Fred Appleyard

Fred Appleyard was born on the 9 September 1874 at Middlesborough, Yorkshire, the son of an iron-merchant. He dropped the formal ‘Frederick’ name as a child and was always known as ‘Fred’. He was educated at the art school in Scarborough and it may have been here that he first encountered the fame of Scarborough’s most famous artistic son, Frederic Leighton. Appleyard soon progressed to the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1897 where Leighton had been President until the previous year when he died. Appleyard became a brilliant pupil with the encouragement of a series of prestigious Professors of Painting; William Blake Richmond, Hubert von Herkomer and Val Prinsep. He won most of the student prizes, including the Landseer Scholarship, the Turner Gold Medal and the Creswick Prize for landscape. In 1899 he also won the competition to paint a mural in the lunette above the doorway into the Refreshment Room of the Academy. The mural, entitled Spring Driving out Winter was the picture with which he made his debut at the Summer Exhibition at the Academy in 1900 and is perhaps Appleyard’s best-known paintings today. It narrowly avoided being obliterated in 1934 when the Secretary of the Academy, Sir Walter Lamb, wrote to Appleyard to ask if he would have any objection to the mural being painted over as it was 'rather dark in tone and not in accord with modern ideas of mural decoration'. The fact that the mural remains and Appleyard ceased to exhibit at the Academy after 1935, suggests that Appleyard had strong objections.

Following his t.mes as a student, Appleyard went on to enjoy a successful career, having pictures purchased for museums at Bath, Bristol, Rochdale, Doncaster and Grahamstown, South Africa aswell as for the National collects ion which became the Tate collects ion.

Stylistically the present picture is similar to Lay not Thine Hand Upon the Lad exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1913 (Christie’s, London, 8 June 2006, lot 231) which demonstrates an influence from Lord Leighton and the grandeur of the grand paintings of the French Salon. The title The Spirit of the Summit is that of a painting by Leighton painted in 1894 (Auckland Art Gallery) and depicts an oread – a nymph of the mountains. In Greek mythology the oreads were often associated with Pan, the God of wildernesses and with Artemis who favoured hunting on craggy hillsides – each mountain had its own nymph, including Oenone who lived on Mount Ida and Sinoe who gave her name to that mountain in Arcadia. They are primordial Demi-Goddesses of beneficent natures who rarely cause harm to mortals.