A Turning of the Grand Canal

Signed Studd, c. 1904-5
Oil on canvas: 77 x 51 cm

Arthur Haythorne Studd (1863-1919)

Arthur Haythorne Studd was born the fourth son of Edward and Dorothy Studd, at Hallerton Hall in Leicestershire on November 19^th, 1863. Edward descended from a Suffolk family traceable back to the 15^th Century, and had made his fortune as a jute and indigo planter in the Bihar region of India. After Arthur’s birth, his father moved the family to Tedworth in Wiltshire where he rented Tedworth House. Edward, both a keen huntsman and horse-racing enthusiast created a stable of twenty racehorses and built a racetrack at their new home. In 1866 he added to his wealth by winning the Grand National with his horse Salamander, ridden by Alec Goodman and backing the horse to win at odds of 40-1; his confident bet of £1,000 returned the huge sum of £40,000.  Following Edward’s untimely death in 1877, Arthur inherited a great fortune, which would sustain him comfortably for the rest of his life.

Arthur and his brothers were schooled at Eton College and went on to study at Cambridge University. Arthur left Eton in 1883, and went up to Kings College, Cambridge in October 1884. He quickly became a member of the Cambridge Fine Arts Society, attending James Whistler’s influential “Ten O’Clock Lecture” given at the Theatre Royal, Cambridge on 11^th March 1885. Amongst his fellow students at Kings College was artist and art historian Roger Fry. Studd went on to attain Third Class honours in Historical Tripos in 1887.  A year later, at the age of 25, Studd entered the Slade School of Fine Art in London where he made friends with fellow students William Rothenstein and Alfred Thornton. Thornton was later to remember that, “Studd was vague, and to all appearance gentle, but a short acquaintance revealed qualities which influenced friends with talents far exceeding his own.” [1]

Having found the atmosphere of the Slade too dilettante, Studd and his colleagues decided to leave, enrolling in the Academy Julian in Paris the following year. Studd took up residence in the Hotel de France et de Lorraine. Rothenstein, who also followed Studd to Paris, wrote of his friend “Although several years older than I, he had preserved a delightful child-like nature, an affectionate simplicity, which endeared him to everyone … His manners were frank and unconventional, with an engaging diffidence …  Much better off than most of us, he occupied two of the largest and best furnished rooms in the hotel, and his sitting-room served as a sort of common-room for us all.” [2] Herbert Fisher, another guest at the hotel, recalled,“Among my fellow lodgers was A.H. Studd (known as Peter)…Peter was already known to me. He was the most diffident and delightful of men …  That he was gifted beyond the ordinary was made evident when he tried his hand at an original composition in oils.” [3]

L’Academie Julian was the second largest and most renowned of the Paris art schools after les Beaux Arts. It not only offered an excellent education in fine arts, but also provided innumerable opportunities for students to engage with the turn of the century avant-garde art scene, such as the Paris Exhibition of 1889, which showcased exceptional works of Impressionist art. Studd arrived at the Academy Julian at a time of changing influence within the Parisian art-world. The work of the Impressionists appeared to have limited influence on the students at the Academy Julian. However, a mildly rebellious group labelled Les Nabis, was being formed around a small number of young Academy artists, disaffected by its conservative teaching, who now followed the lead of Paul Serusier in acknowledging the work of Paul Gauguin.

In 1892 Studd exhibited at the New English Art Club, a group that had first formed in 1886 as a rebuttal to the teaching at the Royal Academy schools. Amongst its members were Thomas Kennington, Frank Bramley, Fred Brown, Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, Philip Wilson Steer, Robert Bevan, George Clausen and Stanhope Forbes. However, by 1889 Steer had moved away from the group, which by then had become dominated by George Clausen and Stanhope-Forbes, in order to ally himself more closely with Walter Sickert and the London Impressionists, known as “Les Jaunes”. This group held an exhibition at the Goupil Galleries that opened in December 1889. Steer maintained that a true impressionist was “a poet and not a journalist, and was not destined simply to record the facts.” For these artists the “unity of effect was valued above painstaking elaboration of detail.”[4] Steer was appointed a teacher of painting at the Slade by Fed Brown in 1893, a post he held until 1930, and from 1898 he became a close neighbour of Studd on Cheyne Walk.

In June of 1890, Studd travelled with his friends, including Alfred Thornton, to Le Pouldu in Brittany, where Gauguin had moved to from the nearby village of Pont-Aven. Gauguin had found Pont-Aven, where he had first stayed in 1886, to be too crowded with artists and tourists and so had chosen le Poldu when he, along with his new follower and patron Jacob Meyer de Haan, returned in 1889. There can be little doubt that Studd and his friends met Gauguin during this time and that Studd would have been aware of his plan to travel the following year to stay on the island of Tahiti. It is from this period that Studd’s first surviving works, some small oil-sketches on panel and drawings on brown paper date, and which show that he had studied Gauguin’s work. Upon his return to Paris in 1891, Studd moved to Montmartre where he met and befriended the Australian artist Charles Conder, who had arrived in Paris the year before to enrol in the Academie Julian, and was sharing a studio with Rothenstein. Studd also lived near, and almost certainly became acquainted with, Edgar Degas, Alfred Stevens and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Studd acquired two works by de Chavennes, and in 1892 he also bought work by Claude Monet. Studd was to return to le Poldu, where in 1891 he had taken lease of a small cottage, as described by Alfred Thornton, “Studd had taken a charming little white-walled house with pale blue shutters, on Laita (the River Laita) at the horse ferry”.[5]

