PANDORA'S BOX: WALTER CRANE, “OUR SPHINX-RIDDLE,” AND THE POLITICS OF DECORATION

Victorian Literature and Culture (2007), 35, 309–326. Printed in the United States of America.Copyright C© 2007 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/07 $9.50

PANDORA’S BOX: WALTER CRANE, “OURSPHINX-RIDDLE,” AND THE POLITICS

OF DECORATION

By Morna O’Neill

WITH WALTER CRANE, marginality is a question of medium. For his contemporaries, Crane’sartistic practice embodied the ethos of Arts and Crafts eclecticism, apparent in this view ofhis studio from 1885 (Figure 15): watercolor, oil painting, tempera, sculpture, design, andillustration vie for our attention. As the painter Sir William Rothenstein recalled, “Cranecould do anything he wanted, or anyone else wanted” (292). As an artist, designer, and –crucially – a socialist, Crane disregarded the traditional distinctions between high art andpopular culture. With a history of art constructed along the fault lines of media, school, andstyle, Crane’s diverse artistic practice and radical politics defy easy categorization. And thisis precisely the point: his work requires the viewer to think across media, to move from themargins of wallpaper and illustration to the center of painting and back again. Or perhaps it ismore fruitful to think of this process as one of inversion, placing wallpaper at the center andpainting at its margins. According to Homi Bhabha, it is this “disjunctive temporality” (151)of the margins that allows cultural identity and political solidarities to emerge. The forgingof political solidarities through art was the crux of Crane’s project, and the disruption ofestablished cultural hierarchies signaled the central role of art in political agitation. Visibleon the right margin of photograph of Crane’s studio (see Figure 15), the watercolor Pandorafrom 1885 (Figure 16) provides an ideal starting point for an exploration of the ways inwhich socialist politics move from the decorative margins to the very heart of Crane’s art, aprocess enabled by the artist’s politicized reinterpretation of classical mythology.

Throughout a range of related artistic and political projects, Crane deployed thedecorative emblem of the classical sphinx, seen on the margins of Pandora, as a dualutterance, a figure of art that is always a figure of politics and vice versa. While literaryscholars have commented at length on the significance of “medial substitutions,” for example,in the transference from linguistic to visual media, art historians have given less attentionto “intermediality,” the translation of the same motif across different visual media. Cranecirculated the sphinx throughout a range of his artistic, political production and disruptednot only the categories of fine art and decorative art but also those of art and propaganda.Here intermediality approaches a kind of Fabian permeation, which Sidney Webb definedretrospectively as “the inculcation of Socialist thought and Socialist projects into the mindsnot merely of complete converts” (xxvi). Crane was a longtime member of the Fabian Society,

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Figure 15. View of Walter Crane’s studio, 1885, reprinted in Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (NewYork: Macmillan, 1907) opposite 143. Collection of the author.

and the appearance of the sphinx in his work immediately and endlessly signals its politicalassociations.

Pandora

WITHIN THIS ELABORATELY decorated and theatrical setting, a grieving Pandora embraces abox. According to Greek legend, the god Hephaestus created Pandora, the first mortal woman,at the command of Zeus as a gift for the Titan Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus (Warner216–17). The gods gave her a casket that she was instructed never to open. It contained thespirits of evil as well as the spirit of hope. The temptation proved irresistible: Pandoraopened the box and unleashed evil on the world. Yet hope remained inside as a comfortto humankind. In Crane’s watercolor (Figure 16), the box is elevated on a platform andmagnificently decorated, with each sheen and surface carefully rendered. The inlaid endpanel features the tree of knowledge of good and evil intertwined by the serpent, with thethree fates depicted on the side panels: Clotho spins, Athropos weaves, and Lachesis cuts

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Figure 16. Walter Crane, Pandora, 1885. Watercolor, private collection. Reprinted in Walter Crane, AnArtist’s Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan, 1907) opposite 144. Collection of the author.

the thread of human life (Bell 310). A regal sphinx guards each corner of the casket, andthe sphinx is the most prominent of the “minatory emblems of austere heraldry” (“FineArt Gossip” 512), appearing on the floor, the curtain, and the casket and signaling Crane’spenchant for “sphinxly ornament” (Schleinitz 70).

