The following account of Eleanor Vere Boyle is given in Simon Houfe A Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800-1914, 1978: 'Illustrator of poetry and children's books. Born Eleanor Vere Gordon, youngest daughter of Alexander Gordon of Ellon Castle, Aberdeenshire, she married in 1845, the Hon. and Rev. Richard Boyle, MA, Chaplain in Ordinary to Queen Victoria, Vicar of Marston Bigott, Somerset. She received advice from Boxall and Eastlake and was admired as an illustrator by some of the Pre-Raphaelites. Her delightful little books appeared at intervals from 1853 to 1908 and are full of wide-eyed love of nature and a quirky charm of their own. Her inspiration is often in the work of Holman Hunt or Millais and her decorations and mystical pictures come directly from Arthur Hughes or are softened fantasies from Doyle. Her May Queen of 1861 is her most successful work, her Story Without an End, 1868, perhaps her most famous. At the close of her career, a writer to The Bookman, October 1908, p. 54, said 'E.V.B. is an aesthete of Ruskin's school, a lover of beautiful things, of what is decent and quiet and old, of gardens, of nature in selections, and of art'. She is indeed the only woman illustrator of competence to emerge before the 1860s. She lived at Maidenhead in middle life and died on 30 July 1916.
She exhibited at the Dudley and Grosvenor Galleries, thereby clearly declaring her allegiance to the Pre-Raphaelite and 'aesthetic' schools. This and the following two lots are all illustrations to Sarah Austin's Story without an End, generally regarded (as Houfe observes) as her most famous book.
See lots 108A and 110 for further examples of Boyle's work