It was Rothenstein’s friend Max Beerbohm, the half-brother of the actor and manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who fully introduced him to the world of the theatre. From 1895 onwards, however, his closest link to the stage was his future wife, the actress Alice Kingsley.
By the time Rothenstein met her, at a reception given in honour of the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck in 1895, Alice was twenty-six. Her thoughts on marriage have not been recorded, but as an independent young woman who, at least initially, was keen to put her profession before romance it seems likely that she would have been in sympathy with – if not necessarily a vocal advocate of – what is now referred to as the New Woman movement. Rothenstein will have realised soon after meeting her that she was not a shrinking violet or a personality content to hide behind her looks. By all accounts, Alice Knewstub was a forthright individual, who held sometimes caustic opinions on a wide variety of subjects.
The couple’s early relationship was not without its problems. Rothenstein was frustrated by Alice’s seeming indifference: ‘I shall be glad to see you again, because I love you. But your affection for me is not so entirely clear to me, as I might, in my vanity wish’. He was also somewhat doubtful of his own appeal: ‘How cruel you are again. I expected you all afternoon, and then waited in until late, awaiting a line – nothing. Was it merely forgetfulness, or neglect, or refined cruelty? ... Won’t you come to lunch? Or have you been comparing letters again, to find I am but a dull dog after all?’ Alice’s famous beauty must have proved somewhat unnerving for the young artist, whose own looks elicited less welcoming attention (‘the smallest man I’d ever seen’ was how Alice recalled their first meeting). While interested in the theatre Rothenstein was also clearly envious of the hold it had over his beloved – if not jealous of the admiration she received from audiences. A letter from 1896 suggests something of Rothenstein’s concerns as well as Alice’s own dissatisfaction with her career: ‘Dearest – you must not think me too unsympathetic over your theatrical troubles – for indeed I am worried about them – only there is so much that is distasteful to me in your profession, and there are certain things, and people especially so’. Coming from an upwardly mobile middle-class German-Jewish community in Bradford, Rothenstein was naturally anxious as to what people might make of his relationship with the Catholic daughter of a relatively poor London artist, currently serving in a ‘distasteful’ profession. If Alice was a New Woman, was he a New Man, or just a provincial, bourgeois ‘dull dog’? Could he handle or temper her independent spirit? Although he moved in bohemian circles, Rothenstein was frequently accused by fellow artists of being eminently sensible, if not a little ‘strait-laced.
Rothenstein was certainly rather cautious about informing his parents of his impending marriage. In a letter written shortly before his marriage he wrote: "I am sure you will like her, and that she will love you both very dearly. I have been a little cowardly about her, as I write this, indeed, since I made up my mind as to my duty ... London life is so complicated, & my dear Alice’s position so hard & lonely, that I am looking forward to giving her such a home as I can."
Fortunately, their romance weathered these early gauche moments and, following their marriage on 11 June 1899, the newlyweds honeymooned in Dieppe before renting a small cottage in Vattetot. While there they were visited by William’s brother Albert and the artists Augustus John and William Orpen, both of whom were busy working on sketches of Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the Slade School competition. Included among this rather celebrated group was Conder, who visited in July. The theatre would naturally have been a discussion point and it is likely that, during talk of Shakespeare and the milieu of the London stage, of the talents of Ibsen and Achurch, and with Rothenstein’s own natural sensitivity coming to the fore, the subject of The Doll’s House tellingly lent itself. Indeed, it was perhaps Alice who, frustrated by her own ambitions, suggested the subject, wishing to see herself in a production which would capture her as a talent equal to Achurch, if only on canvas. It was here, after all, that her future as an actress lay: not on the theatrical stage, but on the two-dimensional stage of paint and canvas. Over the next decade, Alice would pose for several paintings each year, usually represented in profile, as she preferred and as she appeared in a photograph taken by George Charles Beresford in around 1901 in which she almost replicates the hand-to-head gesture of The Doll’s House.
The interest in the character of Nora, especially her final dramatic act of independence – the slamming of the door to her old life when she decides to leave Torvald – was characteristic of late-nineteenth-century theatre. The themes and problems of the ‘women question’ (the marriage market, women’s suffrage and the sexual double-standards of male and female relationships) were paramount in the New Drama. Rather than depicting the traditional melodramatic narrative of the fallen woman, however, the New Dramatists tended towards a depiction of a misunderstood woman, bored and ignored in her marriage and striving for control and emancipation in a masculine world. As Archer stated: ‘Nora, it must be remembered, is not a child in years ... nor is she the brainless butterfly of anti-Ibsenite legend. She is a brave little woman who has fought a hard fight against illness and poverty.’
Not everyone saw the situation in the same way, however, as the critic for the Illustrated Sports and Dramatic News asserted: ‘I must say that if married ladies are to take their cue from pieces like A Doll’s House and The Profligate, then husbands have a hard time before them.’38 Had this thought occurred to Rothenstein as well, and if so, how does this painting respond to those fears? By openly exploring his anxieties over his marriage, Rothenstein may have been making fun of his petty middle-class concerns, thereby underlining his credentials as a forward-thinking New Man. Although later paintings of Alice would show her in more conventional domestic settings (reading a book in an armchair or cradling a child), in other works she is represented looking out of a window, as if seeking to escape her humdrum domestic life and flee, like Ibsen’s Nora, into an uncertain future. Once again, Rothenstein appears to be directly engaging with the role and condition of the modern married woman, using his own marriage as the source material.
Rothenstein’s The Doll’s House therefore, with its suggestion rather than direct illustration of Ibsen, experiments with a layering of ideas and issues then affecting modern British painting and the modern theatre. Complex and ambiguous narratives, melancholic realism and an interest in social concerns were permanent features of late-nineteenth-century theatre shared by the realists in painting. Looking beyond simple replication, however, The Doll’s House exhibits Rothenstein as an artist fully engaged with both the contemporary worlds of art and the theatre and highlights his reputation as a considered and significant contributor to this often overlooked tradition, which includes Hogarth, Lawrence, Reynolds, Whistler, Sargent and Sickert amongst its contributors. As his male sitter, Augustus John, noted, the painting captured ‘Rothenstein’s essential romanticism and his penchant for the dramatic. Is not Drama a legitimate province of painting?’.
They had four children: John, Betty, Rachel and Michael.