A contemporary critic termed this profusion of suggestive ornament the “decorativeorder” (“Walter Crane” 5) of Crane’s painting. And it is the decorative elements that glossthe literary import of the subject matter: Pandora is a crucial statement of what Cranewould later term the “identical” forms of decoration and symbolism (Crane and Day 88). Headopted the emblem as the best expression of a unity of symbolic purpose and decorativeeffect, inspired by his study of Renaissance book illustration and classical ornament.1 Latenineteenth century scholars suggested that Renaissance emblems transformed an object fromnature, art, or mythology into an expression of general truth (Daly and Silcox). Crane lookedto mythology for his subjects, inspired by Walter Pater’s essays on the subject later collectedas Greek Studies, which advocated the continued ethical power of classical myths. For Pater,figures such as Pandora are “pure ideas” that absorb “the condition of physical and spirituallife” throughout the ages (155). Form and content are inseparable in this formulation, as theemblem drawn from mythology telescopes the particular and the universal. In his influential


primer The Bases of Design (1898), Crane outlined the formation of emblems and theirmeaning:

While much early ornament, as we have seen, is traceable to a constructive origin, another kind, oranother branch of the tree of design is traceable to a symbolic origin, and springs from the endeavourto express thought – to find a succinct language in which to express some sense of the great powersof nature, and their influence upon the daily life of man – to embody even in a pictorial emblem,symbol, or allegory his primitive conceptions of the order of the universe itself (Bases 230).

Here Crane acknowledges Gottfried Semper’s influential theory of ornament as the orderingof materials, its “constructive origin” in knotting, seams, and weaving, for example.2 Yet hesuggests the central importance of “another kind” of design, namely, the origin of ornamentin the desire to convey meaning. In fact, Crane singled out Pandora as an example of thesymbolic power of the decorative, “in the ancient Greek story of Pandora and her box, sosuggestive a subject to artists, and fruitful in art, we have the classical version of the fall ofman and origin of evil” (Bases 230). Here he endorses the view of comparative mythologistssuch as Friedrich Max Muller, who emphasized, amid some controversy, the equivalencesbetween pagan myths and their Judeo-Christian counterparts. Pandora was the first mortalwoman whose actions, like those of her Biblical counterpart, had dire consequences for thecourse of humankind. The figure of Eve, and broadly speaking, the ideal of the Garden ofEden, held great symbolic currency within the rhetoric of socialism, as powerful evocations ofgreed, damnation, and redemption. The emblems of the serpent and the three fates evoke thefall of humankind and its concomitant renewal under socialism. Pandora deploys emblematicforms from the broader vocabulary of myth and religion to convey a narrative of hope, notonly the hope retained in the box, but the hope of individual redemption and societal renewalpoliticized in its association.

The sphinx, however, remains a mystery. Although redolent with symbolic meaning, ithas no traditional literary or artistic associations with the story of Pandora. Its prominentplacement of the sphinx – repeated in the floor, on the curtain, as guardians of the casket,echoed in the posture of Pandora herself – only enhances the charged mysteriousness of thescene. While they add a sense of Oriental mystery and imperial overtone to the scene, thesphinxes take on a further narrative and symbolic importance in Pandora when consideredin relation to Crane’s 1887 canvas The Riddle of the Sphinx (Figure 17) and the writingsof Thomas Carlyle. Through its reference to Carlyle and contemporary socialist discourse,and its intermediality, the translation from painting and illustration to political cartoon andwallpaper, the sphinx reaches beyond the hermetic world of Crane’s own artistic practice tocomment upon art and politics under socialism.

The Riddle of the Sphinx

THE SPHINX EMERGES from the decorative sphere of Pandora in Crane’s oil painting TheRiddle of the Sphinx from 1887. A monstrous creature combining aspects of woman, lion,snake, and eagle, the Sphinx terrorized Thebes by disposing of those who failed to answerher riddle correctly. Oedipus succeeds and brings about the Sphinx’s downfall. In Crane’spainting, a monumental sphinx perches on a rocky outcropping in a desolate landscape,with the city of Thebes denoted by a cluster of square towers in the distance echoing the

