The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day

Spencer Stanhope painted 'The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day' in 1873, a title taken from a line in Rossetti's 'A Superscription', and a painting that embodies the Aesthetic Movement's cultivation of beauty as the supreme value of art. By the early 1870s Spencer Stanhope had evolved from his Pre-Raphaelite formation toward the more purely aesthetic idiom associated with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and the circle around Morris and the Grosvenor Gallery. The subject — a woman playing or listening to music from the past — is characteristically aesthetic in its preference for nostalgic beauty over narrative action, for mood over event. The National Trust's canvas shows his mature handling of the female figure in an interior setting charged with the quality of dreaming recollection. Music as a subject had particular importance for the Aesthetes, who held it as the art form closest to pure form — Walter Pater's dictum that 'all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music' was formulated in these years.

The oil on canvas shows Spencer Stanhope's Aesthetic Movement style at full development: rich, jewel-like colour with decorative patterning in draperies and interior details, figures modelled with a smooth, slightly ethereal quality that recalls Italian Quattrocento painting rather than Pre-Raphaelite naturalism. The overall effect aims for a beauty that is self-sufficient rather than in the service of narrative or moral instruction.