Henry Holiday

London, 1839 - 1927, London

BiographyLC name authority rec. n80112949
LC Heading: Holiday, Henry, 1839-1927

Biography:
Holiday, Henry George Alexander (1839–1927), painter and stained-glass artist, was born on 17 June 1839 at 2 Lower Southampton (now part of Conway) Street, Fitzroy Square, London, the second of four children of George Henry Holiday (1799–1884), a private tutor, and his wife, Climène Gerber (1804–1897), of Mulhouse, Alsace. Educated at home, he showed an early talent for drawing. After attending Leigh's Art School for a year (1854–5), he entered the Royal Academy Schools, aged only fifteen. There he absorbed elements of Pre-Raphaelitism—its historical realism, as in his first major painting The Burgesses of Calais, A.D. 1347 (exh. RA, 1859; Guildhall Art Gallery, London), but also its decorative emphasis. Friendship with Albert Moore and Simeon Solomon introduced him to D. G. Rossetti and the ‘second-generation’ Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, with whom Holiday shared a similarly creative interest in art history. He also met the architect William Burges who, impressed by his virtuoso draughtsmanship, commissioned painted furniture and architectural decoration, initiating a long career devoted primarily to applied art.

In 1863 the stained-glass manufacturers James Powell & Sons invited Holiday to become their main designer, in succession to Burne-Jones. Work for other firms—Lavers and Barraud, and Heaton, Butler and Bayne—soon followed and the financial independence provided by numerous stained-glass commissions enabled Holiday on 13 October 1864 to marry Catherine Harriet (Kate) Raven (1839–1924), embroiderer, sister of landscape painter John Samuel Raven. Their only child, Winifred, was born in 1865.

Burges expected Holiday to be a compliant collaborator in his neo-Gothic decorative projects, but a visit to Italy in 1867, ironically at Burges's suggestion, led him to reject uncompromisingly the historicist tenets of the Gothic revival. Looking at Giotto's frescoes, he realized ‘that all great art is modern when it is produced’ (The Builder, 22 March 1890, 212). The fruits of this revelation soon appeared in his work. The I. K. Brunel memorial window (1868) in Westminster Abbey and the glazing scheme (1869–1880s) at St Mary Magdalene, Rowington Close, Paddington, exemplify his powerfully original approach to stained glass, combining traditional technique with assertively contemporary figure-drawing.

Although gregarious and charming (especially in those social circles where patrons might be cultivated), Holiday could also be hot-tempered and polemical. Having fallen out with Burges, he began to see his career as ‘a continued protest against medievalism’ (Holiday, 164). By the 1870s, with the Gothic revival waning, he emerged as an influential force in British stained glass, leading a school of non-revivalist ‘aesthetic’ designers which included his former studio assistants H. E. Wooldridge and Carl Almquist.

Around 1870 Holiday's career seemed almost too successful. The frantic industry engendered by commissions for murals (Worcester College chapel, Oxford; Bradford and Rochdale town halls) and stained glass (all windows in Trinity College chapel, Cambridge), coupled with his excitable temperament, led to a breakdown. Respite came in 1871, when Holiday accompanied Sir Norman Lockyer's expedition to India to observe the solar eclipse. He produced meticulous drawings of the scientific phenomena and sketched local costumes and architecture, returning to London with a pet gazelle as a souvenir.

Holiday's Reminiscences (1914) chronicle the prodigious energy driving his artistic ideals, enriched by broad cultural and social interests. In March 1874 the Holidays moved to Oak Tree House, Branch Hill, Hampstead, designed in Queen Anne style by Basil Champneys. Ingeniously planned with ample studio space, the house proved equally suitable for regular musical and political gatherings. Alongside Henry's prolific output, Kate Holiday too developed a successful career. Her embroidery skills were ranked above ‘all Europe’ (Holiday, 266) by her collaborator William Morris, who exhibited her work in his firm's Oxford Street shop. The Holidays' friends included artists, musicians (especially fellow Wagnerites), and politicians, notably W. E. Gladstone.

