John Liston Byam Shaw, A.R.W.S., R.I. (British, 1872-1919)
"LOVE THE CONQUEROR"
signed and dated 1899
70 x 99 cm
Framed original signed Pre-Raphaelite engraving by the original artist after his painting.
Rex Vicat Cole in his biography "The Art & Life of Byam Shaw" described the painting's allegorical subject: "The World, represented by a walled city, has capitulated to Love the Conqueror astride his horse. His soldiers-Youth and Beauty-who won his battles; those who had been wounded, those who had been captured, and those who had died in the fight with him. Little Cupid more powerful than the great ones in history. Rich and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the successful and the unfortunate, all coming under his sway."
Our engraving includes a legend identifying all one hundred and seven figures in this image. The procession of figures is led by the draped figure of Venus. Among the supporters of Cupid are warriors which are identified by arm-bands as personifications of "Youth" and "Jealousy", and trumpeters with banners lettered with the words "Lust" and "Purity". Led by Venus the procession includes: Cleopatra, Faust, Michael Angelo, Fra Lippo, Andrea del Sarto, Flora Macdonald, Touchstone, Henry I, Richard II, Arthur, Launcelot, Guinevere, Elaine, Paris, Helen, Beatrice, Benedict, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tannhauser, Rosalind, Hamlet, Isabella, Goethe, Titania, Bottom, Paolo, Francesca, Romeo, Juliet, Dante, Fair Rosamond, Claudio, Isabella, Leander, Ophelia, Lorenzo, Messalina, Marguerite, Don Carlos, Rizzio, Pizarro, Lohengrin and Byam Shaw himself.
"Love the Conqueror" is a monumental oil on canvas painting (74 x 126 inches). Completed in 1899 it was bought by Shaw's dealers Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell for £1,000. However the popularity of of pre-Raphaelite art declined rapidly in the following years. When Shaw's dealers, Dowdeswell's, went into liquidation in 1917 the painting was bought for only 42 guineas . Renewed public Interest in pre-Raphaelite art developed in the 1980s and 1990s culminating in the purchase of major works at record prices by celebrity collectors. The painting Love the Conqueror was most recently offered for sale at Sotheby's New York in 1999 where it was estimated at 1 to 1.5 million dollars.
Byam Shaw had been strongly influenced by Pre-Raphaelite painting from the start of his career, particularly the work of John William Waterhouse. Shaw was born in India where his father was a legal official. The family returned to England in 1878 or 1879. From 1880 he was tutored by J. A. Vintner, until 1887 when his father died. His mother, keen for Byam Shaw to continue painting , arranged for him to be taken to see John Millais, who advised that the young man should immediately start working towards a studentship at the Royal Academy Schools. To this end, he studied at St John's Wood School for two years, and was then able to enter the Academy Schools in 1890. He studied there until 1892, and then shared a studio with the artist Gerald Metcalfe. Later, together with Vicat Cole, he founded the Byam Shaw school of art in Kensington where his close friend Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale later taught.
Throughout his career, Byam Shaw regarded painting as a means of poetic story-telling and allegory, and it was for this quality that his works (and his book illustrations) were on the one hand admired and on the other provoked controversy. He had been powerfully influenced by Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting; one of his first exhibited paintings was inspired by lines of poetry by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As Percy Bate wrote in his pioneering study of Pre-Raphaelitism as a broad movement, The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, issued in the same year that Byam Shaw painted Love the Conqueror: "The artistic career of [Byam Shaw], although as yet brief, is very interesting from the fact that his love of Rossetti's achievements, both poetic and artistic, seems to have carried him up the stream of that painter's style to the earliest Pre-Raphaelite days. ...The artist shows an intense desire to express his theme clearly, with a distinct preference for subjects of high poetic order; and he displays a technical accomplishment and a daring in the use of pure colour... that are remarkable in the work of so young a painter."
Byam Shaw exhibited widely, but became particularly associated with the firm of dealers- Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell, owners of the original painting who also staged a series of exhibitions of his works on specific themes, such as The Bible Book of Ecclesiastes (1902) and Percy's Reliques (1908). Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell issued the photogravure offered here. Love the Conqueror was clearly regarded as one of Byam Shaw's most important and ambitious paintings and elicited critical responses which ranged from the laudatory (such as that given by the Morning Post: "The originality of the design and the Holbein-like force with which the conception is carried out, alike claim admiration... a brilliant achievement") to the confused and contradictory. Although Byam Shaw exhibited widely in the last decade of the nineteenth century and through to the time of his death at the age of forty-six in 1919, he was given little encouragement by the contemporary art associations, particularly the Royal Academy, to which he was disappointed never to be elected.
References:
SOTHEBY'S IMPORTANT 19TH
CENTURY EUROPEAN PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE
New York 3 November 1999
Rex Vicat Cole, The Art & Life of Byam Shaw, London, 1932, pp. 91-104
