Queer Places:
Plas Nanteos Mansion, Rhydyfelin, Aberystwyth SY23 4LU, UK
Eton College, Windsor, Windsor and Maidenhead SL4 6DW
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
La Chaumière de Dolmancé, Chemin des Haules, 76790 Étretat, France
41 Mornington Cres, Kings Cross, London NW1 7RB, UK
Llanbadarn Fawr Cemetery
Llanbadarn-fawr, Ceredigion, Wales
George Powell (February 10, 1842 - October 17, 1882) lived the life of a
gentleman. He travelled widely through North Africa and Europe, especially
Iceland. He was a great collector, and acquired pieces both at home and
abroad. He also closely followed literary and musical trends and his interests
led him to make several interesting connections, developing friendships with
such famous figures as
Algernon Charles
Swinburne and H.W. Longfellow. Powell also published a variety of material
during his lifetime, including three volumes of his own poetry, and a
translation of Icelandic legends completed in conjunction with Eirikr
Magnusson.
George Ernest John Powell was born in Cheltenham on February 10, 1842, the son of William Thomas Rowland Powell (1815–1878), a Welsh landowner and Conservative politician who served as Member of Parliament for Cardiganshire from 1859 until 1865, and Rosa Edwyna
Cherry , daughter of William George Cherry of Buckland, Herefordshire. His
only sister, Harriet (born 1844), died of tuberculosis aged 13. Born into
a politically influential Cardiganshire family, he was brought up on the
family estate of Nanteos, near Aberystwyth. He received his education at Eton,
and at Brasenose College, Oxford, but left before graduating.
In 1868 Swinburne shared a cottage at Etretat, Normandy with his friend
George Powell; above the entrance was the inscription "La Chaumière de
Dolmancé" (Dolmancé's Cottage), named for the homosexual corrupter in Sade's
La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Guy de Maupassant visited the place twice, and
left accounts of a house of decadence staffed by fresh-laced lads, and full of
weird knick-knacks like a parricide's flayed hand. There was a monkey on the
loose, and hard liquor served at lunchtime, after which the two Englishmen
pulled out gigantic folios of pornographic photographs, taken in Germany, all
of male subjects. "I remember one of an English soldier masturbating on a pane
of glass," recalled Maupassant, whose interests lay elsewhere.
His close friend Algernon Swinburne introduced Powell to the young artist
Simeon Solomon. From his
correspondence it is clear that Powell sometimes suggested ideas for
compositions to Solomon. He purchased three watercolours by Solomon who was
closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle and later the Aesthetic
Movement - Noon, A Roman Youth and Love Dreaming by the Sea; the latter two
were both commissioned by Powell. A Roman Youth was painted when the artist
was in Rome in 1869 where he wrote his prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in
Sleep, published in 1871. Solomon was also a friend of Swinburne and provided
illustrations for his novel Lesbia Brandon (written c.1859-1868). In an
undated letter from Solomon to Powell he consults his patron about the
composition -‘would you like the ruined temple background to your "Love" or
the sea + sky that we spoke of elsewhere - will you kindly let me have a line
as it is being begun’. Solomon’s homosexuality earned him notoriety, an
eighteen-month suspended sentence and eventual destitution. After Simeon’s
arrest in 1873 Powell, unlike Swinburne, appears to have kept in contact with
the Solomons. The Wounded Dove is the only work by Simeon’s sister Rebecca
Solomon (1832-1886) who Powell's owned; her letters to Powell confirm that she
was paid £15 in installments, the last of which was made in 1873. She trained
under her brother Abraham and attended Spitalfields School of Design. The work
she exhibited between 1850 and 1874 was favourably reviewed and reproduced in
contemporary art magazines but after her brother’s arrest her promising career
came to an abrupt end.
Powell also collected a number of works from the more well-known
Pre-Raphaelites - two pencil drawings by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-1882) of Clara Vaughan Morgan, 1874 and Ruth Herbert, 1858 and a
watercolour of the head of a young woman by Sir Edward Poynter (1836-1919) who
eventually became the President of the Royal Academy in 1896. Powell placed
particular value on Ruth Herbert who was manageress of St James Theatre,
London until 1867; quoted in the College Magazine 1882-83 he writes ‘Pictures
of this noblest of artist-poets being of such extreme rarity and immense
value, it has taken me five years of constant search to find this very
interesting specimen’ suggesting that the work was not procured directly from
the artist. Most of the paintings and drawings of female sitters in Powell’s
collection are epicine, or ethereal. The watercolours of ‘scenes of Spanish
life’ by P J Antoine are slightly more robust - his Woman with a Tambourine,
The Drummer and The Fan are more in the Realist vein but very little is known
about him except that he worked and exhibited in London.
