John William Godward

John William Godward’s art is the punctuation mark of the so-called Victorian High Renaissance.  His Greco-Roman compositions reached maturity in the mid-1890s, more or less concurrently with the deaths of two of the movement’s leading figureheads, Frederic, Lord Leighton and Albert Joseph Moore.  To be sure, Godward’s more famous Victorian High Renaissance contemporary, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was still active in the 1890s, and would be through the first decade of the twentieth century.  But Godward outlived them all, and continued to create his placid and often wistful Neo-Classical Mediterranean figure paintings through the tumultuous years of World War I and into the early 1920s.