Lady Godiva | |
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Godiva | |
Artist | John Collier |
Year | 1897 |
Medium | Oil painting on canvas |
Dimensions | 142.2 cm (56.0 in) × 183 cm (72 in) |
Location | Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry |
Accession No. | VA.1974.0048 |
Identifiers | Art UK artwork ID: godiva-55279 |
Lady Godiva is an 1897 oil-on-canvas painting by English artist John Collier, [1] who worked in the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The portrayal of Lady Godiva and her well-known but apocryphal ride through Coventry, England, is held in Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. [2]
Lady Godiva was bequeathed by social reformer Thomas Hancock Nunn. When he died in 1937, the painting was offered to the Corporation of Hampstead. He specified in his will that should his bequest be refused by Hampstead, the painting was then to be offered to Coventry. [3] The model in the painting is Mab (Mabel) Paul, an artist model and West End theatre actress who was also painted as herself by John Collier.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" partly modelled on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.
Lady Godiva, in Old English Godgifu, was a late Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who is relatively well documented as the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and a patron of various churches and monasteries.
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John Maler Collier was a British painter and writer. He painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style, and was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. Both of his marriages were to daughters of Thomas Henry Huxley. He was educated at Eton College, and he studied painting in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and at the Munich Academy starting in 1875.
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