Robert Kemm

ROBERT KEMM (Salisbury, England, 1837 – London, 1895).
“Andalusian Scene.”
Oil on canvas.
With period frame.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 92 x 71.5 cm; 114 x 94 cm (frame).

The son of woodcarver and gilder William Kemm, Robert Kemm’s passion for painting must have been sparked at a very early age, as he is listed in the census as an artist at just fourteen years old. During his early years, Kemm produced two series of 256 watercolors depicting churches in Wiltshire. Following in the footsteps of his contemporaries J. Phillip, J. Bagnold Burgess, and E. Long, he traveled to Spain between 1861 and 1864, visiting Seville and Granada in particular. In the years leading up to his first exhibition, Kemm devoted himself primarily to portraiture. His first show at the Royal Society of British Artists took place in 1874. In this debut exhibition, Kemm already displayed all the typical elements of his style, featuring works with Spanish themes. Of particular note is the presentation of several of Kemm’s works in the exhibition “English Romantic Painters in 19th-Century Spain,” organized in Zamora by Caja Duero in 1999, featuring pieces from a private Spanish collection. Robert Kemm is represented in the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, the Salisbury Museum, the Wiltshire Archaeological Society, the Sunderland Museum, and the Sheffield Museum, as well as in several major private collections.
During the 19th century, Spain and England maintained a special relationship. The valuable support provided by Great Britain to the Spanish patriotic fervor in the face of the French invaders led the Spanish to view the British with sympathy. For their part, British painters and writers flocked to Spain, a country that offered them the quintessence of Romantic idealism. Perhaps in search of a more natural and authentic landscape, they traveled to the Iberian Peninsula, where the Industrial Revolution had not yet marred the landscape. Advances in transportation turned Spain into an exotic yet accessible destination for young English painters who rejected the industrial bourgeoisie and the spiritual poverty that was taking hold of the ever-expanding major cities. In fact, after the War of Independence, our country began to take on an aura of exoticism and extravagance that attracted a large number of English intellectuals and artists. Moorish Andalusia, the bandit, the obscurantist Church, the dashing bullfighter and the maja, the lady in a mantilla, the barefoot children, the beggar clad in rags, Cervantes’s little gypsy girl... Paintings such as the one presented here bring us closer to the essence of Romanticism—the exaltation of the emotional as a response to an era that placed reason on a pedestal. To achieve this goal, Romantic painters ceased to subordinate color to line, thereby rendering pictorial subjects with greater expressive power and naturalism. The brushstroke becomes impetuous, color achieves its autonomy, the impasto is thicker, and so on.