In the past year 2 paintings by Emma Soyer have entered the permanent collections of international museums. Here are some addtions to an impressive but scattered oeuvre. One day there will be enough of them for an exhibition, for the time being they will go towards a catalogue.
To the famous artist more will be given, to the obscure artist all will be taken, and it is fair to say that many of Soyer’s paintings have been given to other artists over the years. In the past year I have chased her through archives and auction catalogues. Some paintings have turned up under her maiden name of Jones, others under the names of other artists. Generally it has been a case of trying to work out who she may have been mistaken for over the years. In certain cases her pictures have been allocated strangely. Others can be explained by a shared choice of subject. Many have defied classification, because they do not resemble the works of her contemporaries, nor do they belong to general thrust of art history in Britain.
Thankfully the speed of art historical progress is not linear. Artistic revivals begin slowly, but each development quickens the rate of progression, and each new addition to Soyer’s oeuvre increases the possibility that others can be found. I believe we now have enough of them to make reliable judgements on the remaining works.
Soyer is in the unusual position of being a “forgotten master” with a mass of material to work with. She has been studied, but rarely by art historians. An attempt to preserve her legacy was taken shortly after her death by husband Alexis Soyer whose ingenious labour-saving inventions and efforts to feed the hungry in Ireland and the Crimea have been obscured behind a colourful persona. He was a regular in Punch Magazine, largely on account of being a famous French chef in post Napoleonic Britain, but also because his endless schemes (and repeated falls) had an unfortunate whiff of quackery. He was perhaps the very last person to convince anyone of his wife’s genius.
Despite her obscurity, the artistic career of Emma Soyer is well documented, with her paintings recorded in auction catalogues and exhibition records. The titles are also helpfully descriptive and her regular appearances at the British Institution are accompanied by dimensions.
Connoisseurship struggles to untangle the networks of famous painters, successful enough to employ assistants and influential enough to attract followers, but Emma Soyer did not have followers. Nor did she follow in any obvious artistic tradition, and for her to have formed a studio of assistants (invariably male) would have represented a difficult departure from the social conventions of her period. Her only stylistic relation, her teacher and stepfather Francois Simonau author to a fine but miniscule oeuvre, appears to have subordinated his own ambitions in favour of hers. From an artistic point of view he arrived in London fully-formed at 32, and aside from a friendship with Sir Thomas Lawrence, his career appears to have passed in relative obscurity.
Soyer’s paintings are recognisable because they do not resemble the works of her contemporaries. They are also distinct for their unusually good condition, the opacity of the flesh tones, and their use of a fine-weave canvas. Broadly they follow two formats, with an outdoor background and an indoor one. The indoor background is generally reserved for named portraits, utilising various shades of brown, which darken from the left of the canvas to the right. This would suggest that she illuminated her sitters from right-hand window or light source.
The outdoor backdrops suggest dusk or evening, using a blue-grey sky with reddish hues at the horizon line. Sometimes it is broken up by a rocky outcrop, a wall or a column in the foreground. In contrast to the generous use of paint in her sitters, Soyer’s backgrounds are sparsely painted and she is quite willing to rely on a thin translucent glaze, making it possible to perceive the canvas weave between the blues, reds and browns. Her light pigments are also unusual and under scrutiny become an interesting combination of colour. Much as she uses blues and greys as a way of giving depth to flesh pigments, she also highlights white collars and fabric with flashes of blue, yellow and red.
Dominic Sanchez-Cabello
