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Lot Essay
The Engraving is Ambrose McEvoy’s first portrayal of his wife-to-be, Mary Spencer Edwards, painted
in his Chelsea studio at 24 Danvers Street, off Cheyne Walk. It has only recently reappeared after forty years in a private collection. McEvoy began the painting late in 1900 and continued working on it well into the new year, with Mary, a fellow student at the Slade, coming for regular sittings to stand in the corner of the room in her shawl and long skirt, looking at a framed engraving propped on the mantelpiece. This intimate interior was described in The Sphere as ‘a small canvas of delicate charm’ (‘English Art of the Eighties and Nineties’ The Sphere, 10 January 1925, pp. 48-9).
The painting was one of McEvoy’s earliest works to be exhibited at the New English Art Club
in 1901. The NEAC held their first exhibition in 1886 and provided a dynamic alternative to the Royal Academy. However, The Engraving was bought prior to the exhibition by Frederick Brown, one of the founders of the NEAC and McEvoy’s professor at the Slade, where he had enrolled in the autumn of 1893. Brown was a frequent visitor to the artist’s studio and had seen the work in progress on the easel. On 28th February 1901 he wrote to McEvoy (original letter now lost) praising his painting and encouraging him to improve the composition by offering to buy the picture for more than the asking price contingent upon his suggested alterations. In this letter, Brown takes on the vital role not only of
a client but also as a critical director of McEvoy’s ongoing learning, even after he has left the Slade:
Dear Mr. McEvoy,
I am willing to give you £20 for your picture or £25 if you can see your way to having another sitting
for the face and hands. The red cloth is also a little out of the scheme of colour of the picture or else
a bit too light and attractive and I think the sky in the picture (background) a trifle too light. You might perhaps put the picture aside for a bit and then look at it with a fresh eye and see what you think of my suggestions. – Apart from these things I think there is a great deal that is charming in it, the drawing is very good and sensitive and the refinement of the whole thing is remarkable. Its completeness is of good augury for future work though in this case the very completeness of the accessories a little detracts from the face and hands.
Altogether I congratulate you heartily upon it. I hope that you won’t hesitate in the least to refuse my offer (it is but little for the labour you have spent upon it) if you think you have any prospect of getting
a higher price for it and I shall be extremely pleased if you can get a better reward for the pains you have bestowed upon it and which you certainly deserve.
Believe me,
Yours truly
Fred Brown
P.S. If you accept my offer I can at once let you have a cheque for £20 and in case of further work upon it the other 5 later on.
F.B. (This letter was recorded by Eric Akers-Douglas, 3rd Viscount Chilston, in his unpublished manuscript Divine People.
The letter initially existed as part of McEvoy’s estate but its whereabouts is unknown.)
A closer inspection of Mary’s face and hands in The Engraving leads to the conclusion that McEvoy reworked these areas of the painting following Brown’s advice, as the impasto is much thicker in comparison to other areas of the composition. Mary corroborates this theory by recalling that McEvoy sold the painting to Brown for £25 rather than the £20 initially offered to the artist prior to reworking (NOT/197, MEP). Mary also writes that Brown later sold The Engraving to James Staats Forbes for £60 and gave McEvoy the £35 profit (NOT/197, MEP). This anecdote not only demonstrates Brown’s generosity and endorsement of McEvoy’s work but by providing McEvoy with a client such as Staats Forbes, the wealthy railway engineer and ardent collector of modern art, Brown was inviting McEvoy into an important inner circle of clients at this early period. Clients like Forbes became vital in the development of his career, and from 1916 McEvoy was one of the most popular and successful British portraitists of his generation.
