Five of the Best: the Walker Gallery

Liverpool's world class collection shines with myth, Nelson and Romance

In a commanding neo-Classical building in central Liverpool, facing Lime Street Station and next to St George’s Hall, is the Walker Art Gallery. It’s one of those rarities, a British art collection outside either Edinburgh or London which has been allowed national status and therefore has free admission. It is also one of those places where you will constantly go “Wow! I had no idea THIS was here”. The wealth of the collection reflects the grandeur of Liverpool during its Victorian hey-day, when it was a major entry point for the wealth of the world, much of it spoils of colonialism and the slave-trade. There is a huge trident-wielding Britannia on the top of the building.

I know Tate Liverpool is one of the city’s key magnets, but honestly for a storied collection of magnificence and range, go to the Walker. Here are my Five of the Best, which were almost impossible to select, so wide is the choice.

1. The Nymph of the Fountain (1534), Lucas Cranach

A masterpiece from the German Renaissance by this expert of the strange and knowing, in which the female nude features extremely regularly. Cranach, a contemporary of Martin Luther, rejects an Italianate style for his nudes preferring a Gothic model of pale and slender women, usually adorned by a mantle or hat. Here, the Nymph lies beside a mythological Fountain which was sort of like a watery Botox, since anyone who bathed in it was instantly turned into a younger woman. The inscription on the fountain reads “I, the nymph of the sacred fountain, am resting, do not disturb my sleep.” The carved putti on the fountain show an Italianate influence; the little town visible over the hill is typically Germanic. Cranach was a man of Europe.

2. The Death of Nelson (1806), Benjamin West

Britain’s conquering hero. West painted it a year after Nelson died at Trafalgar and when it was first exhibited at his house, crowds flocked to it, riveted by the drama of the national figure dying at the moment of victory over Napoleon. Nelson is being held by Hardy, (presumably just before asking him to embrace him). It is a tender moment of compassion and privacy which makes a vivid contrast to the furore on the packed decks of “Victory” , the foaming sea pounded by gunships, and the air smoking with gunfire and bristling with sails and flags.

3. Isabella (1849) John Everett Millais

For this famous pre-Raphaelite work, Millais has used an episode from Boccaccio’s Decameron, which itself inspired John Keats for his shocking poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil which the Romantic poet wrote in 1818.

The aristocratic Isabella, on the right hand side, in grey, is in love with the lowly Lorenzo, who works for her brothers. He is handing her a blood orange, symbolic of his unhappy fate. The three “serpents” Isabella’s brothers, sitting opposite the couple, plan to murder him so she can be married to “some high noble and his olive trees,” as Keats puts it. He is duly murdered in a forest, but after a dream, Isabella finds him, digs him up, cuts his head off and plants it in a pot of Basil. That is all to come.

Millais focuses on the moment that the evil brothers realise what is going on between Isabella and Lorenzo. Everyone else is completely unaware. One brother studies Lorenzo through a glass full of blood-red wine. Another, grimacing and poking the greyhound with his foot, has been the subject of many learned papers discussing phallic symbolism (have a look at the shadow of the pepper pot). The painting’s strict verticals and horizontals around which so many hands flutter gives a wonderful air of tension to the picture. It was the first exhibited painting from the newly-formed Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists about which the 19 year old Millais was so excited, that he painted its initials on Isabella’s bench. It was originally sold by Millais to a tailor for £150 and a new suit.

4. And when did you last see your Father? (1878) William Frederick Yeames

A classic Victorian narrative picture and the most popular one in the Walker. Set in the Civil war, a young Cavalier is being grilled on the whereabouts of his father by the Roundheads. You can tell the lad has been brought up to tell the truth, by how straight he is standing and the sunlight which streams over him; his sister knows he won’t lie, which is why she is weeping behind him. For all the Roundheads’ aggression, their depiction is nuanced; the inquisitor is talking gently to the child while the pike-bearing guard behind puts a fatherly hand around the sister’s shoulders. The picture has inspired books, films and is the fount of many satirical cartoons, as seen below. It was even turned into a waxwork tableau at Madame Tussaud’s.

5. The Funeral of Shelley (1889) Louis Edouard Fournier

Again, a famous work inspired by a Romantic poet, this time Percy Bysshe Shelley who at the age of 29, was drowned in the Gulf of Spezia off the coast of Italy, in 1822. His funeral pyre is being witnessed by the writer Edward John Trelawny, the critic Leigh Hunt and the poet Lord Byron. Shelley’s widow Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, is kneeling in the background. Fournier uses quite a lot of poetic license here, as all these people probably weren’t there in real life, but that doesn’t matter. The picture is a masterpiece of tonal control with a limited palette of black, grey and buff, with flashes of white. The wind, which whips at Byron’s neck scarf and makes the smoke belch upwards, helps to heighten the contrast between life and death, with Shelley’s immobile corpse dominating the middle of the painting.

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