Arts & Crafts 2

Another tit-bit from the MacCarthy biography of Eric Gill, last mentioned a couple of posts ago.

In the form of a book plate, sufficiently recherché that he has the foot of the young lady straying out of her proper domain, which is fully above the lower border. With Gill being so back to basics, anti-art-establishment and all the rest of it. Too careful a craftsman for it to be a mistake.

But he is in good company as a quick whiz around the Sainsbury's wing of the National Gallery would reveal, with plenty of stuff straying out of the proper domain. The earliest example of such a thing that I know of is from around 500BC which, as luck would have it, I was able to turn up on this occasion, having failed on the last two or three times that I thought of it. See exhibit 1989.281.62, a Greek pot in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. See also reference 1.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=1989.281.62.

Reference 2: The Archaeology of Nostalgia - John Boardman - 2002. Not Gombrich, the first person I think of in this sort of connection.

Reference 3: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1989.281.62/. In the first of the additional views, the stables of Poseidon, one of the manikins can just be seen on the far right, climbing out of the upper frieze.