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Tom Roberts and Friends at theAlhambraRoger Benjamina, Emilio Escorizab & Emma Kindredc

a University of Sydneyb Museo de la Alhambra, Granadac Australian War Memorial, CanberraPublished online: 16 Jul 2015.

To cite this article: Roger Benjamin, Emilio Escoriza & Emma Kindred (2015) Tom Robertsand Friends at the Alhambra, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 15:1, 52-74, DOI:10.1080/14434318.2015.1042570

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2015.1042570

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Tom Roberts and Friends at the AlhambraRoger Benjamin*, Emilio Escoriza and Emma Kindred

Alhambrism

The visit of the young Tom Roberts to the Alhambra Palace in Granada has long been

considered a foundational moment for the future ‘father of Australian landscape

painting’.1 Exposure to the bright sunlight and colours of southern Spain, and a

friendship with two other technically advanced painters trained in Paris, are adduced

to help explain Roberts’s move towards high-key painting with a broad touch (fig. 1).

Roberts’s emphasis on painting in the open air, and his satisfaction with small

sketches as self-sufficient pictures, was historicised by William Moore in a well-

known passage from 1934:

The story of how Tom Roberts introduced impressionism in Australia begins inGranada in Spain in 1883. Here he met two clever artists named Barrau andCasas. Barrau, who was a pupil of Gerome [sic], told Roberts that his masterencouraged his pupils to paint a direct sketch every day and go for the effect ofcolour … Casas, who was a pupil of Carolus-Duran, had no theories to offer,but his brilliant sketches show…what effects could be obtained in this way.2

The accuracy of Moore’s claims for an Australian ‘Impressionism’ has been disputed

by more recent scholars.3 Terminology apart, what is not in dispute is the value of the

Spanish journey for Roberts’s aesthetic formation. This was his first encounter with a

form of exoticism and cultural difference of great richness—the Moorish tradition of

Al-Andalus, including the astonishing architecture of the Alhambra, and the

unfamiliarity, on so many levels, of contemporary Spanish life. Coupled with this was

the inspiration of a virtuoso painterly tradition that had started with Diego Vel�azquez

and had informed the contemporary Spanish artists whom Roberts met in Granada.

What the pictures Roberts produced in this milieu suggest is that, like so many

British, French and American artists before him, he underwent a kind of personal

revelation, a temporary enlistment in the cultural movement known variously as

Alhambrism, Andalucism or, more broadly, orientalism.

Using this historical context we wish to look as closely as possible at the works

Roberts produced in Granada, to put flesh on the bare bones of his experience by

understanding the cultural richness of the places in which he painted, and in so doing

establish, for the first time, the particulars of the motifs that he made his own.

*Email: roger.benjamin@sydney.edu.au

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Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2015Vol. 15, No. 1, 52�74, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2015.1042570

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Figure 1. Tom Roberts, A Moorish Doorway, 1883, oil on canvas, 48.3£33 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Joseph BrownCollection.

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When Roberts and his Australian-born friends—John Peter Russell, his younger

brother Percy Russell and William Maloney—visited Granada, the Alhambra had

long been a focal point on the tourist’s map. Its history was one of grandeur and

conflict: following the surrender of the last Moorish King of Granada in 1492 to the

Catholic armies, the complex had suffered architectural damage and intervention (at

the hands of Charles V), followed by centuries of royal neglect.4 By the later

eighteenth century, however, Spanish scholars and architects understood that the

twelfth-century ‘Red Palace’ of the Nasrid sultans remained a supreme example of

Moorish architecture. The Alhambra’s fortunes were revived with the help of

passionate foreigners from the 1820s on. The writer-diplomat Washington Irving

penned his alluring Tales of the Alhambra (1832), while artists such as Baron Isidore

Taylor, David Roberts and J. F. Lewis celebrated its buildings in the new medium of

lithography. Hispanophilia was rampant in Western Europe: Th�eophile Gautier’s

Voyage en Espagne (1843) was a best-seller, and the French monarch Louis-Philippe

(whose wife was from Granada) opened a vast Galerie Espagnole at the Louvre. In

England, the architectural research of Owen Jones and Jules Goury gave the first exact

idea of the Alhambra’s palaces and decoration. Jones’s obsession with Moorish

design influenced The Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and was broadcast in his

influential book The Grammar of Ornament (1856).5

While Roberts and Russell may have known Jones’s books, their knowledge of the

Alhambra was probably enriched by the Alhambra Court, a grand architectural

facsimile that had opened in 1854 at the relocated Crystal Palace in Sydenham (fig. 2).

Designed by Jones as a ticketed attraction, the Alhambra Court featured a reduced-

scale Patio de los Leones (Patio of the Lions) in polychrome ceramics and plaster.6 A

colonial like Roberts, studying in London and an avid lover of all things Spanish, very

likely visited the Alhambra Court (which remained on show until 1936).7

The second likely impulse for Roberts’s travel to Spain came from the paintings of

Diego Vel�azquez. Between 1865 and 1895 no other European old master could rival

Vel�azquez’s impact on both academic and progressive aesthetics.8 Three of the

French artists whom Russell most admired—�Edouard Manet, Charles Carolus-

Duran, and John Peter Russell’s Slade School professor Alphonse Legros � had

travelled to Spain to study Vel�azquez in the 1860s. The cream of mainstream

British and American artists followed suit: Frederic Leighton, John Singer Sargent,

Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt.9 Whether emulating the stunning realism for which

Vel�azquez was admired, or the virtuoso, self-evident brushstroke that was his

trademark, the Vel�azquez paradigm was a valuable acquisition for any young

painter. Roberts was enough of a fan for Frederick McCubbin to nickname him

‘Diego’ back in Melbourne.10

Vel�azquez was also the key reference for progressive Spanish painters. Most

pertinent was the dashing Catalan Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. Refining the decades-

old Spanish movement known as costumbrismo (which traded on regional customs, notcostumes), Fortuny earned a transatlantic reputation with his high-colour, almost

expressionistic depictions of Moroccan and Andalusian subjects.11 Fortuny lived in

Granada for two years (1870�72), and in turn inspired the young French neo-

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romantic artists Georges Clairin and Henri Regnault, who began his 1870 masterpiece

Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada at the Alhambra, and completed

it in Tangiers.12 Orientalist and Andalusian subjects continued their impact at the

official Paris Salon: star pictures included Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant’s LesDerniers Rebelles, 1880, while in 1882 Sargent’s flamenco scene from Granada, El Jaleowas more talked-about than Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Berg�ere of that same year.13

Figure 2. Owen Jones, Alhambra Court, Crystal Palace, Sydenham, London, on display 1854�1936. Photo: Delamotte, c. 1859.Courtesy English Heritage.