McEvoy and Mary Spencer Edwards had both attended the Slade during the 1890s, but the couple did not meet properly until 1900 when they were introduced by their mutual friend Augustus John at the National Gallery. Within just a few weeks, Ambrose and Mary became secretly engaged and Mary began modelling regularly for McEvoy in his Chelsea studio where The Engraving was painted. Mary later described McEvoy’s studio as: a very small room where he lived, slept & worked. The Engraving was painted there and The Thunderstorm. For both of them I stood – sometimes for 3 hours – and then I could have a book – for with the early pictures he painted in silence for the most part – & he did not hurry his pictures (McEvoy Estate Papers, NOT/197).
Mary became his principal muse, and the composition she mentions The Thunderstorm (1901) was similarly painted in his early style. McEvoy adds an element of drama painting Mary standing in a doorway with a child hiding in the folds of her skirt as they shelter from a threatening storm outside. This painting was also exhibited at the NEAC in 1901 and like The Engraving, the details of texture and surface are closely observed. His third exhibit that year Autumn depicts Mary in a more sombre tone, seated in an interior staring out of the tall windows in the artist’s house at 39 Southampton Street off the Strand, where he moved after Danvers Street. McEvoy sold The Thunderstorm for £50 and Autumn for £35. Thus, the successful sale of all three works enabled him to marry Mary, a talented artist in her own right who also exhibited work in 1901 NEAC exhibition. Professor Frederick Brown described Mary as setting ‘a splendid example to other women painters’, after acquiring one of her works for his collection (McEvoy Estate Papers, LET/1258). Ambrose and Mary were married on 16 January 1902 in Mary’s parish church in Freshford, near Bath, with Augustus John as best man.
McEvoy’s professors at the Slade, Frederick Brown and Henry Tonks in particular, were highly influential in his artistic development. After he left the Slade in 1898 he pursued a period of independent study lasting until 1903. During these years he studied and copied recently acquired Old Master paintings at London’s various museums and public art galleries (F. Rutter, Art in My Time, London, 1933, p. 97). McEvoy’s application served to consolidate his formal education and enabled him to glean important techniques from Italian and Dutch Old Masters. Still steeped in the Victorian tradition, his Slade professors strongly influenced his early work in painting figures, invariably women, in detailed interior settings. Henry Tonks’s Rosamund and the Purple Jar, c.1900 (Tate Britain) is one such example of a domestic composition, in this case a narrative from the moralising tales of Maria Edgworth, published in 1823.
William Orpen, McEvoy’s friend and fellow student at the Slade with whom he shared a studio prior to his move to Danvers Street, was also concentrating at this time on producing traditional interior compositions. His painting of 1900, The Mirror (Tate Gallery) is a particularly fine composition in this genre. All these pictures, small in scale, lean towards a recognition and understanding shared by McEvoy and his contemporaries of the traditional 17th century Dutch interior In Divine People: The Art & Life of Ambrose McEvoy 1877-1927 (published on the occasion of the 2019/20 exhibition at Philip Mould & Co., London) based on the fascinating typescript biography on McEvoy, thought to have been lost for nearly forty years, Eric Akers-Douglas describes The Engraving as ‘… the first of a series of small pictures which were a curious amalgam a ‘Little Dutch Masters’ (e.g. Gerard Borch, Caspar Netscher, Gabriel Metsu) and of early Victorian descriptive pictures but without the purely factual, earthy quality of the former or the sentimentality of the latter. Instead they were imbued with a great tenderness and a sense of poetry, which, despite a changing style remained the predominant characteristic of his work throughout his career’ (E. Akers-Douglas, Divine People: The Art & Life of Ambrose McEvoy 1877-1927, London, 2019, p. 48).
