Church Street Antiques

Description

Charles Burton Barber, a Pear's advertising print, 'Suspense', signed and dated 1894 lower left, framed plus one Pears print of children having a picnic. 34"w x 26"h -

Original sold for $442,000 at Christies New York
Although his work enjoyed great popularity in its day and he was much patronized by Queen Victoria, Barber remains a relatively obscure figure. A retiring character, he died at the age of forty-nine, and his paintings, never numerous, are now comparatively rare. Having attended the Royal Academy Schools, where he won several prizes, he began to exhibit at the R.A. in 1866 at the age of twenty-one. He found many of his early subjects in the hunting field, and was a great devotee of the Highlands according to his brother, 'his love of the red deer, and the attraction which mountain solitudes and scenes of storm and mist possessed for him, were quite phenomenal.' Not suprisingly, he was a passionate admirer of Landseer, but his hero's pre-eminence as a painter of deer left him little scope in this area, and he turned to painting scenes of children with dogs or cats. These were enormously popular, gaining wide currency through chromolithographic reproductions, but he came to resent being chained to such themes by his dealers and publishers, talking bitterly of 'manufaturing pictures for the market'. He worked for Queen Victoria for more than twenty years, succeeding Landseer, who died in 1873, as her painter of animals (at least in England Gourlay Steel fulfilled this role in Scotland). Whereas Landseer had painted the Queen, Prince Albert and their children, Barber's task was to paint groups of her grandchildren with the royal pets. His last picture, completed shortly before his death, was a scene of the Queen and her grandchildren with sundry animals on the lawn at Osborn (illus. Harry Furniss, the Works of Charles Burton Barber, 1896, pl. 1).

The present picture, painted in 1894 and apparently never exhibited, is very characteristic in its sentimental subject and humour. Another painting, Friend or Foe?, in which a little girl, her dog and kitten, look apprehensively at a frog, seems to show the same models and must be more or less contemporary (see Furniss, op.cit,pl.39).

The picture's first recorded owner was the soap firm of A. and F. Pears, who probably acquired it for advertising purposes. In 1915 it was bought from Pears by W.H. Lever (1851-1925), the head of the rival soap manufacturers, Lever Brothers, who almost certainly wanted it for the same reason. The Chairman of Pears, Thomas J. Barratt, had taken the lead in this form of marketing by buying Millais' painting Bubbles in 1886, and three years later Lever had follwed his example by buying THe New Frock by W.P. Frith at the Royal Academy and using it to promote his own firm's product, Sunlight Soap. In 1916 Lever was to take over Pears altogether, and other paintings that Barratt had bought with advertisements in view, such as A Water Baby by the Hon. John Collier and His Turn Next by Fred Morgan, passed to the new ownver. These paintings are now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, together with some ten more that Lever himself bought as part of his marketing strategy. The attitude of artists to paint Barratt 'as many pictures for advertising as you like to give me commissions for,' has been the subject of much debate. Frith certainly protested over the use Lever made of The New Frock, but other artists seem to have fallen in with the slightly cynical argument that the publicity could only do them good. If Burton Barber was alive when Pears acauired Suspense, his views are not recorded. He was certainly dead by the time it was acquired by Lever.