Holiday's politics blended liberalism with idealistic socialism, derived from Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward (1888). As with his friends Morris and Crane, conviction led to activism. He joined the Irish National League in the 1880s, designing banners, cartoons, even a home rule firework display, and several times visited Ireland, once to brief Gladstone on the unrest there. Other causes enlisting his propagandist talents were women's suffrage, infant crèches, and garden cities. In 1883 he was the first artist to testify to a parliamentary committee on an environmental issue, opposing the Ennerdale Valley Railway Bill. An aesthete to the core—but also a keen lakeland walker and cyclist—Holiday ardently promoted dress reform as editor of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union's journal Aglaia (1893–4), castigating as ‘the tubular system’ (English Illustrated Magazine, Sept 1893, 909) the typical Victorian masculine garb of trousers, frock coat, and top hat. Holiday himself, a diminutive, bearded figure with a domed forehead and somewhat lugubrious expression, favoured Norfolk jackets and knee-breeches.

Holiday's artistic versatility was impressive, ranging from illustrations for his friend Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876) to sculptural experiments such as Jacob's Ladder (exh. RA, 1884; Leighton House, London) and an innovative method of relief enamelling. For his paintings, research invariably entailed foreign travel. In 1881 he was in Italy, studying background details for Dante and Beatrice (1884; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), still his best-known work. A passion for Hellenic art was reinforced by his 1885 Greek trip, which resulted in Aspasia on the Pnyx (1888; Camden local studies collection, London). A lifelong interest in Egypt's culture culminated in an archaeological visit there in 1906.

Founder-membership of the designers' group The Fifteen, the Art-Workers' Guild, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society placed Holiday at the heart of the arts and crafts movement. A flood of stained-glass commissions, including the Robert E. Lee memorial in St Paul's, Richmond, Virginia, followed his 1890 trip to the USA and Canada, enabling him to terminate an increasingly unsatisfactory collaboration with Powells and establish his own workshop in Hampstead. With all processes of the craft under his personal supervision, he could implement the ‘cordial and complete assimilation by the artist of the spirit of his material’ (H. Holiday, Stained Glass as an Art, 1896, 93) which is conspicuously embodied in the windows of Holy Trinity Church, Manhattan, New York (1898–1925) and other late works.

After moving in 1920 to 18 Chesterford Gardens, Hampstead, Holiday suffered the double blow of his wife's death, soon after their sixtieth wedding anniversary, and failing eyesight. He died at home on 15 April 1927 and was cremated at Golders Green. Drawings and designs for stained glass by Holiday are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Peter Cormack
Sources H. Holiday, Reminiscences of my life (1914) · A. L. Baldry, ‘Henry Holiday’, Walker's Quarterly [whole issue], 31–2 (1930) · P. Cormack, Henry Holiday, 1839–1927 (1989) [exhibition catalogue, William Morris Gallery, London] · C. Mill, ‘Henry Holiday: eminent Hampstead Victorian’, Camden History Review, 6 (1978), 24–7 · M. Harrison, Victorian stained glass (1980), 44–6, 79–80 · The Times (16 April 1927) · Graves, RA exhibitors, 4 (1906), 125–6 · B. R. Lövgren, ‘Carl Almquist (1848–1924): his life and work’, Journal of Stained Glass, 21 (1997), 11–40 · b. cert. · d. cert. · m. cert.
Archives NL Ire., corresp. and papers · priv. coll., diaries, photographs, and sketchbooks · William Morris Gallery, London, one stained-glass panel and an album of printed material by and about Henry Holiday, comprising political cartoons and copies of Aglaia compiled by his wife, Kate Holiday, cat. no. C197.1987; K2422.1990 :: BL, corresp. with Macmillans, Add. MS 55234 · Herts. ALS, corresp. with Ebenezer Howard
Likenesses photograph, 1870, repro. in Holiday, Reminiscences, facing p. 168 · H. Ashdown, photograph, 1870–79, William Morris Gallery, London [see illus.] · J. Russell & Sons, photograph, c.1900, repro. in Holiday, Reminiscences, facing p. 2 · Swain, photograph, c.1900 (after Mendoza), repro. in Baldry, ‘Henry Holiday’, frontispiece · cabinet photograph, NPG
Wealth at death £4507 17s. 2d.: probate, 26 Aug 1927, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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Peter Cormack, ‘Holiday, Henry George Alexander (1839–1927)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2007 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/33935, accessed 2 Oct 2015]

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