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Figure 17. Walter Crane, The Riddle of the Sphinx, 1887. Oil painting, untraced. Reprinted in Pearson’sMagazine, XXI/126 (June 1906) 577. Courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York PublicLibrary, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

representation of cities in Renaissance frescoes, an allusion to the decorative tradition inpainting. A discarded skull signals the Sphinx’s terrible bloodlust. A graceful Oedipus hasapproached to answer the riddle, and his half-kneeling pose indicates both his deferenceto the power of the Sphinx and his ultimately victorious challenge to her authority. Heis a delicate balance between reverence and impertinence, the horizontal of his extendedright leg playing off of the forceful vertical of his raised right arm. Despite Oedipus’striumph, the Sphinx remains the monstrous focus of Crane’s image, the eternal keeper of theriddle. Although Crane submitted The Riddle of the Sphinx to the 1887 Grosvenor Galleryexhibition, he withdrew the painting soon after it opened believing that gallery organizerSir Coutts Lindsay hid his painting behind a pillar rather than disrupt his aesthetic oasiswith what he viewed, presumably, as a political statement (Spencer 129). Although the storyof Oedipus and the Sphinx speaks of the complex interplay between individual action anduniversal inevitability earlier thematized in Pandora (1885), it seems unclear today why adepiction of the Sphinx would raise a socialist red flag.3

A legendary figure of mystery, the sphinx was an object of fascination, artistic andotherwise, in the nineteenth century. Crane exhibited The Riddle of the Sphinx at London’s


Fine Art Society in 1891 as part of his retrospective exhibition there, and he was fullyaware of both the contemporary power of the sphinx motif and its capacity for proliferatingmeaning: sexual, imperial, and otherwise.4 As he writes in the catalogue for this display,“A later picture is ‘The Riddle of the Sphinx’ dealing with another ancient classical storycapable as most of them are of most modern application. Have we not our sphinx-like riddle?More than one, perhaps” (Catalogue 18). He placed the work next to Pandora in the Fine ArtSociety gallery, enacting the intermediality of his decorative motifs and drawing attention tothe repetition of the sphinx in his earlier watercolor. While Pandora’s tragedy is temperedby hope, Oedipus’s victory is tempered by tragedy. Crane continues in the catalogue, “Sitsnot the creature overshadowing our cities? Are not her claws fixed into the hearts of nations?And what of Oedipus? Will he not guess the riddle? Has he not guessed it already?” Withhis dramatic series of rhetorical questions, Crane politicises the riddle. The sphinx is now acreature tormenting modern cities and destroying nations until humankind, represented byOedipus, can solve it. Here Crane plays upon the political resonance of the expression “theriddle of the sphinx” and contemporary notions of the “sphinx riddle.” For this, he and othersocialists looked to Past and Present (1843) by Thomas Carlyle.

Though often identified with illiberal beliefs in his more recent reception (VandenBossche), Carlyle was an important forbearer for late-nineteenth-century socialists. He wasamong the first cultural critics to resist a political and social outlook abhorrent to theirown (Willis 417; Pierson 456). The Sphinx emerges as one of his most powerful rhetoricalfigures. For Carlyle, she represents the problem of how to find purpose in a seeminglyarbitrary universe. She embodies the insistent ferociousness of modern life: “Of each manshe asks daily, in mild voice, yet with a terrible significance, ‘Knowest thou the meaning ofthis Day?’” (Carlyle 13). Her riddle is no longer a simple conundrum about the progress ofman from youth to old age. It is now a probing question about the meaning of life and theplace of the individual in industrial society. Carlyle’s Sphinx emerges most forcefully in hisdiscussion of social protest in Manchester. The workingmen of Manchester posed their ownsort of Sphinx-riddle as they assembled at St. Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819. As Carlyleinterprets it, they gave physical form to the question “What do you mean to do with us?”(13). The resulting Peterloo Massacre, where armed yeoman cavalry killed thirteen unarmedmen and women, focused public attention on the divisive social effects of an industrialismthat would turn people against one another.5 According to Carlyle, “All England heard thequestion: it is the first practical form of our Sphinx-riddle. England will answer it; or, on thewhole, England will perish” (22). No longer a fable of antique curiosity, the riddle expressedthe urgent need for reform.