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To Granada

All who consider the four Australians’ Spanish journey have relied on the memoir

that Dr William Maloney, by 1933 an elderly Federal Labor politician, typed at the

request of Tom Roberts’s widow:

In our walking tour through Spain, Australia was always in his mind … Theboys were a party of four: the Chief, John P. Russell, Artist, of Sydney. TomRoberts, Artist, of Melbourne. Sydney [sic] R. Russell, Architect, of Sydney, andmyself. It was proposed that the artists should make sketches, that Mr. PercyRussell should study the architecture and advise upon it, and that I should dothe literary work … It was the intention of Tom Roberts to paint a picture offour students in a Posada in Spain, after the beautiful one of the French studentsin the Melbourne National Gallery.14

Based on the itinerary loosely recalled byMaloney and a cultural and political

assessment of Spain at the time, the journey has been richly reconstructed by Roberts’s

biographer HumphreyMcQueen.15 Regrettably, Maloney spent more time describing

the Australians’ hijinks in towns like Lac Cazaux and Ir�un than he did on their stay in

southern Spain. In Madrid they studied the OldMasters in the Prado—a key event,

althoughMaloney does notmention themuseum. AsMcQueen points out, the supposed

‘walking tour’ would, out of necessity, have includedmajor stages by railway. After

visiting Toledo, the men took the train south to C�ordoba, encountering the richness of

Moorish heritage for the first time in the Great Mosque. In a letter, Roberts called the

C�ordoba mosque’s ‘vaulted ceiling a wonder of beauty in form and colour’ that gave

him ‘a foretaste of the Alhambra’.16 During three days in Sevilla Roberts admired the

syncretic Muslim and Christianmonument of the Giralda, andwas thrilled to experience

an organ concert in the vast spaces of the cathedral. The Alc�azar palace (built in the

Mud�ejar style byMuslim artisans for Christian patrons) boasted a decorative complexity

equal to the Alhambra’s. Stops in the Andalusian port of M�alaga and inland at Fuente de

Piedra were also made.17 Maloney’s r�ecit then offers this abrupt passage:

Our next pleasant stay was at the Alhambra, where the Moorish art reached itshighest acme, and was glorious in its designs and colour and architecture. TheMahomedan [sic] faith forbids making the image of anything living, thus causingthe Arabian artists to develop their mentality in arabesque designs. In one of theCourts at the Alhambra, called the Court of Lions, there was an effort made by aMoorish artist to sculpture lions … [which] were crude in the extreme.18

Travelling at the height of the Spanish summer, the group was in Granada by 12

September. Based on the dates on his paintings Roberts stayed at least until mid-

October, whereas John and Percy Russell are thought to have left earlier. Russell had

to get back to London, via the British port of Gibraltar (where he sketched), in time for

the new term at the Slade School of Art.19 Two previously unpublished documents

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throw new light on these scanty facts. The first is the entry in the long-standing

guests’ book for the Alhambra (fig. 3).20

All four men signed in their own hands on 12 September 1883. The existence of

John Russell’s signature is important, as scholars had suspected that Russell returned

to England without seeing the Alhambra himself. William Maloney, who was

completing his medical training at the time in London, remained a lifelong friend of

Roberts and Russell; he is memorialised in a fine portrait that Russell made in 1887 of

Maloney as a bohemian in a pink shirt.21

The second document—a printed permit to sketch in the palace grounds—was

signed by Roberts, but filled out and countersigned in a Spanish hand (fig. 4).22 The

ticket may be translated as follows: ‘Permit, to draw in the castle of the Alhambra in

favour of Tom Roberts and persons who may accompany him. For one month.

Director of Restoration. Rafael Contreras [signature] Granada 12th Sept � 1883.’

Figure 3. Detail of page in guest book for 12 September 1883, Album del Palacio Arabe de la Alhambra de Granada, 1883, vol. 3,Archivo de la Alhambra.

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It is piquant to think that Roberts very likely met Rafael Contreras, the

Alhambra’s director of restoration (whose signature has been authenticated by the

Contreras scholar Asun Gonz�alez). Famous in the annals of the modern Alhambra,

Rafael Contreras was the most controversial member of three generations of a family

that undertook to restore sections of the Alhambra palace from the 1820s on. Rafael

had begun work under his father Jos�e well before the latter’s death in 1847, and by

1869 was truly master of the place.23 Many of Rafael’s restorations, mentioned in his

book of 1875,24 were contested by his rivals at the time and were later judged to be

overly influenced by Romantic aesthetics. Recent research paints an unflattering

picture of Rafael Contreras, who obscured the achievements of his father and profited

commercially from his power.25 Several of his restorations were dismantled by his

more esteemed twentieth-century successor, the professional architect Leopoldo

Torres Balb�as.26

It was into this zone of debate that Roberts unknowingly slipped. Roberts’s two

architectural canvases, AMoorish Doorway, Granada, 1883 (National Gallery of

Victoria), and Basking—A Corner in the Alhambra, 1883 (National Gallery of Australia)

can be understood within this emerging Spanish discourse on heritage conservation.

Despite the calls of intellectuals, a governmental mechanism to bring the Alhambra

Figure 4. Permit to paint in the grounds of the Alhambra, signed Tom Roberts and Rafael Contreras, 12 September 1883,Mitchell Library MSS 4586/2. Author photograph.

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under control was only formalised by the 1870 declaration of the precinct as a

national monument. This went some way towards correcting centuries of neglect, and

partially curtailed the depredations of unscrupulous private owners.27 One of the two

buildings Roberts painted had already been ‘restored’ under the Contreras regime:

this was the Oratorio del Partal (or Oratory, as we will call it, overturning the

inaccurate term ‘Mezquita/Mosque’ used in Roberts’s day).28 Thus, we can say that

when Roberts painted the Oratory his subject was not a stable one, despite

appearances. Rather, it was a contested site and in constant evolution, for at various

points in the nineteenth century the ancient Nasrid chapel underwent physical

alterations, as we will see.

The Oratory of the Partal

Both of Roberts’s architectural pictures are closely observed naturalist paintings.

