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Looking at this photograph of Gaetano Meo, it may come as a surprise to learn that as a young man he was a favourite model of London’s leading Pre-Raphaelite painters. We first encountered him when researching ‘The Good Grave Guide to Hampstead Cemetery’, where he is buried. This is the story of his life in London, and the lives and loves of some of his family members.
From Italy to London
Around 1865, Gaetano arrived in London as an illegal immigrant, smuggled into the country aboard a freighter from France. He was born on 15 December 1849 in southern Italy, to Rocco and Francesca Meo. Tradition has it that all the Meo family were musicians, including Gaetano who played the harp. An alternative but less credible version (given we know most family members did play instruments well), claims Gaetano was sold by his cash-strapped parents to gypsies, who taught him to play.
Gaetano left Italy in March 1864, travelling north through Europe but found life as a street musician both hard and financially unrewarding. Some reports say he was accompanied by an older brother who played the lute and the brothers’ destination was America.
Gaetano was very handsome, and he supplemented his musical earnings in Paris by working as an artist’s model. He decided to stay in London and took lodgings in Clerkenwell, in a neighbourhood known as ‘Little Italy’ by virtue of its large Italian community. We don’t know how they met, but in December 1868 Gaetano married Agnes Morton in Holborn and in 1871 the couple were living in Fulham. He gave his profession to the census that year as first, artist’s model, and second, harpist.
Life as an artist’s model in London
As an illegal immigrant, Gaetano preferred playing his harp in Italian restaurants to performing on the streets, where he risked being picked up by the police and deported. But it was his work as a model that paid the bills. At the time, male models would generally pose wearing a loincloth, but Meo was happy to pose nude. He posed for many Pre-Raphaelite painters including Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton and Simeon Solomon. Solomon claimed to have discovered Gaetano when he was busking, but the family history says it was an Italian barber who introduced Gaetano to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Meo went to Rossetti’s home on Cheyne Walk and was welcomed by the artist as being the perfect model. However, while he posed for Rossetti in ‘Dante’s Dream’, a painting dating from 1869-1871, it was Solomon who created the earliest known works to feature Meo, ‘Bacchus’ and ‘The Sleepers and One that Watcheth’ in 1867.
Meo criticised English artists in general for treating their models ‘as dirt’ but said his Pre-Raphaelite employers were different, regarding their models as ‘human beings.’ Other paintings he modelled for include: by Edward Burne-Jones, ‘Phyllis and Demophoon’ (1870) and ‘Love Among the Ruins’ (1873); by Frederic Leighton, a mural, ‘The Arts of Industry as Applied to War’ (1870-1872); and Henry Holiday, ‘Dante and Beatrice’ (1883).
He also modelled for a young Frank Dicksee. In 1877 Frank’s painting ‘Harmony’ took London by storm. It showed a seated young man (Meo) staring adoringly at a girl (Hilda Spencer) who was playing the organ. A reporter called it ‘one of the most beautiful pictures’ at the Royal Academy show. Dicksee was only twenty-three, little known despite being a gold RA medallist, but he went on to become a very successful artist. He was knighted in 1925 and from about 1898 lived at 3 Greville Place off Maida Vale.
Here is our blog story about Frank Dicksee:
http://kilburnwesthampstead.blogspot.com/2022/04/sir-frank-dicksee-artist.html
For a longer list and images of the paintings that Gaetano Meo modelled for, see
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gaetano_Meo
Family life
Gaetano’s reports of life and opportunities in London may well have encouraged other family members to move to England.
In 1871, Gaetano was sharing his home with three of his siblings, Maria Nunziata (10), Maria Carmela (11) and Luigi (16). By 1874, his parents were also in London, living close to ‘Little Italy’ in Leather Lane and Maria Nunziata was now sharing their lodgings.
The family were briefly in the news that October when Rocco, his father, and Gaetano believed Maria Nunziata had been kidnapped by Frank Morris, aged 16. At the Old Bailey, Frank was accused and acquitted of the charge of unlawfully removing 15-year-old Nunziata from the care of her father and brother. Her parents, Rocco and Francesca gave evidence through an interpreter. Nunziata told the court Frank had stopped her going home one evening after they had been to a music hall; he promised to marry her, so she stayed with him. He kept her incommunicado for a week before travelling to Glasgow where Nunziata said they ‘went through a wedding ceremony.’ The marriage failed and after a few months Gaetano sent his sister enough money to pay her fare back to London.
