The Flower Girl

For a portrait of Nora England (nèe Ward) see lot 108.

The Flower Girl is one of two known alternative versions of James Jebusa Shannon's Royal Academy exhibit of 1901. Extensively reviewed and judged a popular success, the exhibition-piece was purchased by the Chantry Trustees for the National Collection of British Art (fig. 1, Tate Britain).1 Well-known as a portrait painter to the aristocracy, Shannon was considered to breaking new ground in painting an 'impression' of a young anonymous mother and child in sunshine. The artist's daughter recalled that the idea for the canvas originated on a family holiday in Eastbourne during the summer of 1900. According to Kitty Shannon, every morning on the way to the beach the Shannons encountered a flower seller and her baby. Before their return to London, the painter had persuaded her to pose for him, 'exactly as you are, baby, basket of flowers, the white blouse with the big black spots and old battered straw hat'.2

This present version of the Tate Britain canvas was given to its current owner's grandmother, Nora Ward, during Shannon's lifetime.3 She was a next door neighbour and close friend of the Shannons. Although not a portrait in the conventional sense, Shannon's Flower Girl appears to have been the result of a casual encounter. Initially, the young mother with her basket and baby, flashed past his retina and were retained as a visual memory until he made his approach. Thereafter, the ensemble was recreated on canvas as though it was being seen for the first time.4 The reconstruction of the event recalls Shannon's origins in the 1880s, during the heyday of plein air painting. Although he was born in Auburn in New York State of Irish parents, Shannon studied at the Government Art Training School at South Kensington, and made his career in London. Immensely talented, he was seen by avant-garde critics as an artist of great potential when he exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours and as one of the founders of the New English Art Club in 1886. Shannon only left the club in 1892 after a savage review of his work in 1892 by the 'new' critic, George Moore. Moore considered that he had sold out by giving himself almost exclusively to portraits of 'white satin duchesses'. So flattering were these that the only question to be asked by a wife of her husband, Moore remarked, was 'Why can't you afford to let me be painted by Mr Shannon?'.5 When in 1897, Shannon was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy, his membership of Whistler's International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers was initally blocked because it was considered that he had joined the establishment.6 This rule was later relaxed. It was nevertheless the case that the exhibition of The Flower Girl (Tate Britain) brought him back into the fold, to a limited extent. Referring to the decadence of portrait painting, D.S. MacColl, the other perspicacious proponent of 'new criticism' noted that in the Flower Girl, Shannon was 'slipping away from the professional compromise of his portraits for an hour in the sun'.7

Flower girls had been a subject of great curiosity throughout the late 19th Century. They were archetypes of the urban poor - street-sellers whose lives of poverty, petty crime and prostitution were the constant focus of the city missionaries brandishing their evangelical tracts. The easy virtue of street vendors in great cities like London and Paris was as much a source of speculation as their aggressive sales tactics. P.F. William Ryan writing in 1903, noted that they often worked in groups and were 'lynx-eyed ... skirmishers who advance to the attack' on the unsuspecting passer-by.8 None of this is obvious in the present case. A reviewer noted the silver rings on the model's right hand - by implication observing the absence of a wedding ring.9 Yet for all this, Shannon's flower-seller is not ragged, nor does she show obvious signs of being a fallen woman. Self-absorbed, she nurses her baby seemingly unaware of the artist-bystander. When not selling their wares in the parks and thoroughfares of central London, costers would spend the summer season at work in the Kentish hop-fields or the summer haunts of Eastbourne and Margate. They were intensely independent and like Eliza Doolittle, a late manifestation of the coster type, they constantly protested their respectability. By 1914, when Shaw's Pygmalion was first performed, a huge volume of popular literature had been devoted to the street trades of the Metropolis. Somerset Maugham's early novel, Liza of Lambeth, (1897) deals with similar street characters, as does Richard Whiting's No 5 John Street, (1899) - a best seller at the time Shannon's picture was being painted.10