It was in Paris in 1892 when Studd first formally met James McNeill Whistler, who would not only become a life-long friend, but also one of Studd’s most influential mentors. Between 1893 and 1896 Studd acquired three important paintings by Whistler, buying “Symphony in White, No.2” (1864) and “Nocturne, Blue and Silver, Cremorne Lights” (1874) from John Gerald Potter for a sum of £1,400, and in 1896 he bought “Nocturne, Black and Gold, The Fire Wheel” (1875) for £1,000. Despite reputedly being offered the sum of £250,000 by the Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer in 1905 for these important paintings, Studd bequeathed them to the National Gallery of Art in London. They are now held in the collections of Tate Britain. Both Studd and Whistler relocated to London in 1894, moving into neighbouring houses on the fashionable Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. In November 1895, Studd accompanied Whistler to Lyme Regis to study alongside the great master, and as a result, significantly developed his artistic technique and style. Rothenstein once commented upon Whistler’s influence on Studd: “Before he met Whistler, there was a genuinely naïve and primitive element in Studd’s painting.” [6]

In March of 1896 Studd had his first one-man exhibition of paintings, pastels, drawings and etchings of views in Brittany and Spain at the Goupil Galleries in London. In February 1897, Studd accompanied by his younger brother journeyed to the South Seas, visiting Tahiti, where he remained for a year, then Samoa, Australia and New Zealand. Whistler later suggested that wealthy American artist John LaFarge encouraged Studd to visit Tahiti. LaFarge stayed on the island in 1890 when travelling in the South Seas with his friend Henry Brooks Adams. Paul Gauguin had first stayed on the island of Tahiti between 1891 and 1893, living in the south of the island. He returned to France but left again for Tahiti in 1895 and never returned home. It is quite likely that Studd would have met with Gauguin again on his return to le Poldu in 1894, and have heard his account of life on the remote Polynesian island. After his arrival in Tahiti in mid May, Studd wrote to Whistler, encouraging him to join him in Tahiti. It was Studd’s wish, as he declared in a letter to Whistler dated the 22^nd of June 1897, to establish a ‘Studio of the South Seas.’ Studd was still away in 1898, but returned to London in time to exhibit his new work at the exhibition of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers in the summer of 1899.

Between 1899 and 1906 Studd spent a significant amount of time in Venice producing paintings that many critics regard as his best work. The Illustrated London News of June 2^nd 1906 contains a review of Studd’s one-man exhibition at the Baillie Gallery, London, greatly praising his Venetian paintings.  In March 1907 he was given a solo-show at the Bernheim Gallery in Paris that attracted many plaudits from the press, which acknowledged Studd’s artistic debt to Whistler whilst commenting on his ability to produce strikingly individual views of Venice. The exhibition then continued on to the Del Vechio Gallery in Leipzig in May and from there to the Kunstsalon Emil Richter in Dresden. By late 1906 Studd produced a limited edition, small folio of nineteen photographs of a number of his paintings, mostly those of Venice with some portraits, which were given to friends and relatives.[7]

A Turning in the Grand Canal may be regarded as one of the most significant paintings ever produced by Studd, not only for its exceptional quality, but also for its size, which is much larger than most of his other works. The painting is signed and further inscribed verso:

Ma   *im Exhibition International
Un Coin du Grand Canal Venise
by Arthur Studd 97 Cheyne Walk London
Price 2500 francs  – 100£

Selected for display in the International Art Exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1907, this painting hung amongst works by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Whistler, Brangwyn, Klimt and many others, and was sold shortly thereafter. Whilst showing the influence of Whistler, most notably in its upright shape, the present work may be considered to owe something to the palette of George Clausen, and more to the style and teachings of Philip Wilson Steer with a smaller reference to Walter Sickert.

The fact that this painting along with a portrait by Studd were selected for display in the Mannheim International Art Exhibition of 1907 demonstrates not only the artistic importance of the work, but also emphasizes the significant regard with which Studd was viewed as a painter. The exhibition was developed for the 300^th year jubilee celebrations of the foundation of the city of Mannheim, and it was one of the first international art exhibitions of its kind in Germany. Curator Rudolf Adelbert Meyer especially sought to exhibit modern French art, highlighting the work of the Impressionists, as a means of presenting Mannheim as a European cultural capital.

Studd’s last major one-man exhibition occurred at the Alpine Gallery in London in June 1911, and displayed a variety of paintings from his entire oeuvre. On January 25^th, 1919, Studd died from pneumonia at the age of 55. He was described as a self-sufficient but somewhat melancholy and introspective character. Due to his inherited wealth, Studd never needed to work to support himself, and could thus devote his time to art without depending upon it. Although Tate Britain owns a small number of paintings by Studd, his contribution to modern British Art has yet to be fully appreciated.