John William Godward

Prior to ending his life at the age of 61 years, John William Godward (1861-1922) wrote a valedictory note to the world. It is claimed that he wrote that ‘the world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso’. This may sound grandiloquent but the gap between artist and public became all too wide. The dogmas that he had absorbed as a young man in London were in total contrast to the dawning modernism of the first decade of the 20th century. And Godward’s demise coincided with the end of the neoclassical English painting that he had sought to protect throughout his life.

Early in his career Godward exhibited his antiquating subjects almost every year at the Academy from 1887 until about 1900. Early on he was supported by such luminaries as Lord Frederic Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, with the latter taking Godward as his pupil and protégé. Today we know little of his private life and it is claimed that not a single photography of him remains; only a self-portrait within one of his paintings. His family disowned him when he travelled to Italy with his model. They cut his picture out of all the photographs in the family album.

In Godward’s paintings we find ourselves in an imagined ancient world in which the sun always shines and the ‘sweetness of doing nothing’ rules. Like his teacher, Alma-Tadema, Godward was also an amateur archaeologist and many of his subjects were chosen after careful explorations of urns, decorations and antiquely draped kitons that the women wore in the sculptures. This was to satisfy a public that purchased and admired his work and that was familiar with classical mythology and culture. In England, where this style developed and flourished at the turn of the century, Godward and Alma-Tadema are often called ‘The Marble School’ precisely because they so realistically portray marble and the heritage from antiquity.

The painting under consideration is a newly discovered work by Godward and it has links with ‘At the Garden Shrine, Pompeii’ (1892) with which it shares its composition and, probably, the model. Winding Wool was painted in 1894 and at this time in the 1890s the artist painted several subjects on domestic themes with women sewing or spinning yarn and including the characteristic tiger skin that recurs in several of Godward’s paintings.

We are grateful to Dr. Vern G. Swanson for his help in cataloging this work. It will appear in his new publication on the artist.