“From ideals in art we are led to ideals

in life and to the greatest art of all —

The art of Life.”

Walter Crane, William Morris to Whistler, London, 1911, p.255

Within a panoramic landscape, a young woman, her red-haired covered by a flowing headscarf, stoops to gather an abundance of daffodils. Beyond her, a broad belt of green grazing gives way to a ploughed band of red ochre, and further still to the washed-blue silhouette of a mountain range beneath a pale, high sky. La Primavera was painted in Rome in the spring of 1883 and kept from public view for three years until the artist sent it to the Dudley Gallery in 1886. It is among the most fully achieved of Crane’s easel works: at once Italianate in atmosphere, Pre-Raphaelite in lineage and decorative in intent, it is Crane’s Italian education distilled into a single horizontal breath.

Crane was born in Liverpool on 15 August 1845, the second son of the portrait painter Thomas Crane. Apprenticed in 1859 to the wood-engraver William James Linton, he acquired a rigorous craft training that would underpin his lifelong advocacy of design. His The Lady of Shalott (Yale Center for British Art) was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1862, but when the Academy rebuffed his more ambitious submissions, he transferred his allegiance, on its founding in 1877, to the Grosvenor Gallery, and thereafter sent nothing further to Burlington House. By the early 1870s, he was among the most celebrated book illustrators in the country, his toy books establishing a fresh visual vocabulary for children’s literature through crisp outlines and flat tints borrowed from the Japanese woodcut. Painting, however, he regarded as the higher calling.

A decisive experience of Crane’s artistic development was his marriage in 1871 to Mary Frances Andrews, which occasioned an Italian wedding journey that lasted nearly three years. In Rome, he fell under the spell of the Renaissance masters, and of Sandro Botticelli in particular. Through Frederic Leighton, he was introduced in 1872 to Giovanni ‘Nino’ Costa, the Roman landscapist whose studio on the Via Margutta had become the gathering point for British painters in Italy. Costa preached a pastoral ideal derived from Claude and Corot, quiet horizons, reticent tonalities, and landscape distilled to its essential forms. On 28 January 1883 the circle around him formalised itself as the Scuola Etrusca, the nickname honouring Costa’s Trastevere birthplace and his archaic pastoral vision; its founding affiliates included George Howard (later ninth Earl of Carlisle), William Blake Richmond, Matthew Ridley Corbet and Edgar Barclay, with Crane and Leighton as close associates. Crane’s return to Rome that spring, sharing the Via Sistina with Corbet and renewing his conversations with Costa, coincided with the School’s inception; the present canvas is its most immediate fruit.

The title inevitably summons Botticelli, though any specific allusion is unlikely; the echo is iconographic rather than imitative. Crane had long made spring his tutelary theme, including The Advent of Spring and The Earth and Springfrom the early 1870s and A Herald of Spring (1872, Birmingham Museums Trust), depicting a young woman in pale green and pink descending a Roman street with daffodils in a basket. The vernal subject carried the allegorical charge of regeneration, both of art and of society, that would by the mid-1880s draw him into the orbit of William Morris and active socialism. In An Artist’s Reminiscences of 1907 he remembered how the beauty of the Italian spring had ‘been upon us’ from his earliest Roman sojourn, a phrase that captures the ceremonial quality of light and growth he returned to throughout his career.

Technically, the painting approaches the crispness of tempera, a medium Crane increasingly worked in, and would champion through the Society of Painters in Tempera, which he helped to found in 1901. Tones are laid thinly over a pale ground; drapery is drawn with a calligraphic economy of his illustrative practice; the daffodils are picked out in pure lemon against their green stems; the hills are modelled in two or three tones only. It is a panel tuned to sit in harmony within the walls of a house rather than assert itself against it, in accordance with the decorative philosophy Crane had been articulating for more than a decade.

La Primavera entered the collection of the Ionides family, Greek merchants whose London patronage embraced Whistler, Watts, Leighton, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and whose house at 1 Holland Park, completed under Philip Webb with interiors by Thomas Jeckyll, William Morris and Crane himself, ranked among the most admired Aesthetic rooms in the city. Alexander Ionides (1840–1898), the younger brother of Constantine Alexander Ionides, whose collection survives at the Victoria & Albert Museum, presided at Holland Park after Constantine’s retirement to Windycroft at Hastings in 1875. For the same household, Crane supplied a dining-room scheme in gesso drawing on the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859, a collection of Persian poems greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites), and a temple-like overmantel to display the family’s Tanagra figurines. The present painting belonged, in short, within the very interior whose aesthetic its form had been tuned to serve.

Crane had absorbed from John Ruskin and Walter Pater the conviction that art’s highest task was to disclose, through sensible form, the renewing energies of nature and of human community. When he first showed the picture at the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in 1886, he was exhibiting among a circle of young painters, Robert Bateman, Edward Clifford, Theodore Blake Wirgman and himself, whom the critics had dubbed the ‘poetry without grammar school’, in affectionate mockery of their romantic intensity and disdain for academic drill. La Primavera declares that faith without raising its voice. It asks only that we look, as its gatherer looks, with the patience of one who knows the year will turn and will bring what it has always brought: daffodils in the grass, blue hills at the horizon, and the slow gold of another morning.