Not much I guess. Unless it’s yours! And I remember well… the day I stumbled upon the existence of a man who once, long ago shared my name… (as well as my love for the watercolour medium!)
Intrigued? Well… so was I!
When I was younger I used to daydream about my heritage…. and as a fourth generation Aussie descended (on my father’s side) from Scottish immigrants to this wide brown land… have even (okay maybe only once or twice *wink*) romanticised the notion that I may have been related… somewhere way back… to someone important! Okay… who hasn’t? (chuckles)
Back then I used to wonder about which branch of the family we might have been descended from.
My father was a silent man who never spoke of family… it was only recently we discovered the existence of not one but five great aunts (all of them… now long since gone and silent as the grave!) Okay – way off track now…
So was it Herman’s (Moby Dick) branch of the family… or was it the Lord with the ancestral seat near Edinburgh? Hahaha… truth is… probably neither! But surely we had to be related to someone!
And so it was into this mood of wishing to belong to “someone somewhere” that the unwitting Arthur Melville inadvertently stepped… poor man *wink* No-one could have been more surprised and delighted to learn… just a few years ago… about a man I’d never even heard of before… an artist no less… and not just any old artist… but one who had been one of the greatest and least known watermedia artists of his time!
Surely I could be related to him…oh please!? ~laughs~
Incidentally… Elinor shares his name too (that probably make us sisters)… hers being a middle name… and mine being my maiden surname!
Okay… here’s the skinny.
Arthur Melville lived at the turn of the 19th century (1855 – 1904) at the height of the Impressionist movement…
But he was not one of them!
He was labelled an Orientalist as many of the Impressionists of the day (who painted in the near and middle east) were…
but he wasn’t entirely one of them either!
Stephen Quiller in his 2004 article for The Artist’s Magazine described Melville as one of the greatest yet “least known” watermedia masters of all time”. His loose style could easily have been mistaken for Impressionism… but in truth Arthur Melville leaned more toward the Glasgow Boys (although he was never one of them) than either French or American Impressionism! No… it appears that Arthur Melville was a leader not a follower… and very different to them all.
Born in Scotland… during his early years he travelled to Paris where he was introduced to Impressionism.
TECHNIQUE: Around this time he developed what later became known as the “blotchesse” technique which entailed soaking his watercolour paper and then saturating it with Chinese White. The paper was then stretched and dried… giving a surface which could easily be scrubbed back and reworked back to the paper beneath. This process… innovative at the time… gave great atmosphere to his paintings. Quiller remarked “looking at Bravo Toro you can smell the dust and hear the crowd!”
He travelled extensively around the Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea… drawing inspiration there for now famous works which hang in galleries such as The Tate in London and the Victoria and Albert Museum in England… where Bravo Toro (watercolour 22 x 30) now hangs.
His watercolours were not small and intimate but rather bold and expressive and considered quite radical for the times.
Quiller points out how for this reason “Melville’s works were often “skyed” or placed out of eyeline at national exhibitions” (Some things never change! LOL)
He befriended John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler somewhere along the way and served together with Whistler on the hanging Committee of the Walker Art Gallery. In a letter to his beloved Beatrix (Chinkey)… Whistler remarked:
“I get on well with Melville… well indeed I could not have got on without him!”
And so it was that Arthur Melville was a man ahead of his time… but although he enjoyed moderate success during his lifetime… he was never fully appreciated… much less understood. Why does this not surprise me? (slap… ooo ouch… that hurt!)
And the reasons for his lack of acknowledgment were simple. He was at the heart of it a modest man… and nowhere near flamboyant enough in his persona to ensure his own immortality. He took no mistresses… he hadn’t escaped to the South Seas… and hadn’t gotten around to cutting off an ear by the time he died suddenly from typhoid… on the verge of his artistic prime!
Sadly… while his work embodied the spirit of the coming age… it “apparently” lacked the blatancy that would attract the criticism to support it. In short… critics of the day either missed the point… or couldn’t figure it out!
The thought occurs to me… that perhaps this may have been different had he the chance to live a little longer!
Sadly for me… I will never get to meet him. And the truth is… I more than likely share no blood connection to this man who shared my name once long ago.
But it was fun getting to know him… and making the discovery that we have at least two things in common… a love of the watercolour medium… and a healthy disrespect for the conventional way!
That’s more than good enough for me… *wink*
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Artwork Copyright 2007 Jean Burman 
