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Description: GEORGE FREDERIC WATTS, O.M., R.A. 1817-1904 ALEXANDER CONSTANTINE IONIDES AND HIS WIFE EUTERPE, WITH THEIR CHILDREN CONSTANTINE ALEXANDER, AGLAIA, LUKE AND ALECCO

oil on canvas, unframed

PROVENANCE

Alexander Constantine Ionides; his daughter;
Aglaia Ionides, later Mrs Coronio (1925); by family descent
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Mary Watts, 'MS Catalogue of [the] Works [of George Frederic Watts] compiled by his widow', n.d., III, p. 74;
B.S. Long, Catalogue of the Constantine Alexander Ionides Collection [at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London], 1925, p. 65;
Luke Ionides, Memories, 1925 (reprinted 1996), p. 56;
Mark Evans, 'Blake, Calvert - and Palmer? The album of Alexander Constantine Ionides', Burlington Magazine, CXLIV, September 2002, pp. 539-549;
Veronica Franklin Gould, G.F. Watts - The Last Great Victorian, 2004, p. 8, fig.7 (where reproduced from an early photograph by Frederic Hollyer)
CATALOGUE NOTE

Alexander Constantine Ionides, who commissioned this magnificent group portrait of himself and his family from the still youthful and little known George Frederic Watts, represented the second generation of an Anglo-Greek family who had established as traders in textiles in London early in the century. By the early 1840s, when the painting was made, the Ionides family were well advanced in building the great family fortune which was to allow them to become among the most remarkable of all Victorian patrons of art. The decision to ask Watts to paint the family followed the birth of Alexander Constantine and Euterpe's fourth child Alecco in 1840, but was perhaps also prompted by their move from 9 Finsbury Circus in the city of London, where they had lived close to the Ionides business premises in Gracechurch Street, to a beautiful and richly furnished house at Tulse Hill near Dulwich. That Watts planned the present composition at the Ionides' new house, is established because the preparatory sketch (which exists as part of the Ionides Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum) bears an attached label which states that it was 'painted at Tulse Hill / of Alexander Constantine Ionides / his wife & children by me / G.F. Watts'. This mansion no longer stands, and accounts of its style of decoration and contents are sparse. Nonetheless, the present family portrait by Watts must have been one of its principal ornaments.

The painting shows Alexander Constantine and Euterpe, with their four eldest children - Constantine Alexander (born 1833), Aglaia (born 1834), Luke Alexander (born 1837), and Alexander Alexander (known as Alecco, and who was born in 1840). Aglaia, who was eventually to inherit the painting after her father's death in 1890, is shown as the child who puts her arms around her mother's neck. Alecco, perhaps a year old when the painting was made, sits on his mother's lap. The two boys on the right of the composition are Constantine Alexander and Luke Alexander, the latter seated and offering an apple to his brother. These two figures wear Greek national dress, a motif clearly introduced to demonstrate the pride that the family took in their Greek ancestry and their deliberate identification with all things Hellenic (the costume worn by Constantine Alexander survives in the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh). Three years after Watts had painted the present family portrait Alexander Constantine and Euterpe's last child, a daughter named Chariclea (1844-1923), was born.

The relationship between Alexander Constantine Ionides and George Frederic Watts had commenced when the latter had been asked to make a copy of a portrait by Samuel Lane of Constantine Ipliktzis (Alexander Constantine's father; see below), a work which appeared at the 1837 Royal Academy. The copy was to be shipped to Constantinople to be hung in the family's business premises there. As Alexander Constantine affectionately recalled in a letter to Watts: 'I recollect as if it was yesterday my visit with Mr E. Riley to see a portrait of a little girl that you were painting when he recommended you for copying Lane's portrait of my father. Equally well your visit to my office, when you brought both original and copy, and I said at once to Mr G.F. Cavafy, who was present, that I preferred by far the copy, and that I was going to keep the copy and send the original to Constantinople. This was in the early spring of 1837. That Cavafy was quite startled at the novelty of my preferring a work for which I had paid £10 to one that had cost £63, and seemed quite incredulous' (M.S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, three volumes, 'The Annals of an Artist's Life', I, 1912, p.32). Other opinions of the comparative merits of the original and replica were sought, which confirmed Ionides' view that the copy was a superior work of art to the original.

