拍品專文
The sitter was the elder daughter of Frances Horner, née Graham, whose portrait by Burne-Jones, dated 1879 and once in the same family collection as our picture, was sold in these Rooms on 10 March 1995, lot 156. Her grandfather, William Graham, was Burne-Jones's greatest patron, and her mother was one of his closest friends.
A wealthy India merchant and Liberal MP for Glasgow, Graham became attracted to Burne-Jones's work when the artist began to exhibit on a regular basis in the mid-1860s. He was an exceptionally sympathetic patron, liking the small incidental works as much as the great machines, and he made one of the largest collections of Burne-Jones's pictures that has ever been formed. He also bought Italian Old Masters on a lavish scale, providing a context for Burne-Jones's work that had an important bearing on the artist's development. Gladstone appointed him a Trustee of the National Gallery in 1884, and when he died the following year his collection was sold in a five-day sale at Christie's.
His daughter Frances (1858-1940), the fourth of his eight children, came to know Burne-Jones by accompanying her father to his studio. She soon fell a victim to his famous charm. 'He generally came twice a week to our house to dine', she recorded in her memoirs Time Remembered (1933), 'and his company was most fascinating ... He was one of the wittiest and jolliest of talkers.' But the attraction was by no means one-sided. Frances was not a great beauty, but she had a strength of mind, an intellectual curiosity and a depth of understanding that Burne-Jones greatly appreciated. In fact she became one of his closest confidants, and was undoubtedly the most important of the many young women with whom he enjoyed romantic but platonic relationships in later life. The portrait we sold in March is only one of many monuments to their friendship. He showered her with presents of his own devising - Valentine cards, illuminated books, a jewel-box, designs for needlework and clothes. She inspired some of his best letters (extensively quoted in Time Remembered), and appears in several of his subject pictures. In 1879-80 he designed and decorated the well-known 'Orpheus', or 'Graham', piano (private collection), which her father commissioned for her use. When Burne-Jones died suddenly in 1898 Herbert Asquith wrote to her: 'I can hardly imagine anything that could tear a greater gap in your life or create such a breach between the future and the past. He gave you always of his best, and it must be some solace to you to remember that up to the end you above all others lightened and enriched his difficult life.'
In the 1880s and '90s Frances was a leading light in the coterie known as 'The Souls'. Indeed the redoubtable Lady Paget called her the 'high priestess' of the set, a tribute not least to her intimacy with the artist who did so much to define her circle's taste. In January 1883 she married (Sir) John Horner (1842-1927), a barrister who had succeeded to the family estate of Mells Park, Somerset, nine years earlier. Cicely, the subject of our portrait, was born the following November, receiving in quick succession a younger sister, Katharine, and two brothers, Edward and Mark. She was an attractive and placid child, as her mother later recalled. 'She entered into her beauty when she entered the world, with large eyes, and a complexion like Rose Red and Snow White. She never cried, was always happy, and stayed just where she was put.' She was also bright, learning to read 'soon after she was three', was 'devoted to birds and animals', and 'had a large doll, which was christened Frances D.D. Lang Horner, after Mrs Lyttelton and Mr Andrew Lang, who were its godparents.' When her grandfather, William Graham, lay dying in the country Burne-Jones went regularly to visit him, and 'Cicely, who was not yet two years old, used to meet him on his way up. She always called him Mr Rosey, as he brought bunches of moss roses from his London garden for the sick-room.' As a young girl Cicely's 'dream was to marry an actor-manager', but in 1908 she married the Hon. George Lambton (1860-1945), the fifth son of the second Earl of Durham, and entered the world of racing at Newmarket, a very different ambient to the high-minded, cultured and rather rarified atmosphere in which she had been brought up. In Time Remembered there is a photograph of her as an Edwardian beauty, perhaps taken at the time of her marriage. She died in 1972, aged 88.
