Indeed, Edwin Henry Landseer’s 1865 Lady Godiva’s Prayer (fig.2) draws this to our attention - the servant holding Godiva’s horse has her eyes tightly balled shut. This is a paradox which besets all works of visual art depicting Godiva. As viewers, we are looking at a forbidden sight, and are immediately positioned as the infamous voyeur 'Peeping Tom', who was unable to resist looking at Godiva's naked body. Yet, according to the Godiva legend, the pre-condition that Godiva remove her clothes was that the townsfolk avert their eyes from her nudity. The painting presents the body of an unclothed pubescent girl for public scrutiny in Coventry's civic art gallery. The Godiva legend has a particular power to make us question our position as viewers. In this short piece, I aim to set out some of the Victorian debates over nudity and spectatorship from which this image emerged.įig.2 Edwin Landseer, Lady Godiva’s Prayer (1865), oil on canvas, 143 x 112 cm, Courtesy Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. But I do think it could be a point of departure for important conversations and interventions about the public responsibility of museums, the representation of women and girls, and the formation of norms and expectations around gender, sexuality and class (given Godiva’s aristocratic position), which is why I've introduced Coventry via a detour to Manchester. I do not think that Collier's Godiva needs to be censored. The painting depicts in profile a slender, unclothed young woman, head down and demurely avoiding eye contact with the viewer, astride a rather bombastic horse. Godiva is one of those images which has become so familiar, such a marker of a well-known story, that its interesting, peculiar and troubling aspects have slipped out of view. It adorns tea towels, mouse mats, book covers and keyrings, and accounts for around 90% of the total reproduction rights requests made to the Herbert. It is the image which greets the viewer on entering the Godiva gallery, a display opened in 2008 to showcase the gallery's unique collection of Godiva imagery. My focus here is not Manchester, nor Waterhouse, but what is perhaps the most iconic image at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry John Collier’s 1898 painting Godiva (fig.1). Understanding and displaying these images to the public today has its challenges, but also huge opportunities for discussion of a range of issues, from the role art plays in legitimising expectations of male and female behaviour, to the history of laws governing the age of consent. Boyce’s intervention sought to draw public attention to these images and the complex issues that surround them. There are, of course, Victorian male nudes - but not in the same volume, and (with important exceptions), these men tend not to be presented as passive, sexually available objects. ![]() Īrt galleries around Britain are full of nineteenth-century images of unclothed women - indeed, girls - painted almost exclusively by men. Instead, it became a news story about censorship, and was deemed a cheap publicity stunt rather than a stimulus for a much-needed debate. Boyce's desire to involve the public in curating, and to raise questions about the ways in which gender, sexuality and race are presented in public galleries were largely overlooked. The temporary removal of Waterhouse's painting caused an outcry. In the blank space left by the painting, the gallery posed a series of questions, and visitors were encouraged to leave post-it notes with ideas about how this image of nude teenage girls ought to be displayed in contemporary Manchester. Manchester Art Gallery, working with contemporary artist Sonia Boyce, temporarily removed John William Waterhouse's painting Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) from display. In January and February 2018, the Victorian nude became a twenty-first-century global news story. ![]() Keywords: John Collier, Godiva, Victorian nude, morality, representationįig.1 John Collier, Godiva (1898), oil on canvas, 142 x 183 cm, Courtesy Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. ![]() Kate NicholsĬollection: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry Download a PDF of this article It sets out new information about the model for the painting and contextualises the image in Victorian debates over nudity in art. Victorian nudes have been in the headlines in 2018: how should we exhibit, study and look at works depicting young women and even girls in sexualised poses? This article examines Coventry's famous painting Godiva by John Collier.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |