Oil on canvas, 'Meditation: A Lady Looking out of a window', Arie Johannes Lamme, mid 19th century

In a niche, a blond woman with long hair and a dark dress seats beside a window with an open book in front of her; she is staring at a landscape by moonlight.

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886
Ref: Parkinson, Ronald, Catalogue of British Oil Paintings 1820-1860, (Victoria & Albert Museum, HMSO, London, 1990), p.xx.
Joshua Dixon (1811-1885), was the son of Abraham Dixon of Whitehaven and brother of George Dixon (who was head of the foreign merchants firm of Rabone Brothers in Birmingham 1883-98). Educated at Leeds Grammar School, and was deputy chairman of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company 1869-70. Died Winslade, near Exeter, 7 December 1885. Bequeathed all his collection of drawings, watercolours and oil paintings to the Bethnal Green Museum; they have since been transferred to the V&A. He also collected engravings, Japanese vases and panels, and bronze and marble sculpture.

Historical significance: Arie Johannes Lamme specialised chiefly in history and genre paintings such as the famous versions of Ary Scheffer's studio in Paris (Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris). The present painting shows a medieval interior identified by the golden and richly decorated curtain on the left hand-side and niche's architecture. The lady's dress also gives an idea of what would be a medieval garment without being accurately documented. The lady is blond like all the medieval heroines and the setting by moonlight increases the mystery of the scene and makes it more enigmatic. Mystery and enigma were a common factor to the Romantic imagery that developed during the 19th century and this painting is therefore a good example of this category that proposed to investigate the human nature and personality trough the remote, the mysterious and the occult.
Many paintings of the Dutch school feature windows or doors, and play with the interior/exterior dynamic. This scene is possible one of religious contemplation such as the dream of St Helen.
Lamme executed very few pictures such as the present one and mainly focused on domestic genre scenes reminiscent of the art of Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684).

The word Romanticism derived from the medieval term 'romance' and was first used by the German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel to label a wider cultural movement beginning with the late 18th and ending towards the mid 19th century. Romanticism started first in Western Europe as a literary and philosophical movement and only gradually involved the other arts, explicitly around 1800. Romantic artists were fascinated by nature they interpreted as a mirror of the mind. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious and the occult. The interest in the exotic and the non-Western, illustrated in France by such a painter as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), as well as the medieval revival, witnessed in England by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), are perhaps the most identifiable parts of Romanticism. It is really in the Post-Napoleonic period that this movement gained ascendancy. Its greatest proponents were among others Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) and François-René de Chateaubriant (1768-1848) in France, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) in England, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in Germany. In the visual arts, it was largely played out by 1850, but in music it persists for another generation.

Arie Johannes Lamme (1812-1900) was born in Dordrecht and trained there under his father Arnoldus Lamme (1771-1856). In 1829, he went to Paris where he was a pupil of his cousins Ary and Henry Scheffer (1798-1862). Lamme preferably painted subjects from history and genre pieces. In 1845 he won a gold medal in Paris for one of his interior scenes. Besides painting he would be known as art-dealer. From 1852 to 1870 he was director of museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Arie Johannes Lamme executed very few pictures such as the present one that presents an enigmatic lady from medieval times and chiefly specialised in history and domestic scenes.

1072-1886