James Doyle Penrose RHA (1862-1932) Fra Angelico Praying Bef...

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James Doyle Penrose RHA (1862-1932) Fra Angelico Praying Before Painting Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 25 cm Inscribed on frame: ‘Fra Angelico. Fra Angelico worked without payment: he prayed before beginning any work for Divine guidance in its conception.’ Literature: Austin Chester, 'The Art of J.W. Doyle Penrose', The Windsor Magazine, Volume 26 (June 1907) The great Renaissance Florentine painter, and monk, Fra Angelico, as Guido di Pietro (c. 1395-1455) is usually known, rose from a position of comparative obscurity at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a elevated place in the pantheon of Italian painting by its end, with his portrait in mosaic included in the ‘Kensington Valhalla’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He was praised by George Elliot in her novel set in Renaissance Florence, Romola (1862-63), (‘Fra Angelico’s frescoes, delicate as the rainbow on the melting cloud’); admired by artists, notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, and by critics such as John Ruskin, who pronounced that the painter formed ‘a class by himself; he is not an artist properly so-called, but an inspired saint’. For Ruskin the spiritual aspect of art trumped the merely aesthetic and he wrote elsewhere ‘the highest beauty has been attained only once…by a most holy Dominican monk of Fiesole’. Taking its part in this critical and popular cult of the painter this small painting by James Doyle Penrose derives from a passage in Giorgio Vasari’s life of the artist which recounts how he ‘would never take up his brushes without a prayer’, though his specific source for the quotation on the frame is Sir Edward Poynter’s book on Italian painters: ‘Fra Angelico worked without payment . He prayed, before beginning any work for Divine guidance in its conception ...’. Poynter’s text which inspired Penrose continues ‘believing himself to be so assisted, he regarded each picture as a revelation, and could never be persuaded to alter any part of it’ (‘The Art of J.W. Doyle Penrose’, The Windsor Magazine, Vol. 26, 1907; Edward J. Poynter, R.A. and Percy R. Head, Classic and Italian Painting (London, 1880)). Penrose follows Poynter’s text closely, showing the Dominican artist on his knees at prayer looking up for divine inspiration, which the flood of light which bathes him in the gloom of his cell suggests is forthcoming. His palette, already spread with colours, sits on a carved walnut stool, the pigments having been ground in the pestle and mortar on the rough bench, next to which stands the work in progress, a multifigured adoration subject of haloed saints, anachronistically shown as being painted in oil on canvas. The illuminated manuscript in front of the praying saint reminds that Fra Angelico also was as a miniaturist. As a young art student, Penrose would very likely have been aware of the National Gallery of Ireland’s acquisition, in 1886, of a panel, Saints Cosmas and Damian and their Brothers Surviving the Stake, part of the predella of Fra Angelico’s great San Marco altarpiece, commissioned by Cosimo de’Medici (NGI 242, c.1439-1442). A comparable work by Paul-Hipployte Flandrin shows Fra Angelico moved to tears by the frescoed crucifixion which he is in the process of painting (1894, Musée des Beaux Arts de Rouen). Penrose was born at Mitchelstown, Castleknock, County Dublin, in 1862. His father, also James, was a landowner from Ballykean, County Wicklow, and a member of the noted Quaker family of merchants and glass manufacturers who had come to Ireland in 1656 and settled in both Waterford and Cork. The artist’s most illustrious predecessor was Cooper Penrose the enlightened collector and patron of James Barry and Jacques-Louis David. Penrose studied at South Kensington School of Art and at the RA Schools, where he won a silver medal in 1887 and, two years later, began to exhibit. Works shown at the Royal Academy and the RHA illustrate the range of his subject matter, from Teutonic myth to historical subjects. In 1894 he showed the Punishment of Loki, a startling, Promethean image depicting ‘Loki, the Scandinavian personification of Evil’. For the RA exhibition of 1902 Penrose contributed another monastic interior, The Last Chapter, which shows the Venerable Bede dictating the final words of his translation of St John’s Gospel shortly before dying. Other academy exhibits included historical paintings such as Lady Jane Beaufort and King James I of Scotland (RA 1900) and Margaret of Anjou and the Robber (RA 1901), and Old Testament subjects including Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (also RA 1901) and Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert (RHA 1907). In addition to historical subjects and portraits, Penrose also painted landscapes in oil for relaxation while on family holidays. Although he spent almost his entire adult life in England, Penrose identified himself very much as an Irish artist. He was included in the 1888 Irish Exhibition in London and was also represented in Hugh Lane’s 1904 Guildhall exhibition. Even much later, he was included in the 1930 Brussels exhibition of Irish art where he hung side by side with artists working in a modernist idiom, such as Mainie Jellett, who herself had made a rather different tribute to the quattrocento artist in Homage to Fra Angelico (private collection). Penrose was elected ARHA in 1901, a full academician three years later and showed fifty pictures at the annual Dublin shows; the ‘interests of the Academy’, the Council of the RHA believed, ‘were always very close to his heart’. Penrose married Elizabeth Josephine Peckover the daughter of a Quaker banker. The couple had four sons, including Roland who was to become Britain’s leading Surrealist artist, a friend of Picasso and an eminent writer and collector. Both Penrose and his wife were devout in their Quaker faith, Roland Penrose recalled ‘I was born in a cloud smelling strongly of oil paint, honest banking and piety’. Unsurprisingly, Penrose’s beliefs were expressed in his art. His son continues: ‘My father was an academic painter of some talent, but his work always had a moral purpose, more righteous than the works of contemporaries such as Alma-Tadema, Herkomer, Swan and others whose studios he visited’. In addition to the biblical subjects noted above, Penrose painted specifically Quaker themes, notably The Presence in the Midst (1916, Friends’ House, London) which has been described as the ‘crowning exposition of the essence of Quaker worship’, and Penrose’s obituary noted how he had ‘the joy of receiving messages telling of the help and comfort which this picture brought to weary or stricken souls (The Friend, January 15, 1932). No doubt the ‘moral purpose’ that he sought in his art made Far Angelico a sympathetic subject. William Laffan