Their primary inspiration is surely the naturalist and pleinairist project of

transcribing in oil paints the sensations of light, colour, atmosphere and form of a

given outdoor scene: in this case, buildings of great architectural distinction. Both oils

are delightful on that count, and certainly represent an intense forward movement in

comparison to most other ‘Australian’ paintings made up to that time.

That being said, it can now be shown that both pictures respond to a pre-

established iconography of the Alhambra. Roberts’s title, AMoorish Doorway, Granadais generic; his inscription on the work ‘Granada, Oct/83’ also avoids an exact

identification of the motif, the Oratory of the Partal Palace (fig. 1). The subject is

remarkably modest when one understands the architectural and decorative

grandiosity of the Alhambra complex, extending over dozens of hectares. It could be

argued that Roberts chose a small, physically peripheral monument because that was

all his confidence allowed: an image within the grasp of a painter still in training, and

still developing his proper aesthetic. But we must also recognise that he was limited

to the use of an easily transportable, robust support that had to be small enough to fit

into his luggage: timber panels. Popularised amongst progressive Spanish painters by

Fortuny, timber panels were used at Granada in 1883 by Ram�on Casas for his oil

sketches.29 It could be that Roberts’s ongoing use of timber panels for oil sketches—

famously including the cigar-box covers he and his friends Arthur Streeton and

Charles Conder used in the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition of 1889—began in Granada.

Roberts’sMoorish Doorway finds a happy medium between the decorative

intricacy of the little monument, and its dramatic emplacement at the edge of a cliff

looking across a verdant valley to the Generalife (the sultans’ summer gardens and

palace). The building and its foreground have a satisfying stony quality and, with

Roberts’s depiction of the direct fall of light on old masonry interrupted here and

there by the shadows of oleander leaves, he achieves, for the first time, the sensation

of ‘truth to nature’ that made his work so popular in Australia at the end of the 1880s.

More broadly, the aesthetic of the fragment was at stake here. If the totality of the

Alhambra Palace defied representation, and if its major architectural ensembles such

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as the Court of the Lions, the Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of the Myrtles), or the

Sal�on de los Embajadores (Hall of the Ambassadors) posed huge aesthetic challenges

to any painter and had been reproduced ad nauseam in both lithography and

photography, then a modest architectural fragment was the path a late-coming

painter visiting the Alhambra might well take.

The case is bolstered by the fact that the Oratory was a building of real

significance, despite its very modest proportions (the main prayer-room is only 3£4

metres). Restored in 2013�14, it forms part of one of the earliest sections of the

Moorish palace (the Partal) dating to the reign of the Sultan Yusuf I (1333�1354).30 It

is most likely that it originally functioned as a private place of prayer (hence ‘oratory’)

for noble families who lived close by, perhaps in the adjacent two-storey Torre de las

Damas (The Ladies’ Tower) with its splendid open portico and mirador looking across

to the Moorish dwellings of the Albaycın.

The Ladies’ Tower is the key building in the spot where Roberts painted. In a

lithograph of 1834 by J.F. Lewis entitled Casa S�anchez, it appeared as a ramshackle

place of private residence—a condition that continued until the 1890s.31 An early

edition of aMurray’s Handbook for Spain (written in the 1830s by Richard Ford and

still in print in an 1883 edition) mentions:

The Casa del Observatorio … once most picturesque, inside and outside, andbeloved by every artist, in 1837 was ruined by a barbarian empleado[employee]. To this was attached a Moorish Mezquita, which is now isolated inthe garden below, of which the mihrab, or holy niche for the Koran, is mostelaborate.32

Unlike the Casa S�anchez, the Oratory (‘Mezquita’) was relatively undisturbed

structurally. Yet parts of the interior, with elaborate windows on two sides and a

small but finely decorated mihrab (niche facing Mecca), had been reworked in 1846 by

its owner, Francisco Acebal y Arratıa. Probably employing workers from the

Contreras establishment, Acebal y Arratıa ‘restored the building in line with the

eclectic fashions of the time completing the decoration as the fancy took him with

assorted adornments removed from other places’.33 In his Descriptive Study of 1875Contreras described the Oratory as:

a precious mosque of beautiful and handsome decoration; but it has had themisfortune of being painted badly in a grotesque manner, and has lost theproverbial delicate charm of Mohammedan art. The ornamentation that hasbeen placed on the exterior is also false, but instead of these lamentable repairsthe visitor could enjoy how well made this intimate enclosure is, with itselegant techo de lazos [Moorish inlaid wooden ceiling] and joinery. How beauti-ful it would be with its lost filigree of red, blue and gold, and the Niche of theQuibla or sanctuary in the centre of the main wall that is today clumsilystained!34

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The professional photographer Jean Laurent (a Frenchman established in the

Alhambra) took the first in a series of views of the Oratory around 1866. In 1871

Laurent chose the point of view later adopted by Tom Roberts; Laurent’s title, Lamezquita y el Generalife (Alhambra), deliberately includes the distant garden palace in

the overall motif (fig. 5). He repeated the shot with minor adjustments of viewpoint,

sunlight and season, in 1874 and in 1880, providing the best evidence we have of how

the Oratory appeared to Roberts in 1883.35 At the end of the nineteenth century this

view of theMezquita y el Generalifewas repeated in several postcards by local firms.

That of Abelardo Linares still shows the slender timber balustrade, visible in

Roberts’s time, that was replaced around 1900 with a heavy neoclassical balustrade

and a circle of inlaid paving on the Oratory porch.36 The vivid green and pale yellow

polychrome tiles that Roberts took pains to reproduce in 1883 were removed by

Torres Balb�as in 1930, as latter-day ‘improvements’ from the Contreras period.

Although Laurent’s photographs precede Roberts’s painting, we do not believe AMoorish Doorwaywas copied from them—rather, Laurent’s work suggested the motif

and its orientation. One can use the dozen or more early photographic and postcard

views of the Oratory to confirm the impressive accuracy of Roberts’s painting, even

down to the branches and pink flowers of the vividly painted oleander bush on the

right-hand side of the canvas.37 It is possible (as was standard practice among

Figure 5. Jean Laurent, La Mezquita y el Generalife (Alhambra), 1871, silver print, Fototeca del Instituto del Patrimonio Cul-tural de Espa~na, MECD, Madrid.

