Alon Zakaim Fine Art

John William Godward was born in England in 1861 and lived in Wilton Grove in Wimbledon. An English painter from the end of the Pre-Raphaelite / Victorian Neo-Classicist era, he was a follower of Frederick Leighton and a protégé of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, with whom he shared a penchant for rendering Classical architecture. Godward began exhibiting at the Royal Academy from 1887 and continued to do so regularly throughout his career. His family never approved of his chosen career and after he moved to Italy with one of his models in 1912 they broke off all contact with him and cut him from their family pictures. No photographs of Godward are known to survive.

The vast majority of Godward's paintings feature women in Classical dress, posed against landscape features. There are also some semi-nude and fully nude figures included in his oeuvre, notably “In The Tepidarium” (1913), a title shared with a controversial Alma-Tadema painting of the same subject that resides in the Lady Lever Art Gallery. The titles of his work reflect Godward's main source of inspiration, Classical civilisation: a subject which bound him closely to Alma-Tadema. Similarly to Alma-Tadema, Godward also meticulously studied details of architecture and dress, in order to ensure that his works bore the stamp of authenticity.

The appearance of beautiful women in studied poses in so many of Godward's canvases causes many people to mistakenly categorise him as a Pre-Raphaelite, particularly as his palette was often a vibrantly and colourful. However, Godward’s choice of subject matter (ancient civilisation) is more properly that of the Victorian Neoclassicist, though in keeping with the Pre- Raphelites he produced romanticised images of the world.

By the 1920’s the beauty and precision of Godward’s work was rapidly becoming overshadowed by the changing tastes of art critics of the time. Returning to England in 1919, Godward discovered that the popularity of his style was disappearing under the blaze of the 20th century avant-garde, falling out of favour with the arrival of painters such as Picasso.

John William Godward committed suicide in 1922 at the age of 61. He is said to have written in his suicide note that "the world was not big enough" for him and a Picasso.
He was the best of the last great European painters to straight-forwardly embrace classical Greece and Rome in their art. In his work we see the final summation of half a millennium of Classical antique influence on Western painting. It vanished during Godward's generation- killed, as it were, by contemporary nihilistic philosophies.

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