oil paint |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
Pre-Raphaelite |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
Joanna Boyce trained at Cary's and Leigh's art academies. In the London art world she met other young women artists, including Anna Mary Howitt, established figures such as William Powell Frith and Augustus Egg, and also the Pre-Raphaelites, through her brother George, who was also an artist.
The year 1855 marked a breakthrough for Boyce. She traveled to Paris where she trained in the atelier of Thomas Couture and reviewed the Salon of the Exposition Universelle for the Saturday Review. She also exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy, showing an oil painting of the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Elgiva, who. according to history, was branded and exiled when she fell foul of a powerful Archbishop. Elgiva was admired by Ford Madox Brown, and by John Ruskin, who
declared in his Academy Notes that Boyce could hope to attain a position 'in the very first rank of painters'. Boyce's best-known work is her Head of Mrs Eaton (1861, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven). The sitter is thought to be a black woman who also posed for the Pre-Raphaelites. But, as Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn argued in their catalog for the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Women
Artists (Manchester City Art Gallery 1998), rather than following their lead and representing the mode! as a nameless part of a narrative, Boyce painted an elegant, self-contained individual.
In 1857 Boyce traveled through France and Italy She met and married the artist Henry Wells, although she had expressed doubts about the 'slavery' of marriage in correspondence with him. She painted her growing family in portraits and domestic genre scenes. But following the birth of her third child she died, leaving Cretchen
unfinished. The painting represents a character from Goethe's Faust, a young woman who is seduced and destroyed. For Victorians, the subject matter is likely to have brought to mind contemporary debates over 'fallen' women. Anna Mary Howitt also painted a scene from Faust, and in William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853-4, Tate) a woman is shown realizing the horror of her loss of innocence. But Boyce's Gretchen is a mysteriously serene figure. In 1935 a solo exhibition of her work was held at the Tate Gallery. |
Samples of Work
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