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Orientalists of Jean-L�eon G�erome’s school) that Roberts referred to Laurent’s photos

for physical details. As the travel writer Victor Fournel remarked, a ‘Parisian

photographer’ (surely Laurent) had his photographic shop and studio right there ‘in a

corner of the former palace’, meaning that his prints of the Oratory may have been

available for purchase in 1883.38

It appears that Roberts adjusted the actual position of the Generalife buildings

across the valley for picturesque reasons. The summer palace’s north wing is visible

in one of Laurent’s views, whereas in his 1871 view and in a recently sold watercolour

study by Roberts one sees the long central colonnade and southern wing of the

Generalife.39 If Contreras’s 1878 map is accurate (fig. 6), the geometry of sight lines

suggests that Roberts conveniently shifted the north wing of the Generalife into view

to enhance his oil painting, while keeping the Oratory’s facade flatter and more

comfortably parallel to the viewer than Laurent’s mechanical vision could achieve.40

It is possible that Roberts may have discussed the necessary restoration of the Oratory

with Rafael Contreras himself (Contreras spoke both French and English).41

The Divan in the Patio

These questions of an already mutable architectural heritage also arise when we

consider Roberts’s second painting from the Alhambra: Basking—A Corner in theAlhambra (fig. 7). Again, we ask how this little-known work relates to the pre-

established iconography of the Alhambra, and how Roberts tackled the problem of

conveying an impression of mind-snapping decorative detail.

Basking, a very small oil painting on wood panel, was first owned by John Peter

Russell (probably purchased by him to support the impecunious Roberts). Anna Gray

Figure 6. Rafael Contreras, annotated detail of map of the Alhambra in Estudio Descriptivo (2nd ed., 1878), Courtesy Bibliotecadel Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife. Scanned by B�arbara Jim�enez.

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has noted that in a letter of 2 January 1886 to Roberts back in Melbourne, Russell

wrote, ‘Your little Alhambra is much admired this week by a fellow student, Antonio,

a Spaniard, who knows the place well’.42 The title Gray has given to the work at the

National Gallery is taken from the 1884 Royal Academy exhibition in London, where

Roberts exhibited a painting (presumably the same one) entitled ‘Basking—A Corner inthe Alhambra’ in Gallery VII.

Figure 7. Tom Roberts, Basking—A Corner in the Alhambra, 1883, oil on panel, 21.6£16.2 cm, Courtesy National Gallery ofAustralia, Canberra.

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This time Roberts painted in the heart of the Alhambra complex: in a corner of the

matchless Court of the Myrtles, with its 34-metre-long rectangular pool in the

Comares Palace. A gracious three-story arcade at the southern end connects directly

to the Palace of Charles V (a grand Renaissance monument inserted into the side of

the Nasrid complex). At the northern end, where Roberts depicts one of two niches

(fig. 8), the portico with six fine marble pillars and the Tower of Comares behind is

mirrored in the reservoir. Close by, the narrow Sala de la Barca (Hall of the Boat) and

a step lead up to the Hall of the Ambassadors, under its constellated dome of timber

moc�arabes.Once again, Roberts tried his hand at a modest motif. He chose to enliven his

architectural scene with two elements: the first is the bright morning sunlight flowing

from the east over the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains. On the carved columns to the

left, the light is broken by shadows from the leaves of a bush (as in AMoorishDoorway). Old photographs reveal that the Court of the Myrtles was planted with

individual trees—either oranges or myrtles—that have long since been removed. In

the centre of the composition an irregular shaft of sunlight illuminates the shaded

wall of patterned azulejos (shaped ceramic tiles).

The second motif enlivening Roberts’s Basking is the unlikely figure of a girl

reclining in the niche. She is a redheaded teenager with pink socks, swathed in light-

coloured silks. In front of her a tiny kitten plays with a ball-like object: we suggest a

pomegranate—the eponymous symbol of Granada—to judge by the shape and colour

of the second fruit near the girl’s feet. Girl and kitten give the scene an intimacy, an

easeful warmth, cemented by Roberts’s title Basking—A Corner in the Alhambra.Roberts presents a contemporary scene, rather than a typical time-collapsing

‘Orientalist’ one. He has not typed his model as an Andalusian Moor; the figure has

an Aestheticist and contemporary feel—perhaps Roberts painted (or imagined) the

daughter of British visitors to Granada.

Owen Jones had treated this very niche motif in his sumptuous chromolithograph

Divan, Patio de la Alberca, 1834�45 (fig. 9). This gives another clue to Roberts’s unlikely

insertion of the girl lying directly on the marble paving of the niche: to an English-

speaker of that time, a ‘divan’ meant a backless sofa or settee of Eastern kind. In short,

a divan needed someone to recline upon it.43

The intense colour of Jones’s plate is an idealisation, part of his broad attempt to

re-establish, on an archaeological basis, what the role of colour had been in the time of

the Alhambra’s construction.44 This complex issue continues to challenge today’s

conservators of the monument. In Jones’s time there was clear evidence that much of

the carved three-dimensional plasterwork—the famous beehive decoration or

moc�arabes of which Jones and Goury provided the first accurate geometrical

analysis—had been painted. In the monument today, most of the moc�arabes arepresented with the fundamental beige tint of plaster, with faded highlights in pale

blue or pale red that certainly make the patterning and its volumetric relief more

comprehensible, as Jones argued.

Roberts has clearly not followed the chromolithographic aesthetic. Even though

Roberts was simply intending to paint what was in front of him, he was faced with a

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Figure 8. North-west niche in the portico, Patio of the Myrtles, next to the Hall of the Ambassadors. Author photograph.

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big problem: how to approximate the visual effect of this dizzying decorative scheme

in a painted panel perhaps one tenth the size of his model. In one sense he failed, in

that the imagery on the top of his back wall appears to be haunted by figures (as if the

spectator is looking at faded fifteenth-century wall paintings such as were present

nearby in the Hall of the Kings). However, even while failing to convey the abstract

forms of the carved plaster, this section of Roberts’s painting has a pleasing effect of

mysterious antiquity.