In the early 1840s, as Watts came to be interested in allegorical themes and as he began to think of large-scale projects that might occupy him over long periods, the artist suggested to Alexander Constantine Ionides that he might be prepared to pay him an annual stipend of £300 which would allow him to devote himself to such work. His entire production would have gone to Ionides, with a work that Watts then had in hand, entitled Aurora the first to be offered on the basis of this proposed arrangement. Ionides agreed to support the artist, but preferred not to be committed in the longer term. In any case, as he explained to Watts, he believed that the painter would become successful enough not to have to rely on any one particular patron.

It does seem that the Ionideses regarded Watts principally as a portrait painter; other commissions for portraits were for a portrait of Mariora Ionides, the mother of Alexander Constantine, which seems to have been conceived as a pendant (although somewhat larger) to Watts's copy of the work by Samuel Lane, done at about the same time as the family portrait (Victoria and Albert Museum). A year or two after the present family portrait was made - presumably after the birth of Chariclea in 1844, Watts was asked to paint a further group composition, on this occasion showing Euterpe Ionides surrounded by her three younger children (untraced), a work that is seen hanging on the staircase in an illustration to an article describing his collection (see Art Journal, 1893, pp.139-44). Then in about 1847 the artist made a double portrait of Alexander Constantine's two sisters, Euphrosyne and Katherine (ex Sotheby's London, 15 July 1987, lot 80), which is a work of the utmost elegance and distinction. A small tondo portrait of Chariclea was painted in 1849 (Phillips London, 17 December 1996, lot 75). In the manuscript catalogue of Watts's work compiled by his widow Mary there are about twenty entries relating to portraits by him of members of the Ionides family, dating from at least four decades and encompassing five generations. In addition to being their most favoured portraitist, he was a central figure in the artistic and literary circle that gathered at their successive homes, and a great friend.

The Ionides family were extraordinary for their open-mindedness and originality of taste, and wonderfully generous in their dealings with painters and in their munificent bequests to public collections. Alexander Constantine Ionides, who was born in 1810, represented the second generation of this most distinguished and remarkable of all Anglo-Greek families of the nineteenth century. The founder of the family, Alexander Constantine's father, was Constantine Ioannou (1775-1852), known by the surname Ipliktzis, who seems to have transferred his business as a trader in textiles from Constantinople to London perhaps because he feared the disruption and danger that was caused by the Greek War of Independence, which broke out in 1821. Alexander Constantine, who was Constantine Ioannou's fourth child, followed his father to England when he was sixteen or seventeen years old, completing his education in London. In due course he was established in business, in partnership with an uncle by marriage Nicolaos Thomas and a brother-in-law John G. Argenti. In 1832 Alexander Constantine married Euterpe Sgouta, the daughter of an ancient but impoverished family living in Constantinople (and who claimed descent from the emperors of Byzantium). A year later Alexander Constantine set up the company Ionides & Co in Manchester, by which time the surname by which the family came to be known in Britain had been officially adopted. In 1836 Alexander Constantine and Euterpe were living in London, with their young family, and in the following year Alexander Constantine became a British subject.

Alexander Constantine's intense interest in and engagement with the arts may be judged by the study of an album of engravings and drawings that he compiled and which has recently been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum (ex Sotheby's London, 16 December 2004, lot 273). Mark Evans has described in his article 'Blake, Calvert - and Palmer? The album of Alexander Constantine Ionides' (Burlington Magazine, CXLIV, 2002, pp.539-49), the prints by William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and Edward Calvert (eleven of the fifteen known images by the artist), along with pencil inscriptions and dates attached to drawings by Alexander Constantine himself which seem deliberately to adopt the style of draughtsmanship of Calvert, which are found in the album. The album provides evidence of Ionides's early involvement with contemporary artists, from a time when he was himself still a schoolboy, probably before the end of the 1820s. Of Ionides's own drawings, Evans has written: 'Notwithstanding their artistic shortcomings [they] demonstrate conclusively that [Alexander Constantine Ionides] was a disciple of Calvert' (Ibid., p. 547). In his explanation of how Calvert and the youthful Ionides got to know each other and what it was that they admired in one another, Evans makes the point that, 'although eleven years older than Ionides, [Calvert] would have been predisposed to take an interest in a native representative of the Hellenic culture that he so fervently admired' (ibid.). In his discussion of the Ionides album, Mark Evans concludes by saying that it links 'the mystic universalism of Blake and the "Ancients" with the revival of Hellenism, and the cultural milieu of Whistler' (ibid., p.549).

