Beschreibung:

Alice Mary Havers (British, 1850-1890)Contemplation
signed 'A Havers' (lower left)
oil on canvas
127 x 81.3cm (50 x 32in).FootnotesProvenance
With Thos. Agnew & Sons, Manchester.
With Pyms Gallery, London.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above).
When Alice Havers died of an accidental morphia overdose in 1890, aged only forty years old, more was made of this abrupt, tragic end, linked to her status as a divorced woman than of her art. In her resultant obituaries, journalistic opinion swayed between describing her manner of dress, her mental health, only turning occasionally to the popularity of her art. Despite the seemingly gentle and traditional scope of her art, the life and career of Alice Havers, also known as Mrs Frederick Morgan, resonates with the fate of modern, creative women today.
Alice Mary Celestine Havers was born on 19th May 1850. The Havers family lived at Thelton Hall in Norfolk, their ancestral home, built in the 16th century. Alice's father, Thomas Havers (1810-1870), relocated his family to the Falkland Islands in 1854, taking work as manager of the Falkland Island Company, then moving his family to Uruguay. Thomas Havers apparently had artistic aspirations himself, planning a series of pieces based on the flora and fauna of the islands and it is assumed he encouraged his daughter's talent.1 For source material far from home, Alice copied pictures from the Illustrated London News and the Graphic as her way of developing her artistic skills (Atlanta, Volume 4, 1890).
After Thomas Havers' death in 1870, Alice returned to England with her siblings. She enrolled at the South Kensington Art School where her work earned her a free scholarship. She married fellow artist Frederick Morgan in April 1872 yet maintained her maiden name professionally. The couple had three children, including artist Valentine Havers (1873-1912), who tellingly used his mother's name professionally. Despite the pressures of motherhood, Alice continued to work and exhibit to some modest acclaim, including Ought and Carry One (1874), a profile of a schoolgirl working on a sum, which was bought from the Royal Academy by Queen Victoria. Coupled with this, Alice illustrated books, including the romantic novels of her sister Dorothy Boulger (1846-1923), becoming known for her spirited and expressive illustrations.
The Gentlewoman magazine in September 1890 commented on Alice's work as being 'graceful, delicate, almost ethereal...She never painted anything large or very ambitious in design or colouring...it was [beauty] proceeding from purity of soul, and the outward expression of the artistic thoughts and ideas treasured up in her heart'.2 Her output bustled with images of idyllic, industrious female rural lives; groups of picturesque peasant girls washing clothes, gathering flowers or just pausing in woodland or by streams. Such public-pleasing images became coloured plates, sold for domestic display and securing her reputation as a popular, accessible artist, not to mention providing an income to her household that would have easily rivalled, if not exceeded, that of her husband.
Throughout these years, Alice was contending with an abusive homelife. Frederick Morgan had conducted affairs from the year after Valentine was born until Alice filed for divorce in 1889. The marriage was violent; her sister Dorothy once took the place of her sister at a dinner party after Alice was too badly beaten to attend. It is possibly unsurprising therefore that alongside the pastoral idylls, Alice occasionally exhibited more poignant, darker paintings such as End of her Journey (1875), depicting a woman dying by the roadside, and Trouble (1885), showing a mother holding her cadaverous child la pietà, while stoically instructing her other children, within a dingy room with the grey-washed city visible through the slanting windows. When Trouble was exhibited with the Society of Lady Artists, it was praised in the way Alice 'treats the domestic sorrows of humble life with touching tenderness of sentiment.' The common thread through these works is the condition of female existence in a perfect world, sometimes in harmony, sometimes at odds.
The present painting hangs between the idyllic and the pensive. A beautiful peasant girl carrying a bundle pauses by a stream in a woodland. Beyond the screen of trees lies a sunlit meadow but she pauses, hand on hair, gazing down at a patch of foxgloves. The familiar elements of Havers art are present – the setting, the character, the eternal summer – but the girl's pondering of the flowers brings interpretations to the work. In Thomas Miller's 1840 book on the language of flowers, The Romance of Nature, he gives the meaning of foxgloves as 'I am not changed, they wrong me', an expansion on the traditional meaning of 'insincerity'. Arguably a narrative of Havers own marriage, the weary, thoughtful expression and dark, atmospheric woodland speaks of choices and disappointments, raising questions of where the girl is headed or what she is leaving behind.
Alice's arrival in London in 1870 coincided with that of Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922), famed Parisian art dealer, who sought exile from the Franco-Prussian war. With the establishment of his London gallery in New Bond Street and its annual exhibitions, the shock of Impressionism was finally released on the London masses. Art students including George Clausen (1852-1944) flocked to see Impressionism and its treatment of the rural poor as a legitimate subject. This drive gained further momentum with the publication of Alfred Sensier's 1881 book Jean-François Millet, Peasant and Painter together with others including the Fine Art Society's Twenty Etchings and Woodcuts of Millet's work on the noble, rural poor. This influence was reflected in a review of Alice's illustrations for William Morris's 1889 book of poems, where the Birmingham Mail referred to her as 'one of the foremost English lady exponents of the French school'.3 Alice's transition from rural idyll to rustic narrative reflects the general movement in Britain which resulted in the art of Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929), the Newlyn School and the novels of Thomas Hardy. The girl who considers the foxgloves in Alice Haver's painting is a proto-Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Bathsheba Everdene, considering her life choices that are ever-dependent on their socio-economic status in natural surroundings that offer both light and plenty and dark and danger.
After a very public and damaging divorce in 1889-90, Alice and her children moved back to London, to St John's Wood where she rented a house with a studio, but the new life was not to last long. She had been suffering from neuralgia and medicating with morphia, injected straight into her forehead, spending her nights on the couch in her studio. On the morning of 25th August 1890, the maid found her insensible from an overdose, with the needle still clenched in her hand. On the table was a letter to her doctor, describing her symptoms as unbearable and requesting another course of treatment. She died the next day. There were some newspapers that made much of the fact that she was newly divorced, some drew a line between her status as a successful career woman and mental instability. Many of her obituaries concentrated on her (ex) husband, calling her Mrs Frederick Morgan, and her male ancestors, one of whom was Gentleman of the Horse to John, Duke of Norfolk at the Battle of Bosworth Field. In the Pall Mall Gazette, an obituary 'by One Who Knew Her' remarked how she was 'the best dressed woman in the room' at the last meeting of the Salon, 'her dress somehow always had both cachet and courage, and her slight, girlish figure enabled her to adopt with success combinations of colour that in greater mass would have looked audacious.'
1see https://www.falklandsbiographies.org/biographies/havers_alice.
2The Gentlewoman, 6 September 1890.
3Birmingham Mail, 2 May 1889.
We are grateful to Kirsty Stonell Walker, Independent Art Historian and Author, for compiling this catalogue entry.