Getty Adds a Victorian Outsider's Hallucinatory Collage

John Bingley Garland, Collage, 1850s or 1860s. J. Paul Getty Museum

The Getty Museum's drawing department has acquired a collage by Victorian eccentric John Bingley Garland (1791-1875). It's one of a set of four sheets recently offered by Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker, London. The other three have been purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Not without reason, the dealers termed these works "extraordinary and almost hallucinatory." 

Decoupage and scrapbooking were folk arts of 19th-century Britain (something like TikTok today). Practitioners pasted printed or photographic figures onto watercolor grounds, mostly striving for humorous or sentimental effect. Garland's collages are uniquely disquieting, dripping India ink "blood" onto Old Master and botanical prints. His visual universe anticipates those of Max Ernst and Jess.

John Bingley Garland, page from Evelyn Waugh's "Victorian Blood Book," 1854. Harry Ransom Center, Austin

Novelist Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One) "discovered" Garland and owned his so-called Victorian Blood Book, now held with Waugh's papers at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center, Austin. 

The set of four collages acquired by the Getty and MIA were independent works, not detached leaves. Formerly owned by Peter Burne-Jones, grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, each measures 20.5 by 15.4 inches. They share the dripping blood of the Waugh album but seem more assured and/or extreme. They are presumed to be later. 

The right side of the Getty collage incorporates an engraving of Albrecht Dürer's marginal drawings for Emperor Maximilian's Prayer Book. The female saint at bottom is Mary Magdalene, though the gold rays recall Bernini's sculpted Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Garland's hand-written text copies 18th-century poet Edward Young's Night Thoughts: "The world's a stately bark, on dangerous seas with pleasure seen, but boarded at our peril…"

Unknown artist, Portrait of John Bingley Garland, about 1822. Trinity Museum, Newfoundland

John Bingley Garland's public career is well-documented and kind of boring. He was heir to a Dorset firm dealing in salted cod. He spent time in Canada, managing the family business and becoming the first Speaker of the Newfoundland Parliament. He returned to Britain in 1843 and spent the rest of his life there. The collages were created in England. The Waugh Blood Book contains an inscription to daughter Amy: "A legacy left in his lifetime for her future examination by her affectionate father." This is dated Sep. 1, 1854, the year the artist turned 63. 

Garland's collages abound in Christian crosses, angels, and holy doves, dripping blood. The effect veers towards the maudlin, flippant, or sacrilegious. Or bleeding-heart Aztec? Some have hypothesized a Masonic connection. Libson & Yarker describe the iconography as "worthy of further research and serious study."

Emilie Mediz-Pelikan, Landscape With a Thunderstorm, 1896. J. Paul Getty Museum

The Getty has also added a large Conté crayon and colored chalk Landscape With a Thunderstorm by the Austrian Symbolist Emilie Mediz-Pelikan (1861-1908). A contemporary of Klimt, Mediz-Pelikan exhibited at first Vienna Secession exhibition. She specialized in moody through chromatically lush landscapes. The Getty's almost extraterrestrial view verges on abstraction, save for the brilliantly executed lightning bolt.

Museums are striving to add work by women artists (such as the Getty's new Artemisia Gentileschi). Mediz-Pelikan achieved some renown in her time, yet died young of a heart attack (age 47) and then was thoroughly forgotten. The Mediz-Pelikan revival is only a couple decades old, gaining momentum a year before the pandemic in "City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna From 1900 to 1938" in Vienna's Belvedere Palace. You can see images of her paintings here.