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Lot Essay
Walter Osborne turned seriously to portrait painting from around 1889. The death of his sister in 1894 and the arrival of her baby daughter, Violet, to the family home meant that his parents were increasingly dependent on him financially, and portrait commissions were profitable. Inspired by the portraits of the American painters, John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Osborne also studied the old masters and did sketches after portraits by Velasquez, Goya, Reynolds and Gainsborough. It seems to be from Reynolds that he took the theme of mothers and daughters, which he developed throughout the late 1890s.
The earliest and simplest of these is Lady Brooke and her Daughter Emily (1896) which was followed by the rather more complicated Mrs Andrew Jameson and her Daughter Violet. This was lampooned by Punch who dubbed it The Torture Chamber as the child's shoes were nailed to the studio floor at 7 St Stephen's Green to enable her to keep the pose.
By 1898 Osborne had solved his early difficulties with the formal portrait, executing Mrs Noel Guinness and her Daughter Margaret, his most successful double-portrait to date, and the composition which sealed his position as Ireland's most sought-after portrait painter. The work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and awarded a Bronze medal at the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1901. Osborne immediately followed this successful formula in the present work, a charming and relaxed composition, in which the elaborate curves and textures of the sofa and the drapery, set against the subdued background, allow the beauty of the female sitters to radiate from the picture surface.
(see J. Sheehy, op. cit., pp.48-54).
The earliest and simplest of these is Lady Brooke and her Daughter Emily (1896) which was followed by the rather more complicated Mrs Andrew Jameson and her Daughter Violet. This was lampooned by Punch who dubbed it The Torture Chamber as the child's shoes were nailed to the studio floor at 7 St Stephen's Green to enable her to keep the pose.
By 1898 Osborne had solved his early difficulties with the formal portrait, executing Mrs Noel Guinness and her Daughter Margaret, his most successful double-portrait to date, and the composition which sealed his position as Ireland's most sought-after portrait painter. The work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and awarded a Bronze medal at the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1901. Osborne immediately followed this successful formula in the present work, a charming and relaxed composition, in which the elaborate curves and textures of the sofa and the drapery, set against the subdued background, allow the beauty of the female sitters to radiate from the picture surface.
(see J. Sheehy, op. cit., pp.48-54).