The Government announced the budget earlier today, but cuts in public funding are already taking their toll elsewhere. Truro’s Royal Cornwall Museum is hoping to raise some much-needed revenue through the sale of two pieces of its Victorian artwork. “Bondage” by Ernest Normand was painted in 1895 and, like many of his works, depicts a fetishised notion of ancient slavery and harem life. Herbert Draper’s “The Sea Maiden” shows a nude mermaid trapped in the nets of a fishing boat. Like many artists of the era, Draper’s work concentrates mainly on the femmes fatales of classical literature and mythology.
I’ve spoken briefly before about the theme of dangerous women in Pre-Raphaelite art. In middle and upper-class Victorian Britain, puritanical morality, enforced modesty and prudish behaviour reigned for both men and women. Yet things were not as they seemed. Beneath society’s respectable surface, a wealth of erotic art and literature subverted the sexual norms. Much of it lurked happily under the guise of classicism. By enjoying the nude antics of the ancients – men lured into peril by deadly seductresses or Homeric, homoerotic acts of heroism, for example – Victorian ladies and gents could explore their personal kinks and appear cultured, rather than reveal themselves to be ordinary perverts like the rest of us.
If you’ve got a spare million quid or so, go here.