McEvoy’s working method during this early period was extremely slow and meticulous, with each brushstroke being of vital importance. Painted details would be reworked until the desired effect was achieved. The result of McEvoy’s meticulousness can be seen in The Engraving, from the shine of the polished wooden furniture and the delicate silver embroidery of the tablecloth, to the accomplished rendering of Mary’s face and hands. The subject of Mary’s gaze is the framed engraving of a woman on the mantelpiece. The format of this engraving is reminiscent of several early postcards amongst the McEvoy Estate Papers which may have served as a prop for the frugal artist at the start of his career.[i]McEvoy’s early style evolved into his mature technique of laying out his pictures completely in monochrome and applying the colour in glazes. He further developed his method by thinly scumbling the entire surface with white paint, often tinged with umber, so that the figure was still discernible, then painting over the dry picture giving it an extraordinary brilliance and shimmering quality. The effect was further enhanced by the use of coloured electric lights suspended over the sitter. This technique was particularly flattering to McEvoy’s glamorous society patrons such as Lady Diana Manners and Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough. However, Mary continued to model for him. The Artist’s Wife in an Interior, 1912 (Leicester Museum and Art Gallery) is one such example illustrating his distinctive luminous painting style.
Whether in oil or watercolour, a medium in which he was equally adept, McEvoy’s evolving style reflected the transition from the romantic Victorian era to the stylish Edwardian age. His untimely death in 1927, aged forty-nine, cut short the life of one of England’s most innovative portrait painters. His creative talent nurtured at the Slade, mostly notably under Frederick Brown’s support and encouragement, served to launch his career with The Engraving and the small group of pictures painted c. 1900-1901. Martin T. Wood writing in The Studio in 1907 remarked that McEvoy’s work of the early 1900s has ‘the rare, the dramatic instinct, that goes to make a genre painter, but his is a gentle drama… his figures are posed, but there is about them none of the posing of the model… the gesture is not depicted because in itself it is graceful, but as the emblem of a thought from which it springs. We find in his art a feeling for the gentle side of life’ (T. Martin Wood, ‘The Pictures of Ambrose McEvoy’, The Studio, 1907, p. 98).
The Engraving has only recently reappeared on the market. It was purchased by Sir John Lewis OBE from the Fine Art Society in the early 1980s; thus, it has emerged after some forty years in his collection. It is a charming example of McEvoy’s traditional early work and particularly significant as the first portrayal of Mary, the artist’s beloved future wife and lifelong muse.
We are grateful to Dr Lydia Miller for her assistance with this catalogue note.
in his Chelsea studio at 24 Danvers Street, off Cheyne Walk. It has only recently reappeared after forty years in a private collection. McEvoy began the painting late in 1900 and continued working on it well into the new year, with Mary, a fellow student at the Slade, coming for regular sittings to stand in the corner of the room in her shawl and long skirt, looking at a framed engraving propped on the mantelpiece. This intimate interior was described in The Sphere as ‘a small canvas of delicate charm’ (‘English Art of the Eighties and Nineties’ The Sphere, 10 January 1925, pp. 48-9).
The painting was one of McEvoy’s earliest works to be exhibited at the New English Art Club
in 1901. The NEAC held their first exhibition in 1886 and provided a dynamic alternative to the Royal Academy. However, The Engraving was bought prior to the exhibition by Frederick Brown, one of the founders of the NEAC and McEvoy’s professor at the Slade, where he had enrolled in the autumn of 1893. Brown was a frequent visitor to the artist’s studio and had seen the work in progress on the easel. On 28th February 1901 he wrote to McEvoy (original letter now lost) praising his painting and encouraging him to improve the composition by offering to buy the picture for more than the asking price contingent upon his suggested alterations. In this letter, Brown takes on the vital role not only of
a client but also as a critical director of McEvoy’s ongoing learning, even after he has left the Slade:
Dear Mr. McEvoy,
I am willing to give you £20 for your picture or £25 if you can see your way to having another sitting
for the face and hands. The red cloth is also a little out of the scheme of colour of the picture or else
a bit too light and attractive and I think the sky in the picture (background) a trifle too light. You might perhaps put the picture aside for a bit and then look at it with a fresh eye and see what you think of my suggestions. – Apart from these things I think there is a great deal that is charming in it, the drawing is very good and sensitive and the refinement of the whole thing is remarkable. Its completeness is of good augury for future work though in this case the very completeness of the accessories a little detracts from the face and hands.
