A 19th-century view of the Egyptian temple complex of Karnak is to go on display at the British Museum for the first time this week – more than half a century after it was acquired.
The long-awaited public showing comes 113 or so years after the death of the artist, about whom little is known.
“We now know as much as anyone alive about Henry Stanier – which is practically nothing,” said Kim Sloan, curator of the exhibition on British watercolour landscapes.
Details of his birth, death and family life are unknown, and how he managed to get to Egypt in the 1860s – and how the painting arrived at the museum – remains a mystery. His reputation has retreated so far into the mist that one recent auction catalogue listed a painting by him as by a “British (?) artist”.
Sloan, curator of the British section of the museum’s enormous prints and drawings collection, discovered the huge watercolour in an obscure corner of the museum more than 10 years ago, when she was looking for the original frames for some Turner watercolours.
To her astonishment she found not just empty frames, but three paintings by Stanier, an artist she had never heard of. They appear to have been stashed away in the 1950s without ever being recorded in the museum’s collection.
After setting a researcher on his trail, she discovered little more: his work is in regional collections, including Birmingham, Sheffield and York, but almost none is on display; he won a fourth prize for painting at his Birmingham art college in 1848, when Sloan guesses he would have been 18 or 19. He moved to Granada in Spain for his health, where he obsessively drew and painted the Alhambra palace, became the British vice-consul. He died – presumably still in Spain – in either January 1894 or possibly late the previous year.
Even the Birmingham Daily Post, which kept up intermittent contact, feared readers might have forgotten Stanier. On 27 January 1894 it reported the death of an artist “formerly well known in Birmingham. At one time Mr Stanier, when a young man, was a constant contributor to our local exhibitions and showed much promise.”
Stanier occasionally sent vivid dispatches from Granada, including an account of an earthquake on Christmas Day in 1884, appealing for funds to help “the awful misery of these poor people without shelter, and dying from wounds and cold. What were once flourishing towns and happy villages are now heaps of ruins, and the inhabitants who have escaped are reduced to beggary.”
He also sent a report of a fire in his beloved Alhambra, “which made one feel certain that some criminal hand had been the cause of it”. Fortunately it broke out in one of the fountain courts where there was a plentiful water supply, and the main building was saved.
His lovely view of Karnak, the largest and finest of his three Egyptian scenes, will now take its place beside works by some of the most famous watercolourists, including landscapes by Samuel Palmer, James Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Paul Nash.
Sloan thinks it must have been part of an album of views sketched on the spot and then worked up in his studio, sold to middle-class clients who wanted showy paintings for their walls but couldnot quite afford large oil paintings. She has no idea who donated it to the museum or when.
“Some of the names in this exhibition are and always have been famous, but British landscape watercolours is a very overlooked area, and many of the artists are now almost as forgotten as Stanier,” Sloan said. “I hope people will be moved and surprised by the exhibition.”
- Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850–1950, British Museum from 23 February until 27 August 2017, free
