Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee, P.R.A.

Colonel J.R. Danson, sold by his executors Christie's, 29 July 1977, lot 163;
Sotheby's, 18 April 1978, lot 94;
London, Roy Miles Fine Paintings;
Private collection

Royal Academy 1925, no.83;
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Autumn Exhibition, 1925, no. 940

STRUCTURE Original canvas. The painting is in generally excellent condition with areas of strong impasto. The work is clean and ready to hang. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT UV light reveals a small area of retouching near the lower edge and a few flecked cosmetic retouchings to the figures. These are not excessive and have been very well executed. FRAME Held in a gilt plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5718 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Dicksee's reputation as one of the finest artists of the late nineteenth century was based upon the romantic subject paintings of the first half of his career in the late 1870s and 1880s; pictures of renaissance courtiers in sunlit cloisters and modern-day melodramas in middle-class drawing-rooms. However by the turn of the century the popularity of narrative art was beginning to wane and he began to be more reliant on portrait commissions. Fortunately he was discerning in who he painted and his portraits of the beautiful wives and daughters of the wealthy industrialists, politicians and aristocrats, were among the most successful exhibits in the Royal Academy exhibitions of the early twentieth century. By the 1920s he had painted the likenesses of many of the most eminent men and women of his age including the wives of the Duke of Westminster, Lord Inverclyde, Lord Hillingdon, the engineer John Aird the man responsible for the building of the Aswan Dam and the removal of the Crystal Palace to Sydenham and the millionaire William Knox d'Arcy. Although by the 1920s the majority of Dicksee's exhibits at the Royal Academy were portraits, he painted several successful subject pictures the most accomplished of which is The Daughter's of Eve of 1925.

In a secluded and sunlit corner of an English orchard, a young woman gently pulls down the bough of an apple-tree