It emerged from the court case that at the time, Gaetano had another source of income, the takings from his lease of a pub, the City Arms at 22 Liquorpond Street, now part of Clerkenwell Road, on the fringe of ‘Little Italy.’ This was where Nunziata had met Frank.
Gaetano and Agnes had six children and they moved several times. Leaving Fulham, by 1876 they were at 58 Gayton Road in Hampstead; the 1881 census shows them at 4 Wildwood Grove in North End Hampstead. By 1885, they had moved a short distance to 6 Sunnyside Villas in Child’s Hill, where their son Umberto James, affectionately known as Little Bertie, died that year, aged just seven years old. He was the first family member to be buried at Hampstead Cemetery, Fortune Green Road. The following year they were back in Gayton Road, this time at No.47.
Their long-term home was to be Hampstead, where in 1889, Gaetano bought 41 Downshire Hill for £436.10sh (worth about £50,000 today), later acquiring No.39 as well. At different times, family members lived in both houses.
Associates and new projects
Not content with posing, Gaetano became an artist in his own right. He sold his first watercolour to Rossetti for 2sh 6d in 1870. Two years later he travelled to the country home of artist William Blake Richmond, looking for modelling work. The two men went on to enjoy a very close friendship that lasted for almost half a century. Gaetano always maintained they were fated to work together. He claimed he had been met by a beautiful woman at the door, who pointed the way to Richmond’s studio. No one knew who she was, but Gaetano later identified her as Richmond’s first wife. If we are to believe him, he hadn’t been guided by a living person, but by her ghost, as she had died in 1865.
Gaetano became Richmond’s studio assistant and in the 1890s, led the team that executed Richmond’s mosaics in St Paul’s Cathedral, in the walls and ceiling of the choir and apse. Under Richmond’s instruction, he became a landscape artist, good enough to be exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery. Camden Council own three of his paintings, ‘Wyldes Farm’, ‘Looking towards London from the Heath’, and ‘Tooley’s Farm’. They appear to have been gifted by the family.
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/view_as/grid/search/keyword:gaetano-meo
Gaetano worked for other artists including Henry Holiday, helping execute his stained-glass designs. Holiday and Richmond sponsored Meo to obtain British citizenship, which was granted in 1886 and Holiday hosted a party to celebrate the event. During 1906-1907, and working to designs by the architect, Meo created a mosaic dome for Ernest Debenham’s Peacock House in Addison Road. He set subjects from classical mythology and small portraits of the Debenham family against a background of plant patterns. Debenham, the owner of a large department store in the West End of London, was so happy with the result that he sent a case of whisky to Gaetano at Christmas every year from then on.
Gaetano and Agnes’ children
The family tradition of playing music was passed down to the next generation.
His son Giovanni Batista (b.1890) played the violin. In WWI he served in the 12th Battalion, London Regiment (The Rangers). He was killed in action on 10 June 1916 during the build up to the Battle of the Somme and is buried in Hebuterne Military Cemetery in France.
The couple also had three musical daughters. Taormina (b.1891) a singing teacher and Margarita (b.1874) a piano teacher, were described by a family member as ‘very English and very Catholic.’ Neither married and after their father died, they remained in Downshire Hill, relocating to Rosslyn Hill and then Eastbourne. Elena Fortuna Meo was born in October 1879. A talented violinist, she performed at Hampstead events on several occasions.
Elena and Edward Gordon Craig
Around 1900, Elena met and fell in love with her neighbour, Edward Gordon Craig who was lodging at No.8 Downshire Hill. He was a theatre designer and wood engraver, and the son of the famous actress Ellen Terry. Unfortunately, he was also married: to Helen Mary Gibson and they had four children. Craig and the musician Martin Shaw were sharing the house and Elena had called to ask Martin to accompany her at a concert. Craig answered the door. They looked at each other for what she later described as ‘a very long while, neither saying a word.’ It was Martin Shaw who told Elena that Craig was married. Elena eventually decided to elope with Craig despite her deeply held Catholic convictions. Edward’s wife obtained a divorce in 1905 but the couple did not marry.
