Portrait of Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea

This sheet is one of two known portrait drawings by Sandys of Cyril Flower (the other is dated 1877), and no oil portrait of him is known. It was probably commissioned as a pendant to Sandys' portrait of his sister, Clara Flower, also dated to 1872, in whose family it initially descended. Flower was the son of a merchant and land developer, and was called to the Bar in 1870. He married Constance, the elder daughter of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, in 1877, and in 1880 became a liberal member of parliament. He became Baron Battersea of London and of Overstrand, Norfolk in 1892, choosing the name in honour of both the significant land holdings he had inherited from his father in Battersea, and his restoration with Edwin Lutyens of 'The Pleasaunce', his house at Overstrand, near Cromer.

For much of the 1870s and 1880s Flower was Sandys's most loyal patron and his collection included several of Sandys' portraits of himself and other members of his family. His collection of pictures also included works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.