The trope of the Sphinx is a powerful example of the wide reach of Carlyle’s influence.Later socialist writers adopted this metaphor of “our Sphinx-riddle” to express the decisionsthat face the modern Oedipus; it features in the writings of E. Belfort Bax, Sidney Webb,and George Bernard Shaw, among others. In 1889 Crane translated The Riddle of the Sphinxto political illustration, providing a frontispiece for Fabian Essays in Socialism (Figure 18)based upon his painting. Crane had first accepted an invitation to lecture to the Fabian Societyon “Art and Commercialism” in October 1885 and soon after became an active memberof the organization until his resignation in 1901.6 In the Fabian Society design, the sphinxis an amalgamation of his earlier considerations of the same figure: while her pose recallsThe Riddle of the Sphinx, she grasps a sphere similar to the glass orbs in Pandora. Oedipuswears the cap of liberty. He signals his victory with more than an accusatory pointing of

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Figure 18. After Walter Crane, frontispiece, Fabian Essays in Socialism. Ed. G. B. Shaw (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1889). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.


his finger; he unfurls a banner proclaiming “Fabian Essays in Socialism.” As Crane wroteto George Bernard Shaw, “You see the idea – the sphinx of individualism is clutching theworld while the Æedipus [sic] of Socialism arrives with the true answer to her riddle –political, moral, economic, social, and she is checkmated” (Shaw: Add.50531.ff.125v). AsCrane acknowledges, the Carlylean sphinx was a particularly apt emblem for the FabianSociety, which played upon its relationship with an earlier tradition of English radicalism inbuilding its membership.

Yet the frontispiece, like The Riddle of the Sphinx before it, was more than a simpleallusion to Carlyle’s text. Rather, its location within a collection of socialist essays and itsrole as the emblem that introduces these texts reconfigures Carlyle’s metaphor and claimshis rhetoric for socialism. The figure in The Riddle of the Sphinx canvas becomes the “sphinxof individualism” in his frontispiece. Through the repetition of the sphinx emblem, Cranevisually enacts the Fabian ideal of permeation. Hubert Bland first used the term in hiscontribution to Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889) to discuss the way in which the LiberalParty absorbed Fabian ideals (189). Sidney Webb later defined it more fully as a politicaltactic, the subtle figuring of socialism “into the minds not merely of converts, but of thosewhom we found in disagreement with us” (xxvi).7 Permeation is a process of infiltration, adoctrine that seeks continuity with the past and a radical revision of that past (Cole 85), muchlike Crane’s own borrowing from mythology. Fabian permeation mirrors Crane’s own artisticintermediality, with the transference of political meaning to seemingly neutral emblems suchas the sphinx.

The relationship between art and politics is thus reciprocal. The translatability ofthe emblem enables permeation while permeation requires a translatable emblem. Thecontingency of meaning created by intermediality thus reflects back upon his earliertreatments of the sphinx. When Crane painted Pandora in 1885 and when he contributed TheRiddle of the Sphinx to the Grosvenor Gallery in 1887, the sphinx was already politicized.With Fabian Essays in Socialism, the earlier painted images retrospectively take on a Fabiansignificance, and the frontispiece provides a commentary on the place of art in socialistagitation. Whether in the background of Pandora or the forefront of the Fabian Essays inSocialism, the sphinx signals a political message.

Crane made explicit the political import of the Pandora story and its message of hopein 1892 with his illustrations for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Boys andGirls (Figure 19), first published in 1852.8 He disregards Hawthorne’s description of a boxdecorated with cherubs and foliage in favor of a casket identical to that in Pandora.9 In a boldgesture for a children’s book, Crane has placed a cap of liberty on the head of Epimetheus,drawing upon both emblematic tradition and political emblems to integrate new meaning intothe moral depicted.10 Situated between Epimetheus and the box, Pandora is at a crossroads:she must chose between liberty, equality, and fraternity, as represented by her companion inrevolutionary bonnet rouge, and the glittering, material unknown of the box, guarded at eachcorner by a mysterious sphinx. Only the appearance of hope tempers this tale of greed: thehope that remained within the box as a consolation to humankind and the hope promised byEpimetheus’s socialism.

The further translation of the sphinx motif across media creates a network of reciprocalmeaning that unites these images. For example, in his wallpaper design Corona Vitae(Figure 20) from 1889, the same year as the Fabian Society frontispiece, Crane ordersthe ferocious power of the sphinx into a robust yet elegant pattern.11 Two rampant sphinxesface another, front paws grasping the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil with the

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Figure 19. Walter Crane, Pandora Wonders at the Box. From Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder Book forGirls and Boys. London: Osgood McIlvaine, 1892. Courtesy of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.