AHalting Costumbrismo

It is now possible to establish where Tom Roberts lodged in Granada. The clue is

contained in a letter Russell wrote later to Roberts, back in Melbourne: ‘Next summer

we are hoping to visit Granada—Carmona was I think the name of your host. If the

Figure 9. Owen Jones, Divan, Patio de la Alberca, from Plans and Elevations of the Alhambra, 1834�1845, I, pl. IX. Photo:National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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cholera has spared him perhaps I’ll abide a time there and try your Roman bath’.45

Russell refers to Manuel Carmona, proprietor of the Pension Villa Carmona, an

establishment built recently at number 32 in the Calle Real, the one commercial street

within the Alhambra complex. Judging by twentieth-century floor plans and three

postcards published by the hotelier after 1900, the Villa Carmona was very modest in

scale—probably only four or five bedrooms.46 The Russell brothers would have

lodged separately, most likely in the well-appointed Fonda de Siete Suelos, about a

kilometre further away from the palaces. The contemporary travel writer Victor

Fournel observed that most foreign visitors stayed at this ‘Hotel of the Seven Floors’,

adjacent to the tower of that name by the Alhambra’s southern walls.47 The well-off

painters Regnault and Fortuny had stayed at the Siete Suelos, as did the two young

Catalan artists whom Roberts and Russell befriended in 1883, Ram�on Casas and

Laureano Barrau.48

The Villa Carmona nevertheless boasted comfortable public rooms with furniture

around which Roberts should have been at ease: a gracious dining table under a

Venetian glass chandelier, and a small ‘Sitting-Room’ with an upright piano next to

which one can imagine Roberts, ‘the great swell of the party of four’ (Maloney’s

phrase)49, belting out English songs (fig. 10). Even the ill-sorted d�ecor should have

suited Roberts’s mood of homage to the Moors: horseshoe archways with arabesque

surrounds, and dados of azulejo tiles specifically based on Alhambra models. This

Andalusian d�ecor was mixed with heavy European floral hangings, oil paintings, and

framed mirrors.

Figure 10. Rafael Garz�on Rodríguez, Sitting Room of the Pension Villa Carmona, Alhambra, c. 1904, postcard, DORA Collection,Sydney.

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It was in the Villa Carmona’s enclosed garden that we believe Roberts painted his

watercolour By the Alhambra, 1883 (fig. 11). Although deftly painted, it is a strange

composition figuring the rear facade of a two-storey house, bisected horizontally by

foliage. In the later postcard the Carmona garden is revealed as bursting with potted

Figure 11. Tom Roberts, By the Alhambra, 1883, watercolour, 34.9£24.1 cm, Private collection.

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palms and other vegetation—notably a climbing plant (probably a grapevine) with a

thick horizontal vine of the kind called parra.50 Such a plant is visible traversing By theAlhambra. The postcard shows a paved area with caf�e tables and two foreign ladies

near a barred window-seat, in a leafy milieu festooned with many Chinese paper

lanterns. The proprietors’ taste for paper lanterns would explain two or three

colourful, round objects—otherwise unidentified—in Roberts’s By the Alhambra.Roberts looked upwards to the building where a long bedcover in banded grey hangs

from the first floor window, but there is no human animation—as if Roberts has

captured the scene during the midday heat when the people were somnolent indoors

during their siesta. Certainly, the ritual of hanging washing from windows or

balconies continues throughout the Mediterranean today (and Fortuny had

addressed a similar subject, Balc�on en Granada, the decade before).51

In such works, and in his figure paintings, Roberts worked within the idiom

employed by Ram�on Casas, whose architectural works from Granada feature the

effects of the light flowing over white walls. Roberts made a number of other pictures

in Granada that feature everyday life in an environment like that of the Calle Real.

Two of the paintings are studies of local people in their traditional costume, which

allies them to the strong tradition of costumbrismowhich had dominated

contemporary Spanish painting for several decades, and proposed exactly this kind of

subject.52

The rough oil sketch that Roberts painted on a third wooden panel, AWaterCarrier, Granada, 1883, is true to this genre.53 The small white donkey, with its

decorative halter in pink (a nod, perhaps, to the famous pink/grey palette of

Vel�azquez), appears to be carrying a basket filled with live herb plants, rather than

the pewter or earthenware water jugs suggested by the title. Fournel describes the

latter being lugged by aguadores (water merchants) from the Alhambra’s freshwater

cisterns at the Plaza de los Aljibes (Square of the Cisterns) and down the steep road to

Granada.54 The motif of water carriers is central to the iconography of the orientalism

of hot countries, even in the unlikely hands of Roberts’s future friend, the Melbourne

painter Arthur Streeton, who painted a series of fine costume pieces on the water-

carrier theme in Cairo in 1897.55

The execution of AWater Carrier has a colourism and verve close to the sketches of

Fortuny (which sometimes fail to detail human faces, as is the case with Roberts’s

work here). In choosing this kind of subject, and in his portrait Una Muchacha, 1883(fig. 12(b)), Roberts may have been guided by Casas and Barrau. Although lodging at

the Alhambra, Casas painted primarily in the lower city of Granada and the old

Moorish suburb of the Albaycın, where he produced a dozen sketch oils of the

chalky-brown buildings and the irregular geometry of the Moorish and Mud�ejar

streets.56 For this dashing, very young stylist (he was only 17 in 1883), who was to

befriend and influence the young Pablo Ruiz Picasso in Barcelona the following

decade (along with the other modernista Santiago Rusi~nol), the life of the ordinary

people was a key subject.

Roberts’s friendship with Casas is attested to, despite a dearth of written

documents, by two pictorial gifts Roberts brought back to Australia.57 The first is a

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sheet of the witty caricature drawings in which Casas specialised, in this case

targeting the Spanish clergy: two-dozen spindly pen-drawn figures with exaggerated

features form a kind of conga-line of anti-clericalism (the Catholic Church had been

stripped of many properties and powers earlier in the century).58 The second

souvenir was the fluid sketch portrait of Roberts that Casas painted in oils, today in

the National Gallery of Victoria. Shown as balding, fair-skinned and serious,

Roberts’s head emerges sharply from the shadows of a darkened room. Relaxing with

a pipe in a pale-grey suit with cherry-red cravat, Roberts looks older than his

28 years.59

As we have seen, WilliamMoore claimed that the painterly example of Casas and

the studio phraseology of Barrau helped stimulate Roberts’s move to free up his

brushwork and confront the intensity of natural light, especially when painting

outdoors. That said, the Casas portrait follows different models—Casas’s penumbral

imagery points more to the neo-Vel�azquez style of the day, exemplified by the flashy

society portraits of his teacher Carolus-Duran. Roberts admired the piece, much later

recalling the ‘brilliant sketch head by Leon [sic] Casas full of life and not dating’.60

The Alhambra already had a local cultural life, even though it had not yet attained

the brilliant focus that would soon be provided by the tavern El Polinario, thought to

have opened in 1886 on the Calle Real (across the street from the Villa Carmona). This

was run by the ‘guitarist Antonio Barrios, nicknamed El Polinario, whose

establishment at the Calle Real de la Alhambra was an informal cultural centre built

above a disused Islamic bathhouse in the palace complex’.61 Just as the Carmona

Figure 12. (a) Tom Roberts, Head of Girl in a Sun-Hat (detail) from Tom Roberts Scrapbook, 1883�1931, p. 23, Mitchell Library,Sydney; (b) Tom Roberts, Una Muchacha, 1883, oil on panel, 15.2£21.2 cm, Private collection.