In his close friendship with Alexander Constantine, and as a mentor to the family's next generation, Watts had the opportunity to guide their taste and extend the range of their artistic contacts. This he did with the utmost generosity and open-mindedness. To give just one example of Watts's advocacy of works by younger artists, it was his praise of Whistler's At the Piano (The Taft Museum, Cincinatti), which was refused at the Paris Salon in 1859 and then shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1860 - the first work by the artist to be shown in England, which led to Alexander Constantine's commissioning a portrait of Luke Ionides and his purchase of the great nocturne Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (Tate Gallery, London). The patronage of the Ionides family, and other members of the Anglo-Greek community, seems to have been a critical factor in Whistler's decision to settle in London in the early 1860s.

In 1864 Alexander Constantine Ionides moved from Tulse Hill to a newly built house at 1 Holland Park, reputedly - and because of financial difficulties caused by a downturn in trade - using his wife's fabulous diamonds as a down payment on the freehold. This move meant that the Ionides family were central figures from the very start in the establishment of Holland Park as a location favoured by artists and art collectors, with Watts himself, Frederic Leighton, Valentine Prinsep, and many other painters, architects and illustrators among their neighbours.

Of the third generation of the Ionides family, the boys - Constantine Alexander, Luke Alexander, and Alecco - all followed their father into commerce, but each also carried forward the family's interest in the arts. Constantine represented the Ionides companies in Manchester and later in Bucharest and Constantinople. Eventually he entered the London stock exchange, where he did extremely well. Of all the members of the Ionides family, Constantine was the one who collected on the grandest scale, relying on the advice of Alphonse Legros. His collection eventually consisted of old masters, works by contemporary French painters including masterpieces by Degas, Delacroix, Millet and Daumier, and sculptures by Dalou and Rodin. These hung with works by Rossetti and Burne-Jones (but none by Whistler as by then the American and Legros had fallen out). The Constantine Ionides collection was bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum at his death in 1900. The younger brothers Alecco and Luke Ionides were sent to study in Paris, where in the second half of the 1850s they came into contact with Whistler, Edward John Poynter and George Du Maurier. Alecco was famously characterised as 'the Greek' in Du Maurier's novel Trilby, and was described as 'a boy of only sixteen, but six feet high, and looking ten years older than he was... He was the capitalist of this select circle (and notably lavish of this capital)'. Alecco was to be a patron of Whistler, Rossetti and Watts, and was the pioneering collector of Hellenistic sculpture who seems to have led the cult interest in Tanagra figurines which swept through the Aesthetic circle in the 1870s. He took over the parents' house in Holland Park after their move to Hastings in 1875. Luke's interest in painting was maintained in adult life, as he was an amateur artist himself and formed a close friendship with Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones. In 1925 he published a volume of reminiscences, entitled Memories, in which he described the writers, composers and painters that he had known. The three Ionides boys inherited or were given works of art from their father's collection, but did not receive money from him. Everything that Alexander Constantine had when he died he left to his widow and his daughters, believing that 'dead man's money' was a curse and a disincentive to enterprise and effort.

Aglaia, who grew up to be a great beauty and who was a woman of artistic sensibility, married Theodore Coronio, a fellow-member of the Anglo-Greek business community. She was painted by Burne-Jones, most notably appearing as one of the dancing figures in the great figurative landscape The Mill (the other two girls are Maria Zambaco and Marie Spartali), a work which belonged to her brother Constantine and which is now part of the Ionides collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In addition she helped Burne-Jones by recommending other models, and by finding fabrics and other materials that he needed to introduce to his paintings. She was also a close friend of William Morris. Chariclea, the youngest child who was not yet born when Watts painted the present work, married the musician and conductor Edward Dannreuther. All lived in beautiful houses, stored with marvellous objects of contemporary and historical art. Constantine, Alecco, and Chariclea all employed Philip Webb.

The present full scale and final version of Watts's portrait of the Ionides family was referred to in the catalogue entry for the related preparatory sketch in the Victoria & Albert Museum in B.S. Long's catalogue of the Ionides collection, published in 1925 (see bibliography). From that time to the present, the work has been untraced (although the preparatory sketch has been reproduced in various printed sources). The re-emergence of such a fine and important painting from the early stages of a most beneficent artistic friendship between one of the great patrons of the nineteenth-century art and one of the most distinguished of all Victorian painters is a most exciting event.

CSN

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Dimensions: 153 by 184 1/2 cm. ; 60 1/4 by 72 1/2 in.