Figure 20. Walter Crane, design for Corona Vitae, 1889. Reprinted in Walter Crane, The Bases of Design(London: George Bell and Sons, 1898) 122. Collection of the author.

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serpent still entwined. The floriated forms of winged lions and peacocks support the coronavitae, the Biblical “Crown of Life” mentioned by the apostle James as the “earthly reward”(James 1.12) and described fully in Revelations (Revelation 2.10). The corona vitae is atypological symbol, an earthly prize (life) that signals heavenly reward (the afterlife). Theartist himself discussed the symbolic role of these motifs in a label written for the advertisingcircular:

The design may be understood as generally emblematic of a full, rich and simple life, not without itschanges and contrasts, but ever springing anew to flower and fruition. While the floral winged Lions,supporting the Crown of Life, indicate its material triumphs; the Sphinxes, on either side of the tree,figures its mystery and those unanswered problems perpetually presented afresh to humanity in thefruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In the frieze the Crown again appears upheld in triumph by goodgenii of the house, in the full pride of its flowering time, alternating with the fruit-bearing seed afterits kind (Crane, 1889).

The corona vitae represents the material rewards of life while also functioning as a typologicalsymbol for the wealth of a future life. The Carlylean “sphinx-riddle” and the “sphinx ofindividualism” have not lost their political charge in the graceful repeats of the wallpaperdesign. Rather, as a sign of “unanswered problems,” the sphinx brings socialism into thepolite drawing room. Kenneth Ames has written about the pervasive presence of moralizingmotifs in Victorian decorative schemes, the “death in the dining room” brought by somany sideboards carved with scenes of animal slaughter. Yet what we have here is not thepuritanical condemnation of gluttony, for example, but the transference of a radical politicalemblem to decorative design.12 In its relationship to the tree of knowledge of good and eviland the sphinx, this pattern references Pandora’s narrative of hope. Layered with meaningfrom mythology and Carlyle, politics permeate the Corona Vitae design. In its repetition, thesphinx enacts a politicized intermediality at the same time that it embodies Crane’s theory ofthe decorative emblem. As such, it was the ideal figure to represent Crane’s theory of designin the politicized arena of late Victorian art education.

In an 1887 address to art students at the Glasgow School of Art, Crane confronted thecrucial difference between art and design. In examining the relationship between art andnature, Crane dismisses the notion of unmediated representation: “If we patiently try to drawor paint exactly what we see before us adding nothing and taking nothing away, . . . we shallsoon discover that we have to invent some species of pictorial language or convention.”Although he acknowledges Ruskin’s advice in the first volume of Modern Painters to “selectnothing” and “reject nothing” (624), Crane suggests that even this honest exercise involvesan element of artistic convention. The sphinx is the crux of this formulation, forcing the artistto examine the place of individual observation in artistic creation. He continues,

At this point another question arises, “What is truth?” But supposing that, undaunted by this sphinxof nature and her riddle, and determined to face her and give her some sort of answer – as indeed, weall must in some fashion – we should be moved to construct from the results of our studies, dreams,or impressions, something organic, something with a system and life of its own – an arrangement ofline or colour or tone – a design in short. (“Glasgow School of Art”)

This sphinx of nature recalls the near-contemporary “sphinx of individualism” that loomsover the Fabian Essays. According to Crane, it is not the role of the designer to work afternature directly but rather to construct an image through study and imagination. This same


view informed his definition of the emblem, cited earlier, to “embody” the “order of theuniverse itself,” a process that in its very definition fuses the aesthetic and the political.

The larger question of the relationship between art and nature would play a significantrole in Crane’s understanding of the decorative and its political implications. During an 1888lecture on design given at the close of the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society show, Cranefirst delineated the terms that would become the hallmark of his theory of the decorativearts: the “purely pictorial” and the “frankly decorative.” In the easel picture, the exampleof “purely pictorial” work, the artist “repeats the aspects of the natural world, as he sees it,and gives, with all attainable exactness, a certain number of facts.” In contrast, the aim ofthe decorative artist “is the expression of another order of facts, and the attainment of idealbeauty by selection, adaptation, suggestion, suppression, exaggeration” (“Arts and Crafts”412).

