George Dunlop Leslie, R.A. 1835-1921

London, Thomas Agnew & Sons;
Purchased around 1950 by the architect Colin Jones for Llantarnam Comprehensive School near Cwmbran, Wales;
Sotheby's, 15 June 2000, lot 50;
Private collection

London, Royal Academy, 1883, no. 305

Academy Notes, 1883, illus. p. 32;
Art Journal, 1883, p. 218;
Athenaeum, 12 May 1883, p. 607

STUCTURE The canvas has a backing board but is not laid down; it is in good condition, stable and the board is flat with no sign of bowing. CATALOGUE COMPARISON The catalogue illustration is broadly representative. PAINT SURFACE The paint surface is in very good, clean condition with a light even varnish; ready to hang. ULTRAVIOLET UV light reveals no sign of retouching, the work is in excellent original condition. FRAME Held in a period plaster gilt frame in good condition.
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George Dunlop Leslie's painting Daughters of Eve shows three girls who seem momentarily to have paused in their task of hanging out laundry to pick apples. One stands on a chair, and passes fruit to her sister. A younger girl rests by the trunk of the tree with a half-eaten apple in hand. The subject may be assumed to have been set in the garden of the artist's house near Wallingford on the River Thames. Leslie was passionately interested in plants and gardening, and many of his paintings have horticultural themes or are set in gardens. The girls wear dresses of a Regency pattern, a style that had been adopted by members of the so-called St John's Wood Clique of painters- of which group Philip Hermogenes Calderon, William Frederick Yeames, George Adolphus Storey, Fred Walker and Marcus Stone, in addition to Leslie himself, had been members in the 1870s. The sense of period is further supported by the Windsor chair upon which the girl stands, and the white-painted wooden fence in the background. Leslie's conscious avoidance of the contemporary made a powerful appeal to the late Victorian sense of nostalgia for an earlier age, which was seen as more aesthetically pleasing and somehow less threatening.

Daughters of Eve recalls the words of Christina Rossetti's poem An Apple-gathering, which symbolises lost love and the changing of the seasons played out through the activities of those bringing in the apple harvest. September heralds the decline of the year and by association, the loss of love;

In brisk wind of September,
The heavy-headed fruits
Shake upon their bending boughs
And drop from the shoots;
Some glow golden in the sun,
Some show green and streeked,
Some set forth a purpose bloom,
Some blush rosy-cheeked.

In this early career G.D. Leslie had been influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism. Later he turned to classical-mythological subjects such as Nausicaa and her Maids (shown at the Royal Academy in 1871). In the course of the 1870s he adopted his characteristic aestheticised figurative arrangements- almost always showing women and children in domestic interiors and open air settings. Leslie's move away from the more portentous subjects towards elegant and light-hearted decorative arrangements was commented on in 1873, when the Art Journal demonstrated a fundamental lack of sympathy of the nascent aesthetic-classical school by complaining that a work entitled The Fountain was 'too good a picture to be subjected to the slight of an insignificant title.' (Art Journal, 1873, p.167). By the early 1880s when the present painting was done, Leslie was seen by critics and the public at large as a mildly progressive painter who was looking to adapt classical rules of composition to the representation of mundane or apparently familiar scenes. The influence of Albert Moore, who had first treated thematic subjects suggested by incidental decorative elements in the late 1860s, may be felt in many of Leslie's paintings. Here, however, reference is made in the title- although perhaps with tongue in cheek- to the Fall of Man in the Book of Genesis. In 1925 Frank Dicksee chose the same title Daughters of Eve, for his painting of two girls picking cider apples in an orchard (FIG. 3) and it is possible that he based the subject of his picture on Leslie's painting. In both pictures a commonplace and idyllic setting is given to a picture, the title of which is suggestive of the first temptation and the real subject is a celebration of the prettiness of the female models that posed for the paintings.

Daughters of Eve was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1883. It was described in Academy Notes as 'a sunny English orchard; green, brown and white dresses', and also favourably noticed in the Art Journal which described the picture as 'One pretty girl gathering apples, another holding open her apron to catch them as they fall, and the third and smallest busily munching her share.' The Athenaeum wrote that 'the principle group [of figures] is prettily designed, and the actions are not less acceptable because they are rather dainty than rustic.' Leslie was by this stage in his career one of the looked-for figures of the Royal Academy, having been elected as an Academician in 1876 and being represented at the Academy summer exhibitions each year without fail. In 1914 he published a memoir entitled The Inner Life of the Royal Academy.

A similar subject to the present work is The Young Gardener of 1889 (FIG. 2) sold in these rooms 6 June 2001, lot 94) which also depicts young women in an English garden, with a pretty maiden filling the watering can of her little assistant. The close attention to the flowers and the garden background show Leslie's technical accomplishment.

In the 1950s the architect Colin Jones bought Daughters of Eve and donated it to the Llantarnam Comprehensive School in Wales where it hung for three decades in the entrance hall, perhaps giving generations of children inspiration to emulate the well-behaved Victorian children depicted.