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The Mountain Mists or Clyties of the Mist  (England, 1912)

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Oil on canvas
Signed

220 cm h x 122 cm w (86 1/2 in h x 48 in w)

Provenance
Sir Robert Ropner, Bt., Skutterskelfe Hall, Hutton Rudby, Yorkshire
Christies, 17 November 1950, part lot 42 (two in the lot), entitled Nymphs; sold to:
Bagnell
Private collection, Virginia to 2000

Literature
Pall Mall Magazine Extra, The Pictures of 1912. The Royal Academy, May 1912, page 52, illustrated

Exhibition History
London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1912

Description / Expertise
The Mountain Mists is one of the most powerful, sensuous and entrancing of all images by the painters that we now refer to as The Last Romantics. Like John William Waterhouse, Herbert William Draper breathed new air into Pre-Raphaelitism into the twentieth century, compounding in all his work the aestheticism of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones with the classicism of Frederic Lord Leighton.

The painting depicts three 'Clyties' spiraling airily upwards with the mountain mists. They are as wistfully beautiful as Waterhouse's nymphs although unlike his femme fatales luring men to their doom, Draper's nymphs are themselves the nature's free spirits. According to Greek myth, the water-nymph Clyties fell in love with the Sun God Apollo. In a tragic attempt to meet him in the sky, she was transformed into a sunflower. Till this day, the flower turns its head towards the sun following Apollo through his daily course.

Like Icarus, these Clyties of the Mist are whelmed toward the beautiful but deadly sun. Herbert Draper's magnificent painting Lament of Icarus (now in the Tate Gallery) was bought in 1898 from the Royal Academy exhibition by the Chantrey Bequest, the most important public fund for purchasing modern art and in 1900 this work gained a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle.

Draper was born in London and educated at the St.John's Wood Art School and, from 1884, at the Royal Academy Schools. He won the Royal Academy Travelling Scholarship in 1889 and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris and in Rome. He had already begun to exhibit at the Royal Academy and showed there regularly between 1887 and his death. An number of this works were bought for the recently founded British provincial art galleries and may be found in Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford, Preston, Truro and Hull. At about the same time, the artist received an important mural commission for the ceiling of the Draper's Hall, headquarters of one of the old London livery companies. His work combined academic figure drawing with an almost Post-Impressionist colour range and pointillist technique, designed to retain the works brilliancy when seen from a distance and under the artificial lighting of the company's dinners. They are among the most successful of all late Victorian decorative murals of this kind, yet almost unknown. Despite these successes Draper was never elected Royal Academician or even Associate.