ROBERT KEMM (Salisbury, England, 1837 - London, 1895). "The Northern Inn." Oil on canvas.

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Córdoba: 2,000 Years of Art

By Setdart Auction House

Dec 21, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-12-21 07:30:00 2021-12-21 07:30:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Córdoba: 2,000 Years of Art https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/c-rdoba-2-000-years-of-art-8049
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• Lot Description
  ROBERT KEMM (Salisbury, England, 1837 - London, 1895). "The Northern Inn." Oil on canvas. Presents stamp on the back alluding to the manufacture of the canvas. Signed in the lower left corner. Measurements: 76,5 x 101,5 cm. This work is conceived as a melting pot in which all the topics of the Spanish are amalgamated; the brown woman, the bullfighter, the religious and the bandit. All these characters come together in an interior that also breathes tradition through the ceramic pot, or the poster announcing a bullfight. During the 19th century, Spain and England maintained a special relationship. The valuable support given by Great Britain to the patriotic fervor against the French invader, led the Spanish to look with sympathy to the British. For their part, British painters and literati descended upon Spain, a country that offered them the quintessence of romantic idealism. Perhaps looking for a natural and more authentic landscape, they traveled to the peninsula, where the Industrial Revolution had not yet degraded the face of the landscape. Progress in communications made Spain an exotic, but at the same time close, destination for young English painters who rejected the industrial bourgeoisie and the poverty of spirit that was plaguing the large and ever-growing cities. In fact, after the War of Independence our country began to acquire an aura of exoticism and extravagance that attracted a good number of English intellectuals and artists. The Moorish Andalusia, the bandit, the obscurantist Church, the handsome bullfighter and the maja, the lady with mantilla, the barefoot children, the beggar full of rags, Cervantes' gitanilla... Paintings like the one we present here bring us closer to the essence of romanticism, to the exaltation of the soul as a response to an era that placed the cloth on the altar of Reason. To achieve this goal, Romantic painters stopped subordinating color to drawing, thus reproducing pictorial motifs with more expressive force and greater naturalism. The brushstroke becomes impetuous, the color reaches its autonomy, the impasto is thicker, etc. Son of the carver and gilder William Kemm, Robert Kemm's love for painting must have awakened very early, since he was only fourteen years old when he was registered in the census as an artist. During his early years Kemm produced two series of 256 watercolors of Wiltshire churches. Following his contemporaries J. Phillip, J. Bagnold Burgess and E. Long, Kemm made a trip to Spain in the years between 1946 and 1946. Long, he made a trip to Spain between 1861 and 1864, visiting Seville and Granada in particular. In the years preceding his first exhibition, Kemm devoted himself mainly to portraiture. His first exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists took place in 1874. In this first exhibition Kemm already showed all the typical elements of his style, with works on Spanish themes. It is worth mentioning the presentation of several works by Kemm in the exhibition "English Romantic Painters in 19th Century Spain", organized in Zamora by Caja Duero in 1999, from a private Spanish collection. Robert Kemm is represented in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Salisbury Museum, the Wiltshire Archaeological Society, the Sunderland Museum and the Museum of Sheffield, as well as in several important private collections.
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