Altogether I congratulate you heartily upon it. I hope that you won’t hesitate in the least to refuse my offer (it is but little for the labour you have spent upon it) if you think you have any prospect of getting
a higher price for it and I shall be extremely pleased if you can get a better reward for the pains you have bestowed upon it and which you certainly deserve.
Believe me,
Yours truly
Fred Brown
P.S. If you accept my offer I can at once let you have a cheque for £20 and in case of further work upon it the other 5 later on.
F.B. (This letter was recorded by Eric Akers-Douglas, 3rd Viscount Chilston, in his unpublished manuscript Divine People.
The letter initially existed as part of McEvoy’s estate but its whereabouts is unknown.)
A closer inspection of Mary’s face and hands in The Engraving leads to the conclusion that McEvoy reworked these areas of the painting following Brown’s advice, as the impasto is much thicker in comparison to other areas of the composition. Mary corroborates this theory by recalling that McEvoy sold the painting to Brown for £25 rather than the £20 initially offered to the artist prior to reworking (NOT/197, MEP). Mary also writes that Brown later sold The Engraving to James Staats Forbes for £60 and gave McEvoy the £35 profit (NOT/197, MEP). This anecdote not only demonstrates Brown’s generosity and endorsement of McEvoy’s work but by providing McEvoy with a client such as Staats Forbes, the wealthy railway engineer and ardent collector of modern art, Brown was inviting McEvoy into an important inner circle of clients at this early period. Clients like Forbes became vital in the development of his career, and from 1916 McEvoy was one of the most popular and successful British portraitists of his generation.
McEvoy and Mary Spencer Edwards had both attended the Slade during the 1890s, but the couple did not meet properly until 1900 when they were introduced by their mutual friend Augustus John at the National Gallery. Within just a few weeks, Ambrose and Mary became secretly engaged and Mary began modelling regularly for McEvoy in his Chelsea studio where The Engraving was painted. Mary later described McEvoy’s studio as: a very small room where he lived, slept & worked. The Engraving was painted there and The Thunderstorm. For both of them I stood – sometimes for 3 hours – and then I could have a book – for with the early pictures he painted in silence for the most part – & he did not hurry his pictures (McEvoy Estate Papers, NOT/197).
Mary became his principal muse, and the composition she mentions The Thunderstorm (1901) was similarly painted in his early style. McEvoy adds an element of drama painting Mary standing in a doorway with a child hiding in the folds of her skirt as they shelter from a threatening storm outside. This painting was also exhibited at the NEAC in 1901 and like The Engraving, the details of texture and surface are closely observed. His third exhibit that year Autumn depicts Mary in a more sombre tone, seated in an interior staring out of the tall windows in the artist’s house at 39 Southampton Street off the Strand, where he moved after Danvers Street. McEvoy sold The Thunderstorm for £50 and Autumn for £35. Thus, the successful sale of all three works enabled him to marry Mary, a talented artist in her own right who also exhibited work in 1901 NEAC exhibition. Professor Frederick Brown described Mary as setting ‘a splendid example to other women painters’, after acquiring one of her works for his collection (McEvoy Estate Papers, LET/1258). Ambrose and Mary were married on 16 January 1902 in Mary’s parish church in Freshford, near Bath, with Augustus John as best man.
McEvoy’s professors at the Slade, Frederick Brown and Henry Tonks in particular, were highly influential in his artistic development. After he left the Slade in 1898 he pursued a period of independent study lasting until 1903. During these years he studied and copied recently acquired Old Master paintings at London’s various museums and public art galleries (F. Rutter, Art in My Time, London, 1933, p. 97). McEvoy’s application served to consolidate his formal education and enabled him to glean important techniques from Italian and Dutch Old Masters. Still steeped in the Victorian tradition, his Slade professors strongly influenced his early work in painting figures, invariably women, in detailed interior settings. Henry Tonks’s Rosamund and the Purple Jar, c.1900 (Tate Britain) is one such example of a domestic composition, in this case a narrative from the moralising tales of Maria Edgworth, published in 1823.
