H J Ford - Venus's Fly Trap

Estimate £20,000 - £30,000
signed 'H J Ford' (lower left) and inscribed 'VENUS'S FLY TRAP' (lower centre within the decorated border) and further inscribed 'This could be reduced to ... by ... for the cover of the book!' (lower left, in the margin, overmounted)
pencil and watercolour heightened with bodycolour on paper
15¾ x 12 5/8 in.

Ford was educated at Repton and acquired a First Class degree in Classics from Cambridge before entering the Slade to study art. He also attended Herkomer's art school at Bushey. Between 1892 and 1930 he exhibited at the Royal Academy, though he is most highly regarded as an illustrator, particularly of the books of legends and fairy stories which Andrew and Leonora Lang edited for Longmans from 1899. He was an associate of Burne-Jones, whose influence on his work is evident.


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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.

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale - In the Spring Time

Just come up for auction
Estimate £15,000 - £20,000

signed with monogram and dated '1901' (lower right)
pencil and watercolour heightened with white on paper
16 x 10¾ in.

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Patricia Quinn as Lizzie Siddal in 'The Love School' video

William Holman Hunt - Scene at Sheen

with inscription 'Scene at Sheen/Holman Hunt' (lower centre)
pen and brown ink and brown wash on writing paper stamped 'The Planes, East Sheen', watermark '1862'
8 x 6 3/8 in.

Hunts work depicts a scene at The Planes, East Sheen, home to Octavius Ommanney (1816-1901), and his family. His wife Helen, on the far left, is surrounded by five of their children, Georgiana, Charlotte, Frederick, Annie Maria and Mildred. The watermark on the sheet dates the drawing to 1862 at which point Hunt was actively looking for a wife and he may have thought of the Ommanney daughters as possibilities for that role.


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Walter Crane - View from the Beach House, Nantucket, July 1892

signed with device, inscribed and dated 'WAUWINET. JULY. 1892' (lower left)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour on paper
10 3/8 x 14 1/8 in.

At the invitation of the Fine Art Society Crane held his first retrospective there in 1891; what was not sold formed the core of a touring exhibition which went to the United States and then Europe.

Crane and his family arrived in Boston on 19 October 1891; his tour took him to Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and then on to Philadelphia by April.

The transfer of the exhibition from Philadelphia to Brooklyn was delayed and Crane decided to take his family to New England on holiday, although Crane completed a commission while he was there. He writes in An Artist's Reminiscences, 1907 'We found at Wauwinet a charming cottage, with a studio, most kindly placed at our disposal by our friends Mr and Mrs Pretyman. I had work to carry out here too. I had been commissioned to paint two large panels for the decoration of the hall of the Woman's Temperance Building at Chicago.... Wauwinet was a most remote little place, consisting of an inn and a few scattered timber dwellings along the sandy shore. It was nine miles from Nantucket, the only town on the island.' After remaining there for six weeks they returned to Boston and embarked for home.


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Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale - Lancelot and Elaine

[Lancelot and Elaine - "But to be with you still and see your face, to serve you and to follow you thr'o the World"]

signed with initials l.r.: E. F. B.

watercolour and bodycolour
15 by 10 in

Elizabeth Siddal & Victorian Sceances (sic) video

Edward Burne-Jones - Portrait head of Kate Dolan, in profile to right

signed with initials and dated '1890' (lower left)
pencil, black, white and red chalk on tinted tuscan red paper
10 3/8 x 9 7/8 in.

Although little is known about her, it is believed that Kate Dolan was an actress and contemporary of the famed Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry (see lot 1). Burne-Jones used a variety of young girls as inspiration for figures for his large works such as Arthur in Avalon and it is difficult to know exactly which work the present drawing is a study for. It clearly displays Burne-Jones's dramatic combination of charcoal and pastel to highlight his model's striking features.
There is a full-length portrait by Millais that is believed to be of Miss Dolan (1886) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Head of a young woman, probably Ellen Smith, in profile to left (recto); Head of a woman (verso)

pencil on paper
9 3/8 x 7¾ in.

The drawing is not included in Virginia Surtees' catalogue raisonné of Rossetti's work, but it appears to date from the 1860s and to represent Ellen Smith, who frequently sat to him during this decade. His first recorded likeness of her, a drawing in the Birmingham Art Gallery, dates from 1863, and she modelled for a number of works a few years later. They included Washing Hands (1865), The Beloved (1865-6), Joli Coeur (1867), A Christmas Carol (1867), and the three watercolour versions of The Loving Cup (1867).

Ellen Smith was neither as voluptuous as Fanny Cornforth nor as soulful as Alexa Wilding or Jane Morris. Her charms were of a homelier order, and she was in fact a Chelsea laundry girl as well as being, like so many of Rossetti's models at this period, of equivocal virtue. She also sat to Burne-Jones, Poynter, Spencer Stanhope, Simeon Solomon, G.J. Pinwell and G.P. Boyce, who often mentions her in his published diary.

Smith's modelling career had an abrupt and unhappy ending. According to Rossetti's assistant H.T. Dunn, this 'sweet young girl...got her face sadly cut about and disfigured by a brute of a soldier and then of course she was of no more use as a model'. By 1873 she had settled for matrimony and gone back to laundering. On 17 February that year Boyce recorded in his diary that 'Ellen Smith, now Mrs Elson, called on me to tell me she had been married about three weeks ago to an old acquaintance and suitor, a cabman. She wishes to do some laundry work on her own account as her husband's earnings are small'. The kind-hearted Boyce had already helped her financially on previous occasions, and no doubt he obliged yet again.

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