Under the Blossom

Nightingale painted figurative works and exhibited at the Royal Academy and Suffolk Street. The present work compares to An Afternoon Reverie, sold at Christie's, London, 11 June 2002 (£23,900), which portrays a girl in a punt, trailing her hand in the water, whilst two swans glide past. The mood of romantic langour is replicated here, though in a more optimistic key. The young sitter reclines in her deckchair, enveloped by the laziness of the spring afternoon. Nightingale repeats the resonant pictorial device of an open gate; here it reveals an expanse of blue sea, perhaps suggestive of enticing possibilities.