Craig and Elena lived together intermittently in England and Italy. They had three children, but one daughter died before her first birthday.
Gaetano strongly disapproved of his daughter Elena’s relationship, as a family biographer wrote; ‘Meo was in a terrible rage and had only one desire, to kill Ted.’ Father and daughter were estranged for many years until Ellen Terry helped bring about a reconciliation. She always described Elena fondly if inaccurately as, ‘her favourite daughter-in-law,’ and paid alimony to Edward’s ex-wife. Elena was very important to Edward, she helped him with theatrical projects and acted as his secretary. Gaetano was thrilled to meet his grandchildren and to find they could speak fluent Italian.
Gaetano appeared in a 1916 silent film, ‘Her Greatest Performance’ which starred Ellen Terry. Sadly, there’s no record of their performances; the BFI has put up a video of all that remains of the film – just one minute, featuring Ellen’s daughter Edith.
There is an excellent series of photographs of Elena taken at Smallhythe Place, the country home of Ellen Terry, where Elena spent time with her children, especially during WWI. Craig was a visitor rather than resident.
https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/results?SearchTerms=elena+Meo&Sort=date
Good looking and charismatic, Edward Gordon Craig moved to France in 1935 and died in Venice in 1966, aged 94. His ashes were buried in Elena’s grave (d.1957) in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Long Crendon, in Oxfordshire. He had been awarded a Companion of Honour for services to the theatre in 1956 and in an obituary, The Stage said of him: ‘He was the greatest single influence in (theatre) production born and trained in this country during the last hundred years.’ He was also a very good actor and versatile artist.
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Today there is a Gordon Craig Theatre in Stevenage which opened in 1975.
Gaetano’s brothers
Two more of Gaetano’s brothers, Alfonzo (also spelled as Alfonso), and Antonio left Italy for London. In 1881, they were living in an extremely poor and densely populated part of ‘Little Italy’, at 8 Fleet Row. The census shows most of their neighbours were born in Italy; many were musicians like the brothers, others were ice cream sellers.
In 1884, Alfonzo married Emily Jane Innes and added her name to his, to become Innes Meo. They had one child, Luigi Alfonzo Rocco. Emily was a talented pianist and teacher, often performing duets with her husband on the violin. But by the mid-1900s he had a second family and the couple appear to have separated.
Antonio married and moved to Bournemouth where he established himself as a talented solo harpist, teacher and orchestral director. By 1911, the family home was 95 Old Christchurch Road.
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In 1912 Alfonzo, using Antonio’s address, bought a third-class ticket on the White Star Line, costing £8. His destination was America and on 10 April he sailed from Southampton, on board the SS Titanic. After hitting an iceberg, the boat sank on the 15th and Alfonzo’s body was later recovered from the ocean, dressed in a blue serge suit. Alfonzo had stuffed his pockets with some cash and small valuable items made of gold and silver, including a snuff box, chain, two watches and rings.
Why was he going to America? A simple answer could be to escape a wife, a mistress and family obligations. Another account claimed he was a violin maker delivering a valuable instrument to an American customer, but there’s no evidence for him being anything other than a violin player. Alfonzo’s body was brought to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and buried at Fairview Cemetery. The value of Alfonzo’s estate at death was £34, all of which went to Emily, and she also made a claim against the White Star Line for the loss of her husband.
Hampstead: the final curtain
Gaetano’s wife Agnes died in 1921 and was buried in the family grave in Hampstead Cemetery on March 1st. Gaetano created a mosaic of the Madonna and Child for the gravestone as a tribute to her. He returned briefly to Italy in 1923 but soon returned to 39 Downshire Hill. He died there on 16 January 1925, from heart failure but also suffering from stomach cancer. He was buried in the Hampstead Cemetery grave and left £2,705 to his daughters Margarita and Taormina. The mosaic has recently been restored by artist Tessa Hunkin and Helen Craig, Gaetano’s great granddaughter.
The Meo family grave in Hampstead Cemetery
We would like to thank Tom Gordon-Craig for the photo of Gaetano Meo.
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