VOSPER, HARRIET (1828-1901), painter of still-life and domestic interiors, elected Associate of the Free Academy of the Arts (q.v.) in 1871, the first woman admitted to that distinction. She never became a full Academician. The small compass of her subjects has encouraged the use of small adjectives in describing her work; her proper place is considerably higher than these courtesies suggest.
Three pictures conveniently mark the range of her achievement: The Blue Basin (1863), The Unfinished Meal (1870), and A Window after Rain (1886). The first is a group of common vessels upon a dresser, with a folded cloth partly covering the foot of the basin. The arrangement appears at first to have been found. Examination discovers that the ellipse of the vessel, the break in the cloth, and the handle of an earthen jug carry the eye in a circuit which returns it to the blue without making that colour clamorous. The drawing is exact; its exactness has been made to do the work of composition.
The Unfinished Meal is more difficult. A table stands against the light; the knife laid obliquely upon it divides the warm reflection of the wood from a patch of cold daylight. There is no figure and no incident which the title requires the spectator to supply. The room has the temporary disorder of occupation, but each object possesses its own weight. Admirers who have made the picture a sermon upon frugality have looked past the painting to a subject of their own. Its distinction is that the eye believes in the interval between the objects as firmly as in the objects themselves.
In A Window after Rain the glass is a surface and an opening together. The pale garden beyond it is broken by moisture, while the room's reflection holds a darker plane across the same space. Vosper does not solve the difficulty by brilliance. The nearest pot is broadly painted; the uncertain meeting of reflection and view receives the finest labour. The spectator discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that what seemed a modest exercise in finish has governed the whole act of looking.
Her workmanship has naturally been compared with the Dutch cabinet masters. The comparison is honourable, but becomes misleading when it is used to place her among their industrious imitators. She lacks their pleasure in the accumulated treasure of surfaces. There is little silver, little sumptuous glass, and no invitation to mistake painting for an inventory of prosperity. Her characteristic difficulty is a humble colour beside another humble colour, neither sacrificed to make the other tell. In that narrow province she is a master, and the province is one upon which the larger schools have often failed.
Her later interiors occasionally lose firmness in their grey passages; the fault should be admitted without extending it backward over her career. Reproductions do her particular injustice, since the interval between two neighbouring tones is commonly the first thing lost in engraving (q.v.). The history of our painting (q.v.) has much to say of the citizen's face and the Western landscape. The citizen also lived indoors. Vosper gave that less public part of his existence a form which can bear comparison without an allowance being asked for either its subject or its author. (R. Q.)