Annie Rose Laing 1869-1946

'A feminine and rather charming sentiment as regards children... united to considerable beauty of colour, lighting and handling.' (James Caw, Scottish Painters 1620-1908, 1908, p.428)

Annie Rose Low was born in Glasgow where she spent most of her life and where she exhibited her first picture in 1894, A Garden, Largo. She travelled to Algeria in 1895 and exhibited a number of the scenes painted there at the Glasgow Institute exhibition in the following year. Upon her return to Glasgow, she began to paint the sophisticated portraits and interiors for which she gained her reputation as an artist and she continued to exhibit in the city for the following three decades. In 1898 she married the Aberdeen painter James Garden Laing.

Laing's paintings are almost without exception bright and bathed in sunlight and she delighted in painting the joys of childhood and early womanhood in her interior scenes. She particularly liked subjects of children and young women sitting in sunlit interiors at tables arrayed with flowers and delicious luncheons or taking tea. Among her many exhibits at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts are several that have titles which suggest a similarity to the present work, including The Tea Table, Waiting for Tea and Preparing Tea. A similar work entitled A Helensburgh Breakfast (sold Sotheby's Gleneagles, 2 September 2002, lot 1464) depicts two young women drinking tea before a sunlit window.