Our portrait was painted in 1895, when she was eleven, and is in Burne-Jones's late and most abstract style. Contemporary with it, though larger and more ambitious in conception, are the great full-length of another leading 'Soul', Lady Windsor (private collection), and the seated likeness of Madeleine Deslandes (private collection), the Parisian bluestocking who arrived in London and demanded to sit to England's foremost symbolist painter. Burne-Jones's willingness to paint portraits in the 1890s, though not significantly greater than it had been earlier, may nonetheless have been connected with the declining popularity of the literary subject pictures which had always been his primary concern. Certainly a number of his younger contemporaries (Dicksee and Waterhouse are examples) were currently moving into portraiture for this very reason.
In the case of the portrait of Cicely Horner, friendship was obviously an important motive, although even this was a commissioned picture and therefore presumably paid for. In Time Remembered Lady Horner quotes a letter from Philip Burne-Jones, Burne-Jones's son who was beginning to establish a modest reputation as a portrait painter. 'I think your little Cicely', he wrote to her on 22 June 1894, 'is the most beautiful child I have ever seen. I am going to ask you to let me try and make a picture of her ... It is simply wicked that no record should be made of her during these wonderful years.' In the event it was his father who was to 'make a picture' of Cicely, and no likeness by Philip seems to have materialised. The opportunity was provided by Frances's thirty-seventh birthday. According to Penelope Fitzgerald, quoting as her source a letter from Burne-Jones to Helen Mary Gaskell, 'in the spring of 1895 Frances Horner came to London, an honoured visitor, with her golden-haired daughter Cecily [sic]; Frances's birthday, as [Burne-Jones] well remembered, was in April, and Cecily's portrait was to be a present from her husband' (loc.cit). Precisely who took the initiative in this arrangement we do not know, but Frances herself was presumably eager, having had her own portrait painted by Burne-Jones sixteen years earlier, and no doubt being aware that he had drawn Francis Jekyll, the young son of her sister Agnes, in 1894 (see Burne-Jones et l'influence des Préraphaélites, exh. organised by Hartnoll & Eyre, Ltd., at the Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, 1972, no.24, repr. in cat., p.17). At least one more of her children was to sit to the artist who had played such a dominant role in her life. Cicely's younger brother Edward, who was to be killed at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, modelled for the boy in The Prioress's Tale (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington), which appeared at the New Gallery in 1898 and was Burne-Jones's last exhibited picture. The study was sold in these Rooms on 2 November 1990, lot 169.
A wealthy India merchant and Liberal MP for Glasgow, Graham became attracted to Burne-Jones's work when the artist began to exhibit on a regular basis in the mid-1860s. He was an exceptionally sympathetic patron, liking the small incidental works as much as the great machines, and he made one of the largest collections of Burne-Jones's pictures that has ever been formed. He also bought Italian Old Masters on a lavish scale, providing a context for Burne-Jones's work that had an important bearing on the artist's development. Gladstone appointed him a Trustee of the National Gallery in 1884, and when he died the following year his collection was sold in a five-day sale at Christie's.
His daughter Frances (1858-1940), the fourth of his eight children, came to know Burne-Jones by accompanying her father to his studio. She soon fell a victim to his famous charm. 'He generally came twice a week to our house to dine', she recorded in her memoirs Time Remembered (1933), 'and his company was most fascinating ... He was one of the wittiest and jolliest of talkers.' But the attraction was by no means one-sided. Frances was not a great beauty, but she had a strength of mind, an intellectual curiosity and a depth of understanding that Burne-Jones greatly appreciated. In fact she became one of his closest confidants, and was undoubtedly the most important of the many young women with whom he enjoyed romantic but platonic relationships in later life. The portrait we sold in March is only one of many monuments to their friendship. He showered her with presents of his own devising - Valentine cards, illuminated books, a jewel-box, designs for needlework and clothes. She inspired some of his best letters (extensively quoted in Time Remembered), and appears in several of his subject pictures. In 1879-80 he designed and decorated the well-known 'Orpheus', or 'Graham', piano (private collection), which her father commissioned for her use. When Burne-Jones died suddenly in 1898 Herbert Asquith wrote to her: 'I can hardly imagine anything that could tear a greater gap in your life or create such a breach between the future and the past. He gave you always of his best, and it must be some solace to you to remember that up to the end you above all others lightened and enriched his difficult life.'
