🖌️🎨Maria Spartali Stillman - woman, model, artist. (35)

 🖌️🎨Maria Spartali Stillman - woman, model, artist.

 Marie Euphrosyne Spartali-Stillman (eng. Marie Euphrosyne Spartali-Stillman); 1844-1927) - British Pre-Raphaelite artist of Greek origin, representative of the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites were convinced that art has a social responsibility.

Style: romanticism

A student of Ford Brown, she had excellent technique and a sense of color. The themes of many of her paintings were inspired by historical and literary subjects of the Renaissance. One of the few professional English artists of her time, Maria Spartali regularly exhibited alongside men and successfully sold her paintings on both sides of the ocean. During her creative career, the artist has created more than 170 works, located in galleries in the UK and the USA.

She was one of the favorite models of the Pre-Raphaelites - George Frederick Watts, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones.

Maria Spartali was the youngest daughter of Michael Spartali (1818–1914), a wealthy merchant, head of the firm Spartali & Co and Greek Consul General in London from 1866–1882. He moved to London around 1828. In London he married Euphrosyne (known as Effie, née Varsami, 1842–1913), the daughter of a Greek merchant from Genoa.

The family lived in a Georgian house on Clapham Common, known as "The Shrubbery", with a huge garden and views of the Thames and Chelsea. They spent the summer months at their home on the Isle of Wight, where Mary's father developed grape cultivation on his lands. In London, Mikhail Spartali often held garden parties, where he invited promising young writers and artists.

Maria Spartali and her cousins, Maria Zambaco and Aglaia Coronio, were together known among friends as the "Three Graces" after the three Charites of Greek mythology, Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia, as all three were famous beauties of Greek descent.

In the house of the Greek entrepreneur A. K. Ionides (1810-1890), Maria and her sister Christina (1846-1884) first met Whistler and Swinburne. Swinburne was so impressed that he said of Spartali: “She is so beautiful that I want to sit down and cry.” Maria's appearance was impressive: her height was about 190 cm, in later years she dressed in long, flowing black robes with a lace hood, attracting a lot of attention.

For several years, beginning in 1864, Spartali studied with Ford Madox Brown along with his children Lucy, Catherine and Oliver. Rossetti, having heard that she had become Brown's student, wrote to him on April 24, 1864: “I have just heard that Miss Spartali will be your student. I also heard that this is the same amazing beauty that people talk about so much. So hide her and don’t show her to anyone, I want her to pose for me first.”

Maria first posed for Rossetti in 1867. On 14 August he wrote to Jane Morris: “I find her head the most difficult I have ever drawn. It depends not so much on the form as on the subtle charm of life, which cannot be recreated.”

She posed for artists Brown, Burne-Jones (The Mill), Rossetti (The Vision of Fiammetta, The Vision of Dante, The Arbor in the Meadow), Spencer-Stanhope, and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

In 1871, against the wishes of her parents, Maria Spartali married the American journalist and artist William James Stillman. Maria was his second wife, the first having committed suicide two years earlier. The couple posed together for Rossetti, but it is not known for sure whether this was their first meeting. Stillman worked for the American magazine The Crayonne, and later as a foreign correspondent for The Times. Because of his work as a foreign correspondent, the couple divided their time between London and Florence from 1878 to 1883, and then Rome from 1889 to 1896. Mary also traveled to America and was the only British Pre-Raphaelite artist to work in the United States. The couple had three children.

Maria's own daughter Euphrosyne (Effie) and stepdaughter Lisa became artists. Her son Michael became an architect.

The themes of Spartali Stillman's paintings are typical of the Pre-Raphaelites: female figures, scenes from Shakespeare, Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio, and Italian landscapes. Her exhibitions were held at the Dudley Gallery, the Grosvenor Gallery and its successor, The New Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, and numerous galleries in the eastern United States, including the World's Fair in Philadelphia in 1876. In 1982, a retrospective showing of her work was presented in the United States.

Maria Spartali Stillman died in March 1927 in South Kensington and was cremated in Brookwood Cemetery, where she was buried with her husband.

Sources: WikiArt; wikipedia; Arthive; Wikimedia Commons; paintingondemand.art.