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family owned and ran their hotel well into the twentieth century, so Antonio Barrios,

followed by his son, the celebrated composer and guitarist �Angel Barrios, maintained

an extensive circle of family and artist friends (including artist Santiago Rusi~nol,

musician Manuel de Falla and writer Ortega y Gasset).62 At the time of Roberts’s visit

the Fonda de Siete Suelos, where contemporary guests included the star French

orientalist Benjamin-Constant, was probably the focus of cultural life.

It is in such a milieu that we believe Roberts obtained the model for UnaMuchacha, the most important figure painting he executed in Granada. This is the

meticulously rendered head of a prepubescent girl, perhaps eight or nine years of age.

Virginia Spate has deftly defined the technical conservatism of this work compared to

Casas’s sketch portrait of Roberts.63 We believe Una Muchacha relates to three

undated pencil sketches of a girl in Roberts’s Scrapbook: one standing, one in profile,

and the other a detailed view of her head (fig. 12 (a)).64 The latter sits next to studies of

boys’ heads: one could speculate that Roberts was able to persuade the Carmona

children or friends to sit for him as models. In the drawing, the girl’s dress is more

elaborate and she looks slightly older than in the painting, but the motif, of a young

face half-seen under the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat, is the same.

Despite its generic title, the painting Una Muchacha is a long way from the

standard typecasting of dark-eyed, brown-skinned gypsy children one sees above all

in American paintings from Spain. Roberts has well captured the gradations of

reflected light on the shaded cheek and brows of the child. She looks sideways at the

artist, her chin thrust forward as if taking none too kindly to the foreigner’s attention.

In Granada, the term muchacha is used to refer to girls just before the onset of puberty.

Her untidy hair, simple cotton wrap closed across her chest and straw sunhat indicate

a ‘child of the people’, with nothing like the social standing of Roberts’s other

putative Spanish portrait, A Spanish Beauty, c. 1885.65 The yellow background of UnaMuchacha, which well evokes the colours of Granada, also points to fashionable

precedents such as the background of Henri Regnault’s Salom�e, 1870 (a hit at the Salonthat year), or the colourful backdrops in society portraits by Sargent or Paul-Albert

Besnard of around this time.

The final work we associate with Roberts’s Granada series is the oil painting StillLife with Pomegranates, 1883, which features an unruly dozen of ripe pomegranate

fruits arranged on top of a wall before a rough wicker trellis.66 With its horizontal

format and detailed style, the work seems to be an homage to the early seventeenth-

century Spanish still lifes known as Bodegones that Roberts would have seen at the

Prado painted by Juan S�anchez Cot�an and Francisco de Zurbar�an. The Spanish

Bodeg�on is rustic, even austere—not refined and bountiful like Flemish and Dutch still

life.

On a mundane level, the fruit-bearing pomegranate tree (similar to the apple tree)

grows freely in the grounds of the Alhambra. The half-open pomegranate fruit

(granada in Spanish, grenade in French) shown with its branch and leaves is the ancient

heraldic symbol of the city of Granada. For centuries it has been the blazon stencilled

in blue onto the products of the city’s potteries. The partly opened pomegranate with

its many pink seeds, which in Christian liturgy symbolises the fecundity of Christ’s

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teaching, took on a new meaning after the Fall of Granada in 1492. Roberts would

have seen the conspicuous pomegranates carved into the stone fountain that Emperor

Charles V of Spain constructed in 1545 near the Puerta de la Justicia (Gate of Justice),

the main entrance to the palatine fortress (fig. 13).

The idea that a still-life of pomegranates should be Roberts’s farewell to

Granada seems fitting. Indeed, McQueen points out that although Roberts

continued to travel extensively in his life, looking back years later he remembered

the journey through Spain as ‘the happiest time I ever had in travel’.67 In the final

estimate, the set of Granadian pictures typifies the experience of artists with

modern tendencies visiting the city in the late nineteenth century. Roberts’s vivid

architectural studies look forwards to the grander Alhambrist views and garden

pictures of the modernistas such as Rusi~nol and Joaquın Sorolla, rather than

backwards to Regnault and Benjamin-Constant. Roberts chose some of the least

hackneyed corners of the Alhambra to depict—the Oratory of the Partal, for

example, which, despite its position in tourist and archaeological photography,

was very rarely painted. As opposed to his costumbrista pictures, it is in MoorishDoorway and Basking that Tom Roberts went the furthest technically, finding his

aesthetic panacea in that place where Moorish art was most ‘glorious in its designs

and colour and architecture’.68 Here, Roberts began to define himself as an artist,

in the task (as our late colleague Ursula Prunster put it) of ‘convincingly rendering

the textures of weathered masonry, its warm tonalities exposed under the glare of

afternoon sunlight’.69

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Raquel Vilar, Asun Gonz�alez, Domingo C�ordoba, GerardHiggins, Humphrey Clegg, Anna Gray, the staff of the Archivo del Patronato de laAlhambra, and the anonymous readers for their help. Roger Benjamin’s work isfunded by the Australian Research Council; all site photographs were taken by himin December 2013 unless otherwise noted.

Figure 13. (a) Tom Roberts, Still Life with Pomegranates, c.1883, oil on canvas mounted on board, 31.1 £ 64.3 cm, Private col-lection; (b) pomegranate motif: Charles V’s Fountain, Alhambra Hill, carved by Nicol�as de Corte, 1545, grey stone. Authorphotograph.