As an example of his theory, Crane illustrated his lecture with an emblem of a sphinx,an unnatural creation, both monster and hybrid (Figure 21). The illustration was reprintedwith a report on his lecture in the Builder. The stylized and symbolic sphinx, encased withina lozenge, is the opposite of the “superficial naturalism” that Crane sees as the cause ofall “degradation” in art (“Arts and Crafts” 412). The sphinx fuses both the decorative andthe political, as an emblem that recalls Carlylean anti-capitalism and Crane’s own theoryof symbolic ornament. The wallpaper Corona Vitae is a perfect example of this process,representing a universal condition, or a desired state, through stylized emblems.13 CoronaVitae is one possible answer to the sphinx-riddles of design and politics posed in this momentby contemporary debates over industrial manufacture. The sphinx emerges time and againas a metaphor for the intertwined “riddles” of design and politics, the ways in which designis invested with meaning. Here, the fantastical sphinx, herself a freak of nature, becomes theemblem of good design, abstract and laden with symbolic meaning.

The suggestive emblem of the sphinx provided Crane with a way to adapt hismythological mode and allegorical meaning to directly address political concerns. Thereis a remarkable convergence of these issues around questions of art education, which spokedirectly to the way in which the artist is a worker – the relationship between the artist and hisor her manual and intellectual labor. As Rafael Cardoso Denis has suggested, the debates overthe ethics and aesthetics of design of which I have outlined only a small portion represent “nota cessation of social conflicts over industrial capitalism but their displacement from the arenaof outright physical confrontation to one of ideological regrouping” (10). Throughout the1880s and 90s, the sphinx was a touchstone for this process in Crane’s art. As an emblem,she conflates heated debates over the relation of art to nature with the condemnation ofcapitalism as a state of nature. As presented in Carlyle, the sphinx revealed the violent,animal nature of society. For Crane, as for other socialists, the Darwinian implications wereclear: pressed into a struggle for survival, humankind must evolve. The goal of “progress,”configured in organic and evolutionary terms, was a founding principle of Fabian socialism(Wolfe). The artist commented upon the centrality of this evolutionary ideal to his politicaloutlook, hailing Charles Darwin and even Herbert Spencer as “prophets” through which “wemay behold the gleam of a new epoch” (Crane, “Of Aesthetic Pessimism” 40). In politics,as in art, the sphinx is a force of nature that must be overcome.

In his epic poem The Craftsman’s Dream from 1889, Crane re-imagined this physicalconfrontation through art, placing art education and politics at the center of the confrontationbetween Oedipus and the sphinx. An unemployed craftsman wanders into a museum where heobserves the revolutionary transformation of society to socialism. For the opening illustration

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Figure 21. “Illustrations of Mr. Walter Crane’s Lecture on ‘Design,’” from the Builder, 8 December 1888:412. Courtesy of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

(Figure 22), Crane shows his heroic craftsman paused before a sculpted sphinx.14 Later in thenarrative, the craftsman comes upon a painting that seems to be an imaginative projectionof his own thoughts onto the canvas: a band of workers, assisted by figures from historyand mythology, defeats a monstrous Capitalist and his minions. Thus all the sphinx riddlesare successfully answered and, as Crane concludes in his poem, “Art and Labour’s causeis one” (“The Craftsman’s Dream” 206)15 There is no longer Carlyle’s plaintive “What doyou mean to do with us?” of Manchester workers at Peterloo described in Past and Present.Rather, throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century, sphinxes posed the riddlescontested in both art and politics in Crane’s work.


Figure 22. Walter Crane, The Craftsman’s Dream, c. 1889. Pen and ink drawing. Courtesy of the HuntingtonLibrary, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California. Gift of the Friends.

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Figure 23. Henry Scheu, The Triumph of Labour, 1891. Engraving. Reprinted in Walter Crane, Cartoonsfor the Cause: A Souvenir of the International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress, 1886–1896 (London: Twentieth Century, 1896). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YaleUniversity.