If this was a popular character in contemporary literature, it is also likely that Shannon was aware of the numerous treatments of the subject already produced by painters he admired. Leaving aside the maudlin flower-sellers of A.E. Mulready, he could well have seen Jules Bastien-Lepage's factual treatment of the flower-girl in his Marchande de fleurs à Londres, 1881 (fig. 2). Thereafter flower-sellers and costers featured centrally in the work of George Clausen, E.C. Wilkinson, William Logsdail and Jacques-Emile Blanche among others.11 The painter would also have seen the flower girl as the illustration for 'F' in William Nicholson's An Alphabet, 1897, (fig. 3) and as the female coster in his London Types of the following year. She was a central figure in the new graphic imagery which re-interpreted prints of the street-hawkers' 'Cries' of the 17th Century.12

Two points distinguish Shannon's Flower Girl from this considerable body of past precedent. The first is the obvious fact that this is also a painting of 'maternity', an equally rich subject, tackled by Walter Osborne, before Shannon, and William Orpen after him.13 Both Osborne's and Orpen's mother and child canvases carry overtones of immorality. While Shannon side-steps the pitfalls of social realism and Bastien-Lepage, he also he avoids the 'type' imagery of Nicholson. In the present work the flower girl is almost upstaged and it is the infant who engages the spectator. Absorbed by her child and enveloped in foliage, she is seemingly unaware of being observed.14 The painter clearly wished to retain the sense of intimacy of looking in on a moment of reverie.

Secondly this is, as several reviewers remarked, a picture of 'green sun-haunted shadow'.15 Shannon announced his interest in painting figures under the trees in the In the Springtime, (Private Collection), a work exhibited at the Fine Art Society in 1896.16 At this point he was moving away from the 'tonalist' square brush painting of his youth towards a modified form of Impressionism. Guided by painters like John Singer Sargent, Frank Bramley and James Guthrie, he was seeking situations like that encountered at Eastbourne.17 However, it was not until The Flower Girl, that this development in Shannon's work was generally appreciated. In his lengthy commentary on the picture Frank Rinder referred specifically to the 'lilt' of the whole - given by the intense greens of foliage, the red roses, the black spots on the woman's dress and the sweetness of the infant's face - 'seldom does one see so fair a child'.18

Shannon clearly wished to introduce these effects into his portraiture. He had experimented with floral settings up to this point and during the Edwardian years he tempered his portrait commissions with 'fancy' pictures echoing Gainsborough and the 18th Century masters.19 A work of this kind, Embroidery, was purchased by Hugh Lane for his new gallery of modern art in Dublin which opened in 1908. By then Shannon's Irish roots were recognized and after Lane's epoch-making Guildhall Art Gallery exhibition of Irish Art in 1904, where he showed five works, he was claimed by the nascent Irish School.

We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for providing the above catalogue entry.

1 Royal Academy, 1901, no. 274.

2 Tate Archives; quoted from M. Chamot, D. Farr and M. Butlin, Tate Gallery Catalogues, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 2 Artists M-Z, 1964, 1964, p. 617. This witness account is confirmed by the fact that the model for the woman, from contemporary portraits, seems to bear little resemblance to Lady Shannon.

3 Whilst the present work is unsigned, it is connected directly to the artist through Nora Ward, a neighbour, playmate friend of Kitty Shannon and adopted daughter of the painter and his wife. It is described here as a 'version', rather than a 'copy' or 'replica' of the Tate Britain picture because there are minor differences between the two. This would be compatible with its status as a 'version' rather than a copy. A copyist would for instance follow the line and folds of the child's headdress exactly. Other significant differences between the two works lie in greater amount of detail in the woman's dress, the greater degree of finish in both hands and in the roses, and in the darker eyes of the infant in the Tate version. The production of alternative versions of celebrated canvases, sometimes worked up from plein air sketches was not uncommon at the turn of the century, especially if an artist discovered potential in a sketch, beyond its normal subordinate role. In this case, the fact that the versions are painted on canvases of almost identical size, is noteworthy. While full technical examination of both versions has not been possible, nor has it been possible to study the third known versions of The Flower Girl, notable stylistic features, consonant with Shannon's practice, are present here. In the Tate picture, for instance, his bravura is evident in the contrast between the flowing paint of the ensemble and dry brush impasto, saved for a few telling, textured highlights on the dress and elsewhere. This overall fluidity, puntuated by points of emphasis, characterises the present version.

