# - [Shaw, G.B.]--Jane (`Jenny') Patterson. Miniature portrait of Jenny Patterson

a watercolour miniature, with traces of pencil, on ivory, English school, a head and shoulders portrait, gilt metal frame, glazed, overall size c.65 x 52mm., [c.1900s] This lot contains 1 item(s).

Jane (`Jenny') Patterson has the distinction of being the first woman with whom G.B. Shaw had sexual relations. She was a friend of his mother, fifteen years older than him, and already a widow by the time she was visiting Mrs Shaw in London for singing lessons. Shaw's friendship with her -- whom he named ``Mrs Chatterbox'' -- developed into a romance following the death of his father on 15 April 1885. ``She had brown hair, black eyes, a `remarkable bust' and voluptuous manner, the ferocity of which, Shaw sensed, was erotic'' (Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, I, 161). In the summer of 1885 they began an affair which ``broke through his celibacy'' and had an enormously unsettling effect on Shaw, combining as it did erotic obsession, guilt, and a struggle between his independent self-sufficiency and her authority and possessiveness (``I wanted to love'', he wrote, ``but not to be appropriated...I was never duped by sex as a basis for permanent relations, nor dreamt of marriage in connection with it''). This stormy relationship, disrupted by frequent quarrels, extended over a five-year period, until Shaw fell in love with the actress Florence Farr. The present image of Florence Patterson is reproduced in Holroy's biography, vol. I, plate 11 after p. 248.

Provenance: Ann M. Elder -- thence by family descent