OIL PAINTING: The Birth of Venus, 1887
The Birth of Venus is indicative of the aestheticized classicism Stott adopted around 1886-7 with its narrow color range, elaborate patterns and reflections. The painting was exhibited accompanied by the following lines from Hesiod's Theogony:
"Her, gods and men name Aphrodite, the foam-sprung Goddess and fair-wreathed Cytherea, and is indeed an ambitious fusion of myth and plein air realism: employing the Renaissance tondo format, Stott presents a modern-day Venus whose streaming hair and open arms echo the undulations of the waves as they meet the shore. The model for the goddess was Whistler's mistress, Maud Franklin, also a painter and exhibitor with the Society of British Artists. Stott's painting was met with savage criticism: "Why outrage so cruelly the Cyprian goddess by giving her name to a repellent, imperfectly developed type of atelier model" asked Marion Spielmann in the Magazine of Art, 1887, while Whistler's enemy Harry Quilter singled the nude out as "a red-haired