FAMAG 2010.29
A nineteenth-century British ?Alma-Tadema? reverse frame with deeply canted outer edge, reeded bevel to sight and inner slip; finished in matt and burnished water gilding; supplied by Paul Mitchell Limited. A nineteenth-century British ?Alma-Tadema? reverse frame with deeply canted outer edge, reeded bevel to sight and inner slip; finished in matt and burnished water gilding; supplied by Paul Mitchell Limited.
About this work
view without frame
Gotch, Thomas Cooper RBA RI RP (1854-1931): Innocence, 1904, signed, watercolour, 23 x 19 cms. Purchased with funding from The Art Fund, Falmouth Decorative Fine Arts Society, Dr Pam Lomax and Ron Hogg, Jacqueline and Richard Worswick (in memory of their daughter, Helen), and local funding.
More information about the frame
The triangular section frame was developed by D.G. Rossetti for his small icon-like portraits of women in the 1860s. It was related to the geometric frames he and Ford Madox Brown had designed, and Rossetti decorated it with semi-circular indentations, causing it to be known as his ?thumb mark? pattern. Brown used the deeply canted outer moulding as part of his own frames, and this version seems to have been picked up by Laurence Alma-Tadema (see A priestess of Apollo, c.1888, Tate Gallery; The triumph of Titus, 1881, Baltimore Museum of Fine Art). Alma-Tadema uses the canted, stepped plane seen on the frame of Gotch?s work, with a stepped inner moulding and mount or slip; however, he decorates the outer plane with a run of painted black/gold triangles, which echo the profile and pick up the Classical exoticism of his subjects.
Minus the painted decoration, the frame was adopted by artists such as Frank Dicksee, Sydney Prior Hall, Arthur Smith, Frank Cadogan Cowper and by members of the Newlyn School, notably Stanhope Forbes and Henry Scott Tuke.
Thomas Gotch himself used a related moulding on The lady in gold: Mrs John Crook (Christie?s, 4 November 1994); because of this, and because of his connection with the Newlyn School, this seemed the ideal model for Paul Mitchell Limited to reproduce for Innocence, replacing a narrow flat gold frame which deprived the work of all substance and importance. This frame acts instead like a Baroque bolection moulding, projecting the painting towards the spectator.