In the 1880s and '90s Frances was a leading light in the coterie known as 'The Souls'. Indeed the redoubtable Lady Paget called her the 'high priestess' of the set, a tribute not least to her intimacy with the artist who did so much to define her circle's taste. In January 1883 she married (Sir) John Horner (1842-1927), a barrister who had succeeded to the family estate of Mells Park, Somerset, nine years earlier. Cicely, the subject of our portrait, was born the following November, receiving in quick succession a younger sister, Katharine, and two brothers, Edward and Mark. She was an attractive and placid child, as her mother later recalled. 'She entered into her beauty when she entered the world, with large eyes, and a complexion like Rose Red and Snow White. She never cried, was always happy, and stayed just where she was put.' She was also bright, learning to read 'soon after she was three', was 'devoted to birds and animals', and 'had a large doll, which was christened Frances D.D. Lang Horner, after Mrs Lyttelton and Mr Andrew Lang, who were its godparents.' When her grandfather, William Graham, lay dying in the country Burne-Jones went regularly to visit him, and 'Cicely, who was not yet two years old, used to meet him on his way up. She always called him Mr Rosey, as he brought bunches of moss roses from his London garden for the sick-room.' As a young girl Cicely's 'dream was to marry an actor-manager', but in 1908 she married the Hon. George Lambton (1860-1945), the fifth son of the second Earl of Durham, and entered the world of racing at Newmarket, a very different ambient to the high-minded, cultured and rather rarified atmosphere in which she had been brought up. In Time Remembered there is a photograph of her as an Edwardian beauty, perhaps taken at the time of her marriage. She died in 1972, aged 88.
Our portrait was painted in 1895, when she was eleven, and is in Burne-Jones's late and most abstract style. Contemporary with it, though larger and more ambitious in conception, are the great full-length of another leading 'Soul', Lady Windsor (private collection), and the seated likeness of Madeleine Deslandes (private collection), the Parisian bluestocking who arrived in London and demanded to sit to England's foremost symbolist painter. Burne-Jones's willingness to paint portraits in the 1890s, though not significantly greater than it had been earlier, may nonetheless have been connected with the declining popularity of the literary subject pictures which had always been his primary concern. Certainly a number of his younger contemporaries (Dicksee and Waterhouse are examples) were currently moving into portraiture for this very reason.
In the case of the portrait of Cicely Horner, friendship was obviously an important motive, although even this was a commissioned picture and therefore presumably paid for. In Time Remembered Lady Horner quotes a letter from Philip Burne-Jones, Burne-Jones's son who was beginning to establish a modest reputation as a portrait painter. 'I think your little Cicely', he wrote to her on 22 June 1894, 'is the most beautiful child I have ever seen. I am going to ask you to let me try and make a picture of her ... It is simply wicked that no record should be made of her during these wonderful years.' In the event it was his father who was to 'make a picture' of Cicely, and no likeness by Philip seems to have materialised. The opportunity was provided by Frances's thirty-seventh birthday. According to Penelope Fitzgerald, quoting as her source a letter from Burne-Jones to Helen Mary Gaskell, 'in the spring of 1895 Frances Horner came to London, an honoured visitor, with her golden-haired daughter Cecily [sic]; Frances's birthday, as [Burne-Jones] well remembered, was in April, and Cecily's portrait was to be a present from her husband' (loc.cit). Precisely who took the initiative in this arrangement we do not know, but Frances herself was presumably eager, having had her own portrait painted by Burne-Jones sixteen years earlier, and no doubt being aware that he had drawn Francis Jekyll, the young son of her sister Agnes, in 1894 (see Burne-Jones et l'influence des Préraphaélites, exh. organised by Hartnoll & Eyre, Ltd., at the Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, 1972, no.24, repr. in cat., p.17). At least one more of her children was to sit to the artist who had played such a dominant role in her life. Cicely's younger brother Edward, who was to be killed at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, modelled for the boy in The Prioress's Tale (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington), which appeared at the New Gallery in 1898 and was Burne-Jones's last exhibited picture. The study was sold in these Rooms on 2 November 1990, lot 169.