ARTHURIAN ART
Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1832-1904)
How does a
young artist gain fame? At 25, Frederick Sandys, then a young man of 25,
gained instant fame by drawing a caricature. Millais, one of the most
famous of the pre-Raphaelites, produced Sir Isumbras at the Ford
depicting the knight and two children seated on a somewhat oversized
horse. Sandys drew a caricature of the painting showing Millais as the
knight and Rossetti and Holman Hunt as the children, sitting on a donkey
branded 'J.R.' for John Ruskin. This picture so impressed Rossetti that
they became close friends for many years.
During the 1860s, Sandys gained an enormous reputation as an
illustrator of books and magazines despite producing only 25 drawings.
Most of Sandys' oils depict femmes fatales and the people in
his pictures often have what has been termed the 'Sandys' sneer'.
Pictures by Sandys include Medea and Morgan le Fay
in the Birmingham City Art Gallery, Helen of Troy in the Manchester
City Art Gallery, a collection of several portraits as well as one large
outdoors scene called Autumn hang in the Norwich Museum, and Spring
in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His Mary Magdalene is in Delaware
in the US.
