Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927) (40 works)

Разрешение картинок от 326x421 до 3369x4560px

Marie Spartali Stillman (10 March 1844 – 6 March 1927) was a British painter and model.

Mary was born in Middlesex to Michael Spartali, an import and export merchant and Greek consul in London. The family knew Maria Zambaco (wife of the artist Edward Burne-Jones). Michael Spartali was a member of the Greek cultural community in London, whose chairman was Constantine Ionidis.
At their country house in Clareham, Spartali and his wife (née Euphrosine Warsami) gathered around them a large and cosmopolitan group of artists and musicians.
Here Mary grew up in an atmosphere of international culture.
In her youth, she was introduced to the circle of Pre-Raphaelite artists, thanks to the Ionidis family, known for their patronage of the arts and Pre-Raphaelite art.
The artist Swinburne described her as "so beautiful that I want to sit down and scream." She posed mainly for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but also for Edward Burne-Jones and Whistler.
During the 1860s she was photographed several times by Julia Margaret Cameron.
From 1864, for five or six years, Spartali was a student of Ford Madox Brown, working in his studio with his daughters Catherine and Lucy, who also aspired to become artists.
In 1871, she married, against the wishes of her family, the American journalist and amateur artist William James Stillman, who had collaborated with the Times newspaper for many years. The Spartali family was against the marriage, since Stillman was a widower with three children in his arms.
They had three more children, one of whom died in infancy. Her daughter Euphrosine (Effie) became an artist, as did her stepdaughter Lisa Stillman, and her son Michael became an architect and settled in America, where his retrospective shows were held in 1908 and 1982.
Her husband, as a newspaper correspondent, was sent to Italy in 1878, and the family settled first in Florence and then in Rome, where they lived until 1898.
Despite her long residence abroad, Spartali exhibited regularly at the Grosvenor Gallery from 1877 to 1887, and at the New Gallery in the eastern United States.
She painted primarily in watercolors, creating a density of color similar to oil painting. She was influenced by Rossetti's work and painted many copies of his watercolor works. Like him, she depicted women at leisure in idyllic interiors or chose themes from medieval literature, such as the Italians Boccaccio and Dante, and the English Sir Tristram and La Belle Iseult.
Her heritage also includes Italian landscapes and floral still lifes.
She died aged 84 in Great Britain in 1927.