Powell also bought paintings which were more of the academic or ‘old
master’ variety, some of them genuine, some copies; these he may have
purchased in sale rooms in London possibly through the agency of Mr Gullick
from whom there is some correspondence. They include two early watercolours by
J M W Turner (1775-1851) Folly Bridge, Oxford (c1794) and Westminster
Bridge (c1796); two landscapes attributed to John Crome (1768-1821); two
paintings attributed to John Constable (1776-1837), Branch Hill Pond,
Hampstead Heath (probably by John Linnell) and A Country Road (possibly by F W
Watts) and three large watercolours by Richard Westall (1765-1836): Satan
Calling Forth His Legions (1792), A Nymph and two Satyrs [Elegia Quinta] and
The Birth of Sin, all finished studies for engravings illustrating John
Boydell’s edition of Milton’s Poetical Works (1792-94).
The paintings and objets d’art also reveal a decided interest in the male
nude particularly in the collection of small bronzes. Some are Renaissance,
some 18th or 19th-century copies of Renaissance originals and some are
contemporary pieces made by well-known sculptors of the time such as On the
sea shore (1877) (a black woman manacled in slavery) by John Bell (1812-1895),
{italic:Pan] by Jean Baptiste Clésinger (1814-1883) and Bacchus by Victoriano
Codina-Länglin (1844-1911). The overall theme of the bronzes is the male nude
in classical guise, subject matter which is echoed in some of Zwecker’s
watercolours, particularly the overtly phallic Boy on a Dragonfly, Ajax by
Etienne Garnier and Love Dreaming by the Sea by Simeon Solomon. Homoeroticism
is undeniably one of the prime organising principles of Powell’s collection of
fine and decorative art.
Powell was a fanatical devotee of Wagner and attended the first performance
of the Ring cycle. A list, preserved by Powell, of those attending Bayreuth in
August 1876 describes Powell as ‘Gelehrter’ - a learned gentleman or man of
letters. By his own account he also had dinner with the ‘Great Master’ and his
wife Cosima in September 1876. The relic of this experience was a dried flower
from the gardens at Bayreuth (long since lost). He amassed a number of musical
manuscripts and autographs including Ode upon the New Year (1693) by Dr John
Blow (1649-1708), and Orazio Benecoli’s Dixit Dominus (1668). In 1862 he
purchased from the sale of the library of the Society for British Musicians an
autographed manuscript of Mendelssohn’s concert overture Meerestille und
glückliche farht (Calm sea and prosperous voyage) 1832. Unfortunately the
score is no longer considered to an authentic working document by the
composer. The artist Wilhelm Kümpel, a mutual friend of Powell and Zwecker was
commissioned to produce crayon portraits of Powell’s musical and literary
heroes among them Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Schumann and Richard
Wagner.
Powell's travels, along with his poor relationship with his father, W.T.R.
Powell, meant that he remained largely absent from Nanteos whilst a young man.
On his father's death in 1878, he inherited Nanteos, and returned home. In
1880, he was appointed High Sheriff of Cardigan, and the following year, on
the 10th of May, he married Dinah T. Harries, of Goodwick, Pembrokeshire.
After only a year of marriage, on the 17th of October 1882, he died childless,
and is buried in the churchyard at Llanbadarn Fawr, near Aberystwyth. He was succeeded by his father's cousin, William Beauclerk Powell.
George E. J. Powell published Quod Libet (Aberystwyth, 1860); Poems, by
Miölnir Nanteos (Aberystwyth, 1860); Poems, by Miôlnir Nanteos, Second
Series (Aberystwyth, 1861); and, with Eirikr Magnusson, he
translated Icelandic Legends Collected by Jon Arnasson (1st series, 1864; 2nd
series, 1866). There are numerous letters to him from A. C. Swinburne in the
National Library of Wales (together with a volume containing transcripts made
by George Eyre Evans).
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