Crane reinforced this interconnectedness, and the sphinx as an emblem that unites both,at his Fine Art Society exhibition in 1891, when Pandora, The Riddle of the Sphinx, andCorona Vitae were first displayed together. Crane’s catalogue text created a network withinwhich to relate these works, yet he also indicates that there is more work to be done: “But Iam afraid our modern sphinx is not so easily disposed of. The Triumph of Labour is perhapsnearer the mark” (Catalogue 18). Leveling traditional distinctions between media, Craneshifts his emphasis from painting to the political cartoon he created to commemorate MayDay in 1891. Yet he renders The Triumph of Labour (Figure 23) without sphinxes, insteaddepicting the united causes of industrial, agricultural, and artistic labor as a happy progressionof liberated workers through a setting of natural bounty. Like many of his images for thesocialist cause, Crane’s cartoon borrows emblems, such as the Phrygian bonnet, and slogansfrom the French Revolution and English Trade Unionism. An agricultural worker on the rightannounces the victory of labor with his pitchfork and following behind, industrial laborerscarry the banner of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” At the far left, artists and architects,including a self-portrait of Crane seated in the far left holding a palette aloft, ride in a wagonbearing the standard “Wage Workers of all Countries Unite.” The Angel of Freedom leadsthis panoply. With her proud stance and broad wings, she is the formal and ideologicalinverse of the sphinx. If the sphinx posed the questions of capitalism in Crane’s work, thenthe Angel of Freedom suggests the answer. It is as if The Triumph of Labour represents theworld after the sphinx’s riddles of art and society are solved, exemplified by the decorativeunion of form and content. The sphinx moves once again from margin to the center, and sheis transformed in the process.

NOTES

Thanks to Tim Barringer, Jay Curley, Gillian Forrester, and Michael Hatt for their comments andsuggestions.


1. Crane was an enthusiastic student of emblems and an avid collector of books on the subject. He owneda seventeenth-century edition of Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum liber and an eighteenth-century editionof Francis Quarles’s Emblems (1777), now in the Walter Crane Archive.

2. For a discussion of Semper’s influence, see Connelly 63–64.3. Just ten years later, however, Crane faced public criticism over the exhibition of the blatantly anti-

imperial Britannia’s Vision (1897) during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (Crane, Reminiscences445). Such a critical context suggests an anti-imperial reading for Crane’s The Riddle of the Sphinx.Crane and many other socialists were concerned with the effects of empire’s drain of energy andresources on a home economy, as well as the subjugation of native populations. Anti-imperialism,however, was neither a specifically socialist concern nor necessarily a concern of socialist groups.Crane did resign from the Fabian Society in 1900 when they failed to condemn the Boer War. AsCrane wrote in his resignation letter, “Love for liberty is not shown by the attempts to carve otherstates into your opinion” (dated 11 February 1900, Fabian Collection).

4. Debelius perceptively maps the Sphinx’s sexuality on top of the confused and often conflated issueof national origin: “the sphinx also functions . . . as an expression of concerns about empire crumblingand sexual preferences shifting” (7).

5. Crane had first hand experience with the martyrdom of the worker, as he attended the labor rally inTrafalgar Square on 20 November 1887. Alfred Linnell was crushed when the mounted police chargedat the surging masses assembled in the square; he died a few days later. Walter Crane and William Morriscommemorated his death with the pamphlet “Alfred Linnell, Killed in Trafalgar Square, November 20,1887,” a copy of which exists in the Working Class Movement Library, Salford. Donald has suggestedthat in commemorating the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, artists such as George Cruikshank lookedto “grand narratives akin to modern history painting rather than emblems of early Radical imagery”(185). Crane, in turn, looked to Cruikshank’s Peterloo “monument” in his commemoration of the deathof Linnell.

6. By 1885 Crane was an active member of various socialist organizations and had become a popular voicein contemporary debates about art and politics. H. M. Hyndman, founder of the Social DemocraticParty, named him “the artist of socialism” (351). Crane probably came to the Fabian Society throughhis friendship with George Bernard Shaw.

7. For Shaw, Sidney Webb, and other Fabians, “permeation” also involved broadening their platform toappeal to parliamentary Liberals and “radical Tories” in the Ruskinian and Carlylean mold. Whilesome critics have dismissed “permeation” as ideologically unsound, it contributed to the popularityof the party, garnered political influence, and yielded far-reaching social programs, as discussed inMcBriar.

8. The United States edition appeared in 1893, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. of Boston.Crane’s career as an illustrator, particularly as an illustrator of children’s books, entered a period ofextraordinary activity and innovation in the 1880s and early 90s that rivaled his earlier groundbreakingwork with Edmund Evans in the 1870s. For a discussion of this earlier period of illustration see Hydeand Grabow.