William Orpen, McEvoy’s friend and fellow student at the Slade with whom he shared a studio prior to his move to Danvers Street, was also concentrating at this time on producing traditional interior compositions. His painting of 1900, The Mirror (Tate Gallery) is a particularly fine composition in this genre. All these pictures, small in scale, lean towards a recognition and understanding shared by McEvoy and his contemporaries of the traditional 17th century Dutch interior In Divine People: The Art & Life of Ambrose McEvoy 1877-1927 (published on the occasion of the 2019/20 exhibition at Philip Mould & Co., London) based on the fascinating typescript biography on McEvoy, thought to have been lost for nearly forty years, Eric Akers-Douglas describes The Engraving as ‘… the first of a series of small pictures which were a curious amalgam a ‘Little Dutch Masters’ (e.g. Gerard Borch, Caspar Netscher, Gabriel Metsu) and of early Victorian descriptive pictures but without the purely factual, earthy quality of the former or the sentimentality of the latter. Instead they were imbued with a great tenderness and a sense of poetry, which, despite a changing style remained the predominant characteristic of his work throughout his career’ (E. Akers-Douglas, Divine People: The Art & Life of Ambrose McEvoy 1877-1927, London, 2019, p. 48).
McEvoy’s working method during this early period was extremely slow and meticulous, with each brushstroke being of vital importance. Painted details would be reworked until the desired effect was achieved. The result of McEvoy’s meticulousness can be seen in The Engraving, from the shine of the polished wooden furniture and the delicate silver embroidery of the tablecloth, to the accomplished rendering of Mary’s face and hands. The subject of Mary’s gaze is the framed engraving of a woman on the mantelpiece. The format of this engraving is reminiscent of several early postcards amongst the McEvoy Estate Papers which may have served as a prop for the frugal artist at the start of his career.[i]McEvoy’s early style evolved into his mature technique of laying out his pictures completely in monochrome and applying the colour in glazes. He further developed his method by thinly scumbling the entire surface with white paint, often tinged with umber, so that the figure was still discernible, then painting over the dry picture giving it an extraordinary brilliance and shimmering quality. The effect was further enhanced by the use of coloured electric lights suspended over the sitter. This technique was particularly flattering to McEvoy’s glamorous society patrons such as Lady Diana Manners and Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough. However, Mary continued to model for him. The Artist’s Wife in an Interior, 1912 (Leicester Museum and Art Gallery) is one such example illustrating his distinctive luminous painting style.
Whether in oil or watercolour, a medium in which he was equally adept, McEvoy’s evolving style reflected the transition from the romantic Victorian era to the stylish Edwardian age. His untimely death in 1927, aged forty-nine, cut short the life of one of England’s most innovative portrait painters. His creative talent nurtured at the Slade, mostly notably under Frederick Brown’s support and encouragement, served to launch his career with The Engraving and the small group of pictures painted c. 1900-1901. Martin T. Wood writing in The Studio in 1907 remarked that McEvoy’s work of the early 1900s has ‘the rare, the dramatic instinct, that goes to make a genre painter, but his is a gentle drama… his figures are posed, but there is about them none of the posing of the model… the gesture is not depicted because in itself it is graceful, but as the emblem of a thought from which it springs. We find in his art a feeling for the gentle side of life’ (T. Martin Wood, ‘The Pictures of Ambrose McEvoy’, The Studio, 1907, p. 98).
The Engraving has only recently reappeared on the market. It was purchased by Sir John Lewis OBE from the Fine Art Society in the early 1980s; thus, it has emerged after some forty years in his collection. It is a charming example of McEvoy’s traditional early work and particularly significant as the first portrayal of Mary, the artist’s beloved future wife and lifelong muse.
We are grateful to Dr Lydia Miller for her assistance with this catalogue note.