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1. Robert Henderson Croll, Tom Roberts: Father ofAustralian Landscape Painting (Melbourne: Robertson& Mullens, 1935).2. William Moore, The Story of Australian Art: Fromthe Earliest Known Art of the Continent to the Art of To-Day (Melbourne: Robertson, vol. 2, 1934), quoted inCroll, Tom Roberts, 13.3. Virginia Spate, in her Tom Roberts (Melbourne:Lansdowne, 1972), 21, remarks that Moore’s claimwas only true ‘in the very general sense that the term“Impressionism” was used at the time’. For detailedaccounts of the Spanish trip see HumphreyMcQueen, Tom Roberts (Melbourne: Macmillan,1996), 105�24, and McQueen, ‘A Golden Age: TomRoberts and the Arts of Spain’, in Australian Impres-sionism, ed. Terence Lane (Melbourne: National Gal-lery of Victoria, 2007), 21�27; see also Anna Gray,ed., Tom Roberts: A Retrospective (Canberra: NationalGallery of Australia, forthcoming 2015).4. In the vast literature, a good place to start is RobertIrwin, The Alhambra (Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004).5. Jules Goury and Owen Jones, Plans, Elevations, Sec-tions and Details of the Alhambra (London: OwenJones, 1842�45), and Owen Jones, The Grammar ofOrnament (London: Day & Son, 1856).6. See Owen Jones, The Alhambra Court in the CrystalPalace (London: Crystal Palace Library, 1854), andKathryn Ferry, ‘Owen Jones and the Alhambra Courtat the Crystal Palace’, in Revisiting Al-Andalus, ed.Glaire D. Anderson and Mariam Rosser-Owen(Amsterdam: Brill, 2007), 227�45.7. Tim Barringer, conversation with Roger Benjamin,Sydney, 2013. The Alhambra Court inspired a Frenchversion at the 1900 Paris Exposition; see Roger Benja-min, ‘Andalusia in the Time of the Moors: Regretand Colonial Presence in Paris, 1900’, in Edges ofEmpire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, ed. JocelynHackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts (Oxford: Black-well, 2005), 181�205.8. See Gary Tinterow and Genevi�eve Lacambre, eds,Manet�Vel�azquez: The French Taste for Spanish Paint-ing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), andAlisa Luxenburg, ‘Regenerating Vel�azquez in Spainand France in the 1890s’, Boletın del Museo del Prado17, no. 35 (1999), 125�149.9. See M. Elizabeth Boone, Vistas de Espa~na: AmericanViews of Art and Life in Spain, 1860�1914 (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2007).10. See McQueen, ‘A Golden Age’, 22.11. See Bego~na Torres Gonz�alez, Fortuny: un mundoen miniatura (Madrid: Libsa, 2008).12. On Regnault, seeHollis M. Clayson,Paris in Despair:Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870�71) (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2003), 234�44.13. See Nathalie Bondil, Samuel Monti�ege and Val-erie Behiery, Benjamin-Constant: Merveilles etmirages de l’orientalisme (Toulouse: Mus�ee desAugustins and Montreal: Mus�ee des Beaux-Arts,2014), 117�26, and Richard Ormond, ‘Les premierstableaux espagnols et v�enitiens de Sargent’, in Sar-gent/Sorolla, ed. Tom�as Llorens (Paris: Paris-Mus�ees, 2006), 53�74.

14. William Maloney, typescript letter to Mrs. Rob-erts, 28 March 1932, National Library of Australia,Maloney Papers, MS 100, 1-2; the picture in questionis Jehan-Georges Vibert, The Siesta, 1862, illustratedin McQueen, ‘A Golden Age’, 22.15. See McQueen, Tom Roberts, 106�19.16. Roberts, undated pencil draft of letter, ML MS4586 2 (2), quoted in McQueen, Tom Roberts, 114�15.17. See Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Tom Roberts inthe National Gallery of Australia (Canberra: NationalGallery of Australia, 1997), 114; 128, n19.18. Maloney letter to Mrs. Roberts, 1932, 5.19. See McQueen, Tom Roberts, 122.20. Album del Palacio Arabe de la Alhambra de Granada,1883, Libro de visitas, vol. 3, 44, Archivo de laPatronato de la Alhambra y Generalife.21. Ann Galbally and Robyn Sloggett, ‘John PeterRussell’s Dr. Will Maloney’, Art Bulletin of Victoria,no. 37 (1997) (e-newsletter).22. McQueen, Tom Roberts, 119. McQueen mentionsthis permit to prove Roberts’s date of arrival, butdoes not illustrate it.23. Jos�e Contreras was Architect Conservator of theAlhambra from 1828 to 1847, when Rafael(c. 1824�1890) became arquitecto adornista withSalvador Amador. From 1869 to 1888 Rafael was theAlhambra’s director and conservator; see Jos�e�Alvarez Lopera, ‘La Alhambra entre la conservaci�ony la restauraci�on (1905�1915)’, in Cuadernos de Artede la Universidad de Granada, nos. 29�31 (1977): 27.24. See Rafael Contreras, Estudio descriptivo de losMonumentos �Arabes de Granada, Sevilla y C�ordoba, 3rd

ed. (Madrid: Ricardo F�e, 1885; 1st ed. 1875; 2nd 1878).25. See, for example, Juan Manuel Barrios Ruz�ua,‘Jos�e Contreras, un pionero de la arquitectura neo-�arabe’, in La invenci�on del estilo hispano-magrebi, ed. J.A. Gonz�alez Alcantud (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2010),311�38.26. See Leopoldo Torres Balb�as y la restauraci�on cientıf-ica: ensayos (Sevilla: Instituto Andaluz del PatrimonioHist�orico, 2013).27. On the plundering and conserving of the Alhambrasee Jes�us Berm�udez L�opez, The Alhambra and the Gener-alife: Official Guide (Granada: Patronato de la Alhambray Generalife and TF Editores, 2010), 297�307.28. Emilio Escoriza identified the motif when research-ing Antipodean travellers to Granada in 2013; indepen-dently, Roger Benjamin recognised it studyingpostcards and maps with his student Gerard Higgins.Thanks to National Gallery of Victoria curator ElenaTaylor for connectingMr. Escorizawith Prof. Benjamin.29. We thank Domingo C�ordoba for this information.30. See ‘Restoration of the Roofs and Ceiling-Framesof the Oratory of the Partal Palace’, Patronato de laAlhambra y Generalife, http://www.alhambra-patronato.es/index.php?idD1435&LD2.31. In 1891, the last private owner of the Torre de laDamas, the German banker Arthur von Gwinner,removed its inlaid timber cupola to Berlin beforesigning the building over to the State; see Berm�udez,Official Guide, 166.32. Richard Ford, ed., Handbook for Travellers to Spain(London: John Murray, 1855), 313.

