The Author-Editor
F. G. Stephens (1827–1907) was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a failed artist, and a prominent art critic and author. Raised in the London borough of Lambeth, Stephens attended the University College School in London and was also privately tutored, due to a physically disabling accident that he suffered in 1837. After entering the Royal Academy Schools on January 13, 1844, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with his colleagues William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.[1] Millais also used the handsome Stephens as a model for the main figure in his painting Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849).[2] Despite Stephens’s desire to become a successful artist, he was, according to his early biographer J.B. Manson, “a diffident painter.”
When his painting titled The Proposal, completed when he was only twenty-one years old, was rejected by the Academy, Stephens abandoned his hopes of becoming an artist. Afterward, according to Manson, “he asserted with satisfaction, on more than one occasion, that he ‘had destroyed all his paintings.’” Six of them survived, however, including The Proposal, which was discovered, hidden away, after his death.[3] The end of his career as a practicing artist meant the beginning of his career as a popular and prolific art critic. Stephens maintained a forty-year post on The Athenaeum, a leading literary magazine that churned out weekly articles and reviews centered on the multifaceted London art world. In a practice considered controversial by many scholars today, Stephens allowed some of his artist friends, notably Rossetti and Millais, to review and correct the proofs of his articles before they were published, creating unavoidably biased reviews of their works.
Stephens has never been seriously considered as an art historian because of his lack of interest in documents, theories, and antiquarian studies, but he did write detailed biographies from an insider’s perspective. And although he has been criticized for the lack of critical analysis in his writings, he was an influential “interpreter of Victorian aesthetics,” according to the art historian Dianne Sachko Macleod, drawing on his artistic background to translate an artist’s thinking into terms his audience could easily grasp. Stephens was not solely a writer of exhibition reviews; he also wrote monographs and over one hundred freelance articles on art. He published a number of scholarly books, including Normandy, Its Gothic Architecture and History (1865) and Flemish Relics (1855), in addition to an extensive, ninety-part series for The Athenaeum on “The Private Collections of England” (1873-87).[4]
As Macleod observes, “The weekly deadlines for The Athenaeum left little time for travel or profound investigation. Moreover, [Stephens] was constantly looking for ways to supplement his income, and found it necessary to freelance for an increasing number of periodicals in the 1880s and 90s.”[5] This may account for the somewhat plodding and slapdash style of his writing in Artists at Home. Stephens even allowed in the “Preface” that the history of studio paintings he had composed to introduce the series of biographies had been only “a morning’s work.”
Stephens was an ardent believer in art that was affordable to the masses, possibly because of his own lower-middle-class background. As Macleod explains, “One aspect of Stephens’s philosophy which did not change over time was his belief that art should not be elitist. He dedicated much of his energy to promoting the cause of inexpensive prints, beginning in 1859, when he argued that 'the essentials of good art may be produced at a very minute cost.'”[6] Stephens himself possessed “a rich collection of prints and drawings and other mementoes of artistic and historical interest,” Manson writes, adding that he put his ideology of expanding the appreciation of art into practice: “He was never happier than when helping young artists and writers, and his storehouse of accumulated knowledge was always at their disposal.”[7] Stephens was deeply enthralled with the lives and works of the artists that he wrote about, never giving up on a life centered on art, despite having his initial dream shattered.
Vanessa Pike
[1] Dianne Sachko Macleod, "F. G. Stephens, Pre-Raphaelite Critic and Art Historian,” The Burlington Magazine 128, no. 999 (June 1986): 398.
[2] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Stephens, Frederic George (1827–1907),” by Dianne Sachko Macleod, accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36272.
[3] J. B. Manson, Frederick George Stephens and the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers (London: Privately printed by Donald Macbeth, 1920), n.p., http://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t4gn1r12p.
[4] Macleod, ”F. G. Stephens,” 398 and 402.
[5] Ibid., 402.
[6] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. "Stephens, Frederic George."
[7] Manson, F.G. Stephens, n.p.