Walter Crane and his wife returned from their third trip to Italy in late 1890. In March of the following year they decided to travel to America and visited Boston, New York, Niagara Falls, Chicago, St.Louis and California. In July 1892, they sailed for the island of Nantucket, where:
"We found at Wauwinet a charming cottage, with a studio, placed at our disposal by our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pretyman. I had work to carry out here too. I had been commissioned to paint two large panels for the decoration of the hall of the Women's Temperance Building at Chicago... Our house (named "The Wreck") was so near the sea - being actually on the sands - that it was easy to walk straight in for a bathe... Watching the sea breaking all day along the long line of the shore, the motive suggested itself which I afterwards carried out in my picture Neptune's Horses (Neue Pinakothek, Munich), the first sketch for which was made at Wauwinet."
-- from www.leicestergalleries.com
"The Horses of Neptune"
Walter Crane - 1892
At first, Crane's reading of Shelley and of Liberal thinkers like J. S. Mill had aroused his creative, his artist's enthusiasm for the liberation of the imaginative potential in every person, and this led him to ponder the nature of a society in which such potential could be given full expression. It must surely be a society based on equality and freedom from poverty and exploitation. Henceforth his fondness for allegory and symbolism would be transferred from the past to the present, translated into political messages: winged figures in flowing costume, once derived from myths, would be turned into powerful emblems of the struggle, designed to encourage not only revolutionary change but a new consciousness that art can transform life.
-- from Working Class Movement Library, www.wcml.org.uk
Cottons, rayon, bylon netting. Bas-relief
soft sculpted irregular-shaped wall hanging.
Juried into 1999 New Zealand
National Quilt Competition.
"Based closely on Walter Crane's painting, "The Horses of Neptune". This quilted wall hanging has special significance for me as my father was a sailor. I have sailed in sailboats across the Atlantic and I now live in a home, which my husband built, that overlooks Golden Bay to the Tasman Sea. White horses on the water foretell the weather."
-- from www.leicestergalleries.com