4 Christie's and the author are also grateful to Dr Barbara Dayer Gallati, for her extensive research on the artist.

5 G. Moore, Modern Painting, 1893, pp. 190-1. For further discussion see K. McConkey, Edwardian Portraits, 1987, pp. 34-7.

6 The extensive correspondence on the matter of Shannon's membership of the ISSPG between Whistler and John Lavery is contained in the Tate Gallery Archives.

7 DSM, 'The Rape of Painting', The Saturday Review, 18 May 1901, p. 632.

8 J. Coulter, London of One Hundred Years Ago, 1999, p. 69; Quoted from George R Sims, Living London, (1901-3). As early as 1869, visitors to Paris were told to beware of the 'wily advances' of flower girls at the bals publics. See R. Christiansen, Tales of the New Babylon, 1995, p. 14.

9 F. Rinder, 'JJ Shannon ARA', The Art Journal, 1901, p. 44.

10 Later salient examples of this genre would be Jack London's The People of the Abyss, (1903), George Gissing's Will Warburton (1905) and Israel Zangwill's classic novel of Jewish live in the East End, Children of the Ghetto (1909).

11 See for instance, George Clausen's Flora, 1883 (Private Collection), E.C. Wilkinson's Spring, Piccadilly, 1887 (Tyne and Wear Museums), William Logsdail's St Martin-in-the-Fields, 1888 (Tate Britain) and Jacques-Emile Blanche's Jeanne, circa 1895 (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin).

12 These sets of woodcuts were published by William Heinemann. For further reference see C. Campbell, William Nicholson, The Graphic work, 1992, pp. 31-43, 72-86.

13 See for instance, Osborne's In a Dublin Park - Light and Shade, 1895 (National Gallery of Ireland) and Orpen's wash-house mother in Lottie and the Baby, 1907 (National Museums on Merseyside).

14 In the Tate Britain version both mother and baby are cast in uniform shade. The tonal difference between the two heads appears to be greater in the present work.

15 M.H. Speilmann in 'At the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1901', The Magazine of Art, 1901, p. 442.

16 For further reference see Exhibition Catalogue, Modern British Paintings, London, Richard Green, 1989, no. 28.

17 Following the exhibition of Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1887 (Tate Britain), a controversial modern treatment of figures submerged in a backdrop of flowers, Guthrie treated green dappled shade in Midsummer, 1892 (Royal Scottish Academy) and Bramley exhibited Sleep (untraced) at the Academy of 1895.

18 Frank Rinder, 'JJ Shannon ARA', The Art Journal, 1901, p. 44 'The artist will tell you that he found the material ready to his hand, and that is required only to be recorded. But, first, many would have passed by heedless of the pictorial possibilities of this young mother and her baby, while others would have failed to give the canvas just that lift, that lilt which Mr Shannon has given. The thing is seen as a whole. The young woman whose red, rather rosy cheeks have their correspondent note of colour in the ear; her black feathered hat and tie, telling excellently in relationship to the big, black spots; the flat silver rings on her right hand; the sweet baby face - and seldom does one see so fair a child - beneath the white bonnet; the basket of red roses on the woman's left arm; the greenery against which the figures are set; above all, perhaps, the sense of brilliant sunlight capture by means of those bold splashes of white on the flesh and on the texture of the dress - these are freely an skilfully rendered. The impression originally made upon the artist was a vivid one, and, working directly, strenuously, honestly, he conveys that impression to the spectator'. Rinder also returned to the picture in his Academy review ('The Royal Academy of 1901', The Art Journal, 1901, p. 172).

19 See for instance, Lady Cavendish-Bentinck, 1898, (Private Collection).