Artist: Gustav Pope (British, 1831–1910)
Title: Accident or Design?
Medium: Antique engraving on wove paper after the original by master engraver William Greatbach (printmaker; British; Male; 1802 – 1894).
Signature: Signed in the plate.
Dimensions: Image Size – 7 1/4 x 9 7/8 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 16 x 19 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
The title, is sufficiently suggestive to answer its purpose of telling the commencement of a love-story; the composition, as a whole, is pretty, and the principals in it, saving a little alfectation of manner in both which is almost inseparable from the sentiment, are carefully studied. There is evidently neither reading nor sketching going on ; the thoughts of each are centred in the other, and the eyes of the lady watch every movement of the gallant to see if his next steps will bring him nearer to her. She is the most attractive object in the picture, even viewed artistically, for the figure is very gracefully posed, and her costume is well displayed.
Gustav Pope (was a British painter of Austrian origin. Active in the Victorian era, he incorporated several styles on his work, but in his mature style he showed influences of the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Little is known about Pope’s training as a painter, but he is listed as a regular exhibitor in London from 1852 to 1895, at the British Institution, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy. His work shows the influence of Thomas Seddon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederic, Lord Leighton. English literary sources, classical mythology, portraiture, landscape and idealized images of young women are the most typical subjects in his paintings. Some sources shows Gustav Pope as deceased by 1895, based on the last year he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, we can be certain that the year of his death, in 1910, his widow presented the painting A Rainy Day to the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in memory of her husband. He was a resident of Chelsea, according to the 1910 Census.