Portrait of Mrs William Smedley-Aston, bust-length, turned to the right

In 1914 Southall had painted a portrait in fresco of Mrs Smedley-Aston in the back porch of his house in Edgbaston. It is now in the Kidderminster Art Gallery; see the catalogue of the 1980 exhibition, no. I1, illustrated. The sitter, née René Lewis, and her husband were close friends of the Southalls. She may have been related by marriage to the writer Constance Smedley, who married the artist Maxwell Armfield (1881-1972) in 1909. Armfield entered the Birmingham School of Art in 1899, and Southall taught him the tempera technique that he was to practice for the rest of his life.