Joseph Southall was one of the leading artists of the Birmingham Group of Artists-Craftsmen. At the end of the century, Burne-Jones’s proximity to the group pre-disposed the younger artists to emulate his decorative, medievalising style and towards an interest in Pre-Raphaelitism. The revival of tempera painting in Burne-Jones’s circle, was immediately taken up and perfected by the Birmingham Group led by Joseph Southall who had already experimented with the technique, having seen the work of Benozzo Gozzoli and Carpaccio during his visit to Italy in 1883. This difficult technique, using the yolk of egg, was the most important panel painting technique of the medieval period and emerged in the late Pre-Raphaelite circles as an inevitable result of their love of quattrocento painting. Southall founded The Society of Painters in Tempera in November 1901 along with John Dixon Batten, William Holman Hunt and Walter Crane. Southall’s writings on tempera in Papers of the Society of Painters in Tempera have been of great importance in the revival of the technique. Arethusa was a beautiful young Greek huntress and a follower of Artemis in the city of Syracuse in Sicily. Like the goddess, Artemis, she would have nothing to do with men and spent her time running and hunting in the forest. One day, exhausted after a hunt, she bathed in a crystal clear stream shaded by silvery willows when something rose beneath her in the water. Terrified, she ran into the forest, pursued by Alpheus, the god of the river, who cried, Why are you leaving, fair maiden? Arethusa called out to Artemis for help and the goddess answered by changing her into a spring. Artemis cut the earth so that an underground channel was made from Greece all the way to Sicily. Arethusa plunged down and emerged near Syracuse where the spring bubbles forth to this day. Alpheus turned himself back into a river and plunged down the same channel and the legend persists that Greek flowers can be found by the Sicilian spring.
Fine Art Society, London
London, Fine Art Society, 1980 London, Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, The Brotherhood of Ruralists and the Pre-Raphaelites, June - July 2005