Frederick Sandys - Proud Maisie

signed, inscribed and dated 'Proud Maisie. 1903. F Sandys.' (upper right)
pencil and red chalk on paper
14 1/8 x 10 5/8 in.

Proud Maisie was the single most popular image that Sandys created. Betty Elzea lists no fewer than fourteen versions in her catalogue raisonné of his work, most of them drawings although at least one is an unfinished oil. The original prototype, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868, and most of the replicas were made within the next few years. However, three more came at the end of Sandys' life, the last dating from 1904, the year he died.

The Wernick drawing, dated 1903, is the thirteenth and penultimate treatment. There is a second version in the V&A, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, have one each. The rest are in private collections or recorded but missing.

As Douglas Schoenherr has shown in his introduction to Elzea's catalogue, Sandys' undoubtedly borrowed the motif of a woman biting her hair from the figure of Delia in D.G. Rossetti's Return of Tibullus to Delia, a design he had every opportunity of studying when he was living in Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in 1866-7. He was to develop the idea in two contemporary illustrations, If and Helen and Cassandra, while the composition of Proud Maisie was anticipated in Love's Shadow, a drawing of 1867 in which a sullen and haughty temptress is seen in much the same pose but biting a nosegay rather than her hair (An oil version of this design was in the Forbes Collection, sold in these Rooms 19-20 February 2003, lot 91).

When Sandys exhibited the first version of Proud Maisie at the RA in 1868, he gave it the nondescript title Study of a Head. The title by which the composition has become well known, taken from 'The Pride of Youth', a poem by Sir Walter Scott in The Heart of Midlothian, was adopted for a version produced later that year. The original version was praised by William Michael Rossetti and A.C. Swinburne in a review of the RA exhibition they published jointly in pamphlet form. Swinburne, one of Sandys' most ardent admirers, was particularly enthusiastic. It was, he wrote, one of the artist's 'most solid and splendid designs; a woman of rich, ripe, angry beauty, she draws one warm long lock of curling hair through her full and moulded lips, biting it with bared bright teeth, which add something of a tiger's charm to the sleepy and couching [sic] passion of her fair face'. Sandys' evocation of a wilful dominatrix and femme fatale, her action vividly expressive of sexual desire, was indeed calculated to appeal to Swinburne, and there is an art-historical dimension to his comments too. At about the same time he published a pioneering article on Florentine Renaissance drawings in the Fornightly Review, and it is interesting to compare his account of Proud Maisie with the praise he lavishes on the so-called teste divine of Michelangelo and the 'fair strange faces' of Leonardo and his followers.

The model for Proud Maisie was Mary Emma Jones, an actress who took the stage name of 'Miss Clive'. She had first sat to Sandys in 1862, and by 1867 they had established a long-term common law relationship and produced the first of ten surviving children. From then on she was his principal muse, inspiring countless works which celebrate her distinctive profile and luxuriant tresses. Proud Maisie is supreme among these images; Schoenherr rightly calls the design 'a kind of apotheosis of Mary Emma and her spectacular hair'.

Elzea illustrates eleven versions of the composition, and those made within a few years of the original show little development. In all, the shoulder-line of the model's dress is decorated with rectangular tabs in a vaguely mid-seventeenth-century style, while a rose is tucked behind her left ear. However, in the three late versions, including the Wernick drawing, the rather hard shoulder effect gives way to softer folds, while the rose in the hair disappears altogether.


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Betty Elzea, Frederick Sandys: A Catalogue Raisonné, Woodbridge, 2001, p. 296, no. 5.63, illustrated.