Thursday 19th December - Marigolds

Argh! Where is my time going?! It is currently 4am and I'm baking a loaf of potato and leek bread to go with a friend's present while answering emails and generally trying to remember everything I have to do before next Tuesday. And I have a food shop to do! However, I'm awake and functioning (sort of) so let's crack on!

Mr Fluffles wasn't in the mood to embrace stardom...

Okay, I'm calmer now.  It's Day 19 of Catvent and so I'm down to my last (and probably favourite) cats in paintings which I have been saving.  Here is today's offering...

Marigolds (1873) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

How many times have I looked at this gorgeous painting and not seen the cat? When I was looking through different paintings with cat content I was surprised to see this come up as I had never noticed his little face behind the girl and her flowers, but there he is, being a malevolent little ratbag...

Okay, yes, he is very cute but I've told you how I feel about cats attacking my wool. To his shame, Mr Walker has been known to encourage the Chairman's pillaging of my wool basket while I should 'Not the blue! The pink one is acrylic, he can have that!'

Marigolds is what I think of as a 'Kelmscott Painting' - it comes out of Rossetti's time at Kelmscott Manor with the Morris family (without William, obviously). It goes by many different names -'Marigolds', 'The Bower Maiden', 'The Gardener's Daughter', 'Fleur-de-Marie' and is what you would expect from a Rossetti painting, especially of this time.  Here we have a golden haired lovely in a green frock, looking beautiful while doing something feminine. A bit like this one...

Oh la! I'm hanging some mistletoe (1860)

And this one...

Look at me! I can't play a violin! (1872)

So, yes, the man had a type. and excuse me, but they all look quite similar even when it is apparently not the same woman.  To be fair, the 1860 painting Hanging the Mistletoe isn't going to be Alexa Wilding who didn't become Rossetti's model until after 1865, but come on, he knew what he liked. So let's talk about the girl in Marigolds...

Rossetti described his intentions for the painting like this - 'It represents a young girl (fair) in a tapestried chamber, with a jar containing marybuds...which she is arranging on a shelf. Near her a cat is playing with a ball of worsted.' He also likened it to Veronica Veronese, above with the violin. That answered one question I had about the alternate title 'Fleur de Marie' as a name for marsh marigolds are marybuds, so 'Flowers of Mary.' Who is the girl?  Rossetti referred to her as 'Little Annie' and that she was a gardener's daughter. Theodore Watts-Dunton later identified her as a maid who worked at Kelmscott.  You know me, none of that is good enough for me. So, off to the records I go!

Sketch for Marigolds

The problem in tracking people with a fairly normal name is that there are normally far too many candidates.  Also, I'm tracking a girl who is a maid in a village, and they notoriously move around.  I'm left looking for 'Annie' who was a maid and, I'm guessing, a teenager in 1873.  That narrows it down. Similar to Mrs Donkin's Cook (who I wrote about here) this is not an easy pursuit, but I had a look at the 1871 census.  Luckily, if our lass was in Kelmscott in 1871 then it isn't a large place and I should be able to spot her.  Or anyone called Annie.  Or anyone aged around 15-20ish.  No, no luck there as there were no likely candidates, no gardener's daughters of that age.  If you are after an agricultural labourer, you're in luck and of course, that could be what was recorded, but none with daughters of an appropriate age.  Obviously, a family could have magically moved in to Kelmscott in 1872, with a gardener and his titian-haired daughter Annie and I would have no way of knowing. How frustrating!  There is one suggestion and I'm relying on a little supposition and the word 'possibly' but it's Christmas so humour me.

Anne Luker Allen was born in about 1860 in Little Faringdon, just over the meadows from Kelmscott Manor (as Burne-Jones found out as he travelled to and fro to Buscot Park). In 1871, she was living with her uncle Philip Comley, an agricultural labourer.  The reason Miss Allen caught my eye was that by 1881, Anne had come to Kelmscott to work as a domestic servant and was now known as Annie. Annie Allen had somewhat of a complicated life - she was the illegitimate daughter of Jane Looke (or Looker or Luker or any different versions of the above).  Until 1864, Annie actual went by the elaborate name of Anne Gosling Brooks Looker, possibly to counteract the shame of being illegitimate, as noted on her baptism record.  I wondered if her out-of-wedlock status was part of the reason she was handed over to her uncle and aunt to raise, moving to another aunt, Harriet, who lived in Kelmscott. After 1864, Annie adopted the surname of her father/stepfather/who knows, James Allen.  James was from Coleshill in Oxfordshire/Berkshire and was listed as a agricultural labourer, sadly not a gardener.  However, and here's where I got excited, in 1861, the Allen family had a lodger, Stephen Obadiah Oborne, aged 20, who was a gardener. Now, I'm not saying Mr Oborne (who went on to be a head gardener in Somerset) knocked up Jane Looker and went off to tend his garden leaving James Allen to marry her four years later, after which their other children were born, but it is a mighty coincidence.  It might be as simple as Oborne taught James Allen how to be a gardener and that is what Annie liked to think her father (who she doesn't seem to have lived with, unlike her siblings) did. It might be as simple as Rossetti thinking all agricultural labourers were gardeners. Either way, I think there is a good chance that Annie Allen is our lass.

She still looks like Alexa Wilding if you ask me.

As for the cat, I think it is there to indicate playfulness, a little naughtiness and domestic disruption. I doubt that is any reflection on Annie, only possibly in Rossetti's mind for the character he was portraying.  You know how much I love the Language of Flowers and marigolds are meant to symbolise grief and sorrow, but marsh marigolds are actually kingcups or buttercups, which represent childishness. I don't think that is the point (no matter how mournful and young she looks). Rossetti called the marsh marigold 'the earliest of spring flowers' and if I was feeling fanciful, I would say that represented Annie herself, the little girl who came out too early in her mother's life. 

Annie went on to marry Thomas Wheeler, a farmer and had four children, three boys and lastly a daughter, Lily Annie. Sadly, she died in 1905, aged only 45 years old.

Blimey, maybe this is Trag-vent after all...