W.S. Spanton "An Art Student and his Teachers in the Sixties"

Like all decent people I love to rummage through second hand bookshops and there is a lovely little one in Bridport on the Dorset coast which I know well and in which I have found several gems, not least William Gaunt's classic "A Pre-Raphaelite Dream" which was at least partly responsible for confirming my love for the art and artists of that period. On my last trip down I discovered a little book by someone whose name I had never come across before W.S. Spanton, called "An Art Student and his Teachers in the Sixties". For reasons which never become entirely clear there was a well-known photograph of Millais dressed as Dante on the cover and this, supported by a quick flick through re-assured me that "the Sixties" were indeed the 1860's and not the decade of my birth, which (apart from that fact) has little or no cultural interest for me.

It is a curious little book which has the feel of something dictated over the course of a couple of summer afternoons and then published without further reflection or editing. It starts without any preamble and not the slightest attempt to set any scene, I give the first sentence in full: "Having shown some taste and more fancy for drawing, I was allowed by my parents to study as an artist" and we are into a couple of pages about his interest in art as a teenager and then, having failed to get into the Academy schools it was off in 1862 at the age of 17 to Heatherleys' School  in Newman Street one of the best known establishments which acted as a sort of prep school for the Academy. The following year he gained admission as a probationer in  the Academy Schools where he won a silver medal for a copy of Veronese's "Saint blessing a Venetian gentleman" as he calls it, which if it is still at Dulwich as it was at the time must be this picture, now, more precisely known as "St.Jerome and a Donor".

St Jerome and a Donor by Veronese
 

The early chapters of the book deal with memories of his fellow students at Heatherley's and the Academy, none of them are names that have otherwise been preserved by history although many seem to be have been related to someone quite famous such as Browne the son of Dickens' illustrator 'Phiz', two sisters of Robert B Martineau, a grandson of John Crome the watercolourist and an unspecified female member of the sculpting Thorneycroft family, probably judging by their dates this was Hamo's sister Helen. Helen it must be pointed out in all fairness had a more successful career than Spanton acting for some years at as Vice-President of the Society of Woman Artists. Spanton recalls these ghosts from the past in 1927 in just the inconsequential and off hand way one would imagine during a chat over a beer and a cigar but it reads oddly in a memoir to discover that one Ballard from Herefordshire "had always been a regular attendant at Church: towards the end of his life he became deaf". we can only speculate on the relationship between those two facts.

The Spanton family c1865

In 1870 four years after this event when presumably Spanton was beginning to try and earn a living as a painter, his father died prematurely, and, with a mother and sisters to support, he must have had little choice but to give up this attempt and take over the family business. His father had run a successful business in Bury St Edmunds (close to which town I also spent most of my early years ) involving guilding and framing pictures but also the comparatively new art of photography. It is to this lucky chance that we owe the existence of so many pictures of and by the family, the county records office in Bury has a collection of over 4000 glass plates from the 1860s through to the 1940s from the Spanton firm as well as a rival Jarman. At this point it seems Spanton more or less gave up painting except for a few local portraits and interestingly in view of his silver medal, a fairly lucrative trade in copies. His self portrait from towards the end of his life shows a reasonable talent at least but painting can rarely be done successfully if one only has odd hours free at the end of a business day to give to it and Spanton obviously realised this early on.

William Silas Spanton c1870
 

His skill at copying may have been stimulated, (though as usual he leaves the reader to speculate in the dark) by the most interesting fact about him for those, like me, enamoured by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, which is that his greatest friend was Charles Fairfax Murray.  Murray was a minor but central figure (if that is not a contradiction in terms), assistant to Rossetti and Burne-Jones, copyist for Ruskin and art dealer and collector. Through Murray Spanton got to hover on the edges of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, meeting Burne-Jones, visiting Rossetti's house when the owner was away and hearing second hand all the gossip and studio talk of the great men of his generation. One learns little new perhaps but its always interesting to see these people so much written about in their lifetimes and subsequently viewed from  a different angle, and Spanton has such a peculiarly inconsequential and bathetic way of writing that sometimes he produces a nugget almost in spite of himself. "When I first saw a photo of Rossetti I was disappointed, unfortunately for me, his face bore a superficial resemblance to Albert Smith a public showman." or how about this comment on the appearance of the President of the Royal Academy: "we went one morning to Leighton's studio....the President was courtly and gracious; if only his legs had been straight he would have been perfectly beautiful.." Possibly his view was soured by Leighton commenting on Spanton having failed as a painter by telling him "we can give instruction, but we cannot give genius". It is via Murray though that we get one or two curiously intriguing throw away lines such as this about Marie Stillman, "my friend Mrs Stillman has ruined her reputation in Rome by running down her own work" a lesson for all us artists, and this surprising admission that when Morris and Ruskin was raising a campaign to protect St.Marks in Venice Murray "was pleased with himself for having had nothing to do with it".

Spanton died as a result of a motor traffic accident at Blackheath in London in 1930 at the age of 85, although I haven't been able to find out any more details beyond those sad bare facts. He has left us though this curious little book, a bit of a mad scamper at times and it could have done with the assistance of a good editor but anything which adds even a smidgeon to our knowledge and understanding of this richest of periods in British art history is worth preserving. Most memoirs and biographies of the period inevitably centre on the great figures of the age and it is interesting to get the viewpoint of a minor bystander as it were, albeit necessarily a very incomplete view. I would very much like to get hold of his other literary effort entitled "The Old Masters and how to copy them" because I feel he would have interesting technical insights but sadly it seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. This little book though plus a few paintings and above all, the large photographic library produced by the family firm will ensure Spanton's name will live on for many years to come.

W.S. Spanton Self- Portrait