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33. See ‘Restoration of the Roofs and Ceiling-Framesof the Oratory’, Patronato.34. Contreras, Estudio Descriptivo, 184; translationfrom Spanish by Gerard Higgins.35. Javier Pi~nar Samos and Carlos S�anchez G�omez,eds, Luz sobre Papel: La imagen de Granada y la Alhambraen las Fotografıas de J. Laurent (Granada: Consejerıa deCultura, 2007), 252�53, 261; for details on the interior,see Berm�udez, The Alhambra and the Generalife, 169.36. For vintage postcards of the Oratory search thewebsite www.delcampe.net under the rubric‘Mezquita, Alhambra’.37. The oleander was probably removed when TorresBalb�as excavated the alberca, or pool, lowering theground level to reveal eight steps up to the Oratory(not the two visible in Roberts’s day).38. Victor Fournel, Aux Pays du Soleil: Un �et�e enEspagne. A travers l’Italie, Alexandrie et le Caire (Tours:A. Mame et fils, 1883), 101.39. Tom Roberts,Moorish Doorway, 1883, watercolouron paper, 30 x 18.5 cm, in Deutscher-Menzies, 19th and20th Century Fine Australian and International Art,Melbourne, 9 May 2001, lot 73.40. See ‘Restoration of the Roofs and Ceiling-Framesof the Oratory’, Patronato.41. Thanks to Asun Gonz�alez, who is preparing adoctoral dissertation on Rafael Contreras.42. See Anna Gray, ‘A Question of Attribution:Basking � A Corner in the Alhambra’, in Artonview 41(March 2005): 28�29 (letter first quoted in Ann Gal-bally, The Art of John Peter Russell (Melbourne: SunBooks, 1977), 92).43. The niche is called an alhami (‘a low stone benchcovered in tiles’) in Berm�udez, The Alhambra and theGeneralife, 301, 334.44. See Jones, ‘Of the Colouring of the Moors’, Alham-bra Court, 42�47; these texts were reprinted with lit-tle change in The Grammar of Ornament.45. Letter fragment dated 17 January, quoted by Gal-bally, Russell, 92; we have checked the manuscript andread ‘Carmona’ where Galbally saw ‘Carmina [sic]’.Galbally dates the letter on internal evidence to 1886.46. This assessment is based on maps of the CalleReal and floor plans of the Villa Carmona located byEmilo Escoriza in the Archivo de la Alhambra.47. Fournel, Aux Pays du Soleil, 95.48. See McQueen, Tom Roberts, 119 on the hotel; forinformation on Casas, who had a major career, seeIsabel Coll, Ram�on Casas, 1866�1932: Una vida dedicadaal arte, Catalogo razonado (Murcia: De la Cierva, 2002).49. Maloney letter to Mrs. Roberts, 1932, 2.50. For postcards of the garden and the dining room,see Marıa del Mar Villafranca Jim�enez and FranciscoJaraut, Matisse and the Alhambra (Granada: Patronatode la Alhambra y el Generalife, 2010), cats. 125, 126and 30�33 (Matisse stayed at the Villa Carmona fortwo nights in December 1910, and like Robertssigned the Alhambra’s Guest Book).51. See Bego~na Torres Gonz�alez, Fortuny, 324�25.

52. See the rich English-language compendium ofnineteenth-century Spanish painting, Alberto Gil,ed., Museo Carmen Thyssen M�alaga, Collection(M�alaga: Fundaci�on Palacio de Villal�on, 2014).53. See Helen Topliss, Tom Roberts, 1856�1931: A Cat-alogue Raisonn�e, vol. 1 (Melbourne: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1985), cat. nos. 23, 23a, noting anunpublished sketch entitled by Roberts, SpanishWater Carrier at the Alhambra. Humphrey Clegg pro-vided a colour snapshot of the oil, location unknown.54. On the aguadores of Granada see Fournel, AuxPays du Soleil, 96.55. Emma Robyn Kindred, ‘Passages through theOrient: Arthur Streeton in Cairo’, unpublished PhD,University of Sydney, 2012, 167�178, and UrsulaPrunster, ‘From Empire’s End: Australians as Ori-entalists, 1880�1920’, in Roger Benjamin, ed., Ori-entalism, Delacroix to Klee (Sydney: Art Gallery ofNew South Wales, 1997), 46, 138�139.56. See Isabel Coll, Casas, cat. nos. 29�38.57. Isabel Coll has kindly confirmed the lack of auto-graphed documents.58. Tom Roberts Scrapbook, 1883�1931, MitchellLibrary microfilm ML PX�D310, page of caricaturesby Casas, 27.59. Illustrated in Lane, Australian Impressionism, 20.60. Tom Roberts to Marqu�es del Moral, 16 May 1925,ML MSS 285/14/47; quoted in McQueen, ‘A GoldenAge’, 23.61. Domingo Ram�on Cordoba, ‘Andalusismo: stereo-types of Andalusia in the art of the Spanish avant-garde, 1880�1920’, PhD thesis in progress, Univer-sity of Sydney, n.p.62. See Cristina Vi~nes Millet, ‘Alhambra fin desiglo’, Cuadernos de la Alhambra, vol. 41 (2006): 140;Boone, Vistas de Espa~na, 185�86; and Emilio J.Escoriza, ‘La Taberna del Polinario y el Rincon-cillo. Dos Tertulias de la Edad de Plata Granadina’,in Reynaldo Fern�andez Manzano et al., �AngelBarrios: Creatividad en la Alhambra (Granada:Patronato de la Alhambra y el Generalife, 2014),101�20.63. See Spate, Tom Roberts, 23.64. Tom Roberts Scrapbook, ML PX�D310, 22�23.65. See Topliss, Tom Roberts, vol. 1, 85. LikeMcQueen, we prefer to see A Spanish Beauty as awork of the mid-1880s, painted in London or Paris,as it seems closer technically to later portraits than tothe works signed and dated as being made inGranada.66. Pomegranates is illustrated in Ron Radford, ed.,Tom Roberts (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Aus-tralia, 1996), 21.67. McQueen, quoting Roberts’s letter to Barnett of 6December 1925, ML MSS 285/14/47, in McQueen,Tom Roberts, 116.68. Maloney letter to Mrs. Roberts, 1932, 5.69. Prunster, Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 135.

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