9. An earlier illustrated edition closely followed Hawthorne’s text, with vignettes by the Americanillustrator Hammatt Billings, who portrayed Pandora in 1852 as the epitome of Victorian ideals ofchildish feminine innocence. See O’Gorman.

10. As Dolvers persuasively suggests, many of Crane’s illustrations exploit the semiotic gap betweenstraightforward depiction of narrative and an imaginative picturing that can be taken as visual “counter-texts” to the written text, functioning as Derridean supplements, “[infusing] implied political meaningsinto seemingly ‘common-sense’ ones” (Dolvers 208).

11. Crane designed the paper for Jeffrey & Co. For more on Crane’s work in wallpaper and his relationshipto the wallpaper industry, see Wood 59–67.

12. Crane brought socialism into his dining room with a settle of his own design known to the family as“The Seat for Three.” A mantel over the bench depicted three heroic male figures in caps of liberty

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raising glasses in a toast to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” He memorialized this piece of furniturewith his “A Seat for Three, Rondeau Written On A Settle” included in his privately published volumeof poetry from 1891, Renascence, A Book of Verse. A photograph of the settle in situ exists in theWalter Crane Archive, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester.

13. Riegl would similarly confront the place of nature in design and the question of abstraction. Inexamining the relationship between nature and form, Riegl asserted that the artistic impulse, the desireto create, came before the mimetic impulse, the desire to reproduce. This recalls Crane’s suggestionthat design “embodies” ideals rather than reproduces nature. For Riegl, this was the “kunstwollen,” the“will to form” with style shaped by the cultural messages they carried. Unlike Riegl, however, Cranewas attentive to the function, technique, and material of the object, endorsing Ruskinian theories of“expressive” ornament, namely that ornament can exhibit the movement and vitality of natural form.For Riegl’s influence on art and design, see Iversen and Olin.

14. “He stood before Art’s sphinx sedate/ An Æedipus of latter day/ To rede the run of human fate/ fromwhat its sculpted scroll might say” (“The Craftman’s Dream”).

15. Plans to publish an illustrated edition of the poem were never realized. The verses were eventuallypublished in 1897 as Crane’s contribution to the May Day editor of Labour Leader.

WORKS CITED

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

Fabian Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of EconomicsGeorge Bernard Shaw Papers, British Library“Glasgow School of Art and the Haldane Academy,” Glasgow Herald 26 January 1887, unpaginated press

clipping in the Francis Newbery Files, Glasgow School of Art ArchiveWalter Crane Archive, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of ManchesterPrimary and Secondary SourcesAmes, Kenneth. Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP,

1992.“Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society: Mr. Walter Crane on ‘Design,”’ Builder 8 Dec. 1888: 412.Bell, Robert E. Women of Classical Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO,

1991.Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.Bland, Hubert. “The Condition of English Parties.” Ed. G. B. Shaw. Fabian Essays in Socialism. London:

Fabian Society, 1889. 249–72.Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. Ed. Richard D. Altick. New York: New York UP, 1977.Cole, Margaret. The Story of Fabian Socialism. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1961.Connelly, Frances. The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907.

University Park: Penn State UP, 1995.Crane, Walter. An Artist’s Reminscences. New York: Macmillan, 1907.———. The Bases of Design. London: George Bell and Sons, 1898.———. Catalogue of Exhibition at the Fine Art Society. London: Fine Art Society, 1891.———. Corona Vitae. London: Jeffrey, 1889. N. pag.———. “The Craftsman’s Dream.” Labour Leader 1 May 1897: 206.———. “Of Aesthetic Pessimism and the New Hope.” The Knight Errant 1.2 (1892): 40–43.———. Renascence, A Book of Verse. London: Elkin Matthews, 1891.Crane, Walter, and Lewis F. Day. Moot Points: Friendly Disputes upon Art and Industry Between Walter

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London: G. Allen, 1903–12.Schleinitz, Otto von. Kunstler Monographien: Walter Crane. Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1902.Semper, Gottfried. Der Stil in den technischen und tektonishen Kunsten oder praktische Aesthetik. Ein

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PANDORA'S BOX: WALTER CRANE, “OUR SPHINX-RIDDLE,” AND THE POLITICS OF DECORATION

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