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Lot Essay
Born on 13 October 1853, Lillie Langtry was the only daughter of William Corbet Le Breton, Dean of Jersey. Determined to escape her restricted surroundings, she contracted a loveless marriage with Edward Langty, the affluent friend of one of her brothers, in March 1874. The following year the couple settled in London, which had long been the focus of Lillie's ambitions, and in May 1876 she made a sensational entrance into society at a party given by Sir John and Lady Sebright in Lowndes Square. Overnight she was the talk of the town, invited everywhere, and regarded as an arbiter of fashion. 'Never...had such universal worship been paid to beauty', wrote the young artist Graham Robertson, one of her greatest admirers. 'The Langtry bonnet, the Langtry shoe, even the Langtry dress-improver, were widely stocked and as widely bought; photographs of Mrs Langtry papered London'. For three seasons she reigned supreme as a professional beauty, and it was an open secret that she was the Prince of Wales's mistress. The affair came to an end when she overstepped the mark and dropped a cube of ice down his back in a moment of high spirits at a fancy-dress ball. By this time she was also heavily in debt, her marriage was in ruins, and she was pregnant by another Royal lover, Prince Louis of Battenberg. These tribulations, however, did not overwhelm her. Faced with the necessity of making money, she decided to go on the stage, and she remained a successful if not brilliant actress for nearly thirty years. She became a naturalised American in 1887, and much of her later life was spent in the U.S.A.
The secret of Lillie Langtry's appeal lay in the classical regularity of her features, so in keeping with the approved taste of the day, 'Miss Langtry's admirable beauty; wrote Henry James, 'is quite of the antique, classical, formal, and...plastic order'. To Graham Robertson she was 'the Venus Annodomini, the modern Helen....Praxiteles, who had first conceived [such an ideal], should have returned to earth to carve it afresh'. Oscar Wilde, who was one of her staunchest friends, felt that beauty like hers was found 'only in the best Greek gems, on the silver coins of Syracuse, or among the marble fringes of the Parthenon frieze...Pure Greek it is, with the low grave forehead, the exquisitely arched brow, the noble chiselling of the mouth..., the supreme and splendid curve of the cheek, the augustly pillared throat which bears it all'.
Inevitably artists vied with one another to paint this miracle. Portraits by Poynter and Millais, a fellow native of Jersey with whom Lillie had a real rapport, appeared at the Royal Academy in 1878 (for the Millais, see the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, no. 52). She also sat to Watts and Whistler, while Leighton, the arch-classicist, painted her as a bare-breasted nymph in his picture Idyll (1880-81), and Wilde's friend Frank Miles recorded her features obsessively in endless drawings. Graham Robertson asked her to sit, only to realise the impossibility of 'painting the lily'. 'I shall always', he wrote, 'regard that unpainted portrait of Mrs Langtry as my artistic masterpiece.'
The present picture was attributed until comparatively recently to John Singer Sargent, no doubt for no better reason than the 'JS' signature. The true artist is James Sant, one of the longest lived and most prolific of Victorian portraitists. Trained by John Varley and Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, he made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1840, and remained a regular contributor for no fewer than sixty-four years. He came to Queen Victoria's attention in the late 1860s, when she was looking for someone to paint children, a field in which he excelled, and in 1871 he succeeded Sir George Hayter as her Principal Painter, with repsonsibiltiy for carrying out state portraits. The results were not always to her liking, and in 1892 she expressly forbade him to paint any more. Nonetheless a number of his portraits both of the Queen and her family are in the Royal Collection.
The portrait of Lillie Langtry was probably commissioned by the Prince of Wales,although according to the catalogue of the Royal Gifts exhibition (1961), which still attributed it to Sargent, it was given to the Prince by the artist. In any event it must date from the later 1870s, that is to say a few years after Sant became the Queen's official portrait painter. Like Watts's portrait (Watts Gallery, Compton), the nymph in Leighton's Idyll, and many surviving photographs, it shows the sitter in profile in order that her classical features can be seen to full advantage. On the death of the Prince, now Edward VII, in 1910, the picture was inherited by his elder daughter, Princess Louise (1867-1931), who had married the Duke of Fife in 1889 and was created Princess Royal in 1905. Legend has it that she kept it hidden to avoid upsetting her mother, Queen Alexandra, although this may be apocryphal. The Queen had never displayed any animosity towards her husband's mistress; indeed she had gone out of her way to show her favour.
The secret of Lillie Langtry's appeal lay in the classical regularity of her features, so in keeping with the approved taste of the day, 'Miss Langtry's admirable beauty; wrote Henry James, 'is quite of the antique, classical, formal, and...plastic order'. To Graham Robertson she was 'the Venus Annodomini, the modern Helen....Praxiteles, who had first conceived [such an ideal], should have returned to earth to carve it afresh'. Oscar Wilde, who was one of her staunchest friends, felt that beauty like hers was found 'only in the best Greek gems, on the silver coins of Syracuse, or among the marble fringes of the Parthenon frieze...Pure Greek it is, with the low grave forehead, the exquisitely arched brow, the noble chiselling of the mouth..., the supreme and splendid curve of the cheek, the augustly pillared throat which bears it all'.
Inevitably artists vied with one another to paint this miracle. Portraits by Poynter and Millais, a fellow native of Jersey with whom Lillie had a real rapport, appeared at the Royal Academy in 1878 (for the Millais, see the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, no. 52). She also sat to Watts and Whistler, while Leighton, the arch-classicist, painted her as a bare-breasted nymph in his picture Idyll (1880-81), and Wilde's friend Frank Miles recorded her features obsessively in endless drawings. Graham Robertson asked her to sit, only to realise the impossibility of 'painting the lily'. 'I shall always', he wrote, 'regard that unpainted portrait of Mrs Langtry as my artistic masterpiece.'
The present picture was attributed until comparatively recently to John Singer Sargent, no doubt for no better reason than the 'JS' signature. The true artist is James Sant, one of the longest lived and most prolific of Victorian portraitists. Trained by John Varley and Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, he made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1840, and remained a regular contributor for no fewer than sixty-four years. He came to Queen Victoria's attention in the late 1860s, when she was looking for someone to paint children, a field in which he excelled, and in 1871 he succeeded Sir George Hayter as her Principal Painter, with repsonsibiltiy for carrying out state portraits. The results were not always to her liking, and in 1892 she expressly forbade him to paint any more. Nonetheless a number of his portraits both of the Queen and her family are in the Royal Collection.
The portrait of Lillie Langtry was probably commissioned by the Prince of Wales,although according to the catalogue of the Royal Gifts exhibition (1961), which still attributed it to Sargent, it was given to the Prince by the artist. In any event it must date from the later 1870s, that is to say a few years after Sant became the Queen's official portrait painter. Like Watts's portrait (Watts Gallery, Compton), the nymph in Leighton's Idyll, and many surviving photographs, it shows the sitter in profile in order that her classical features can be seen to full advantage. On the death of the Prince, now Edward VII, in 1910, the picture was inherited by his elder daughter, Princess Louise (1867-1931), who had married the Duke of Fife in 1889 and was created Princess Royal in 1905. Legend has it that she kept it hidden to avoid upsetting her mother, Queen Alexandra, although this may be apocryphal. The Queen had never displayed any animosity towards her husband's mistress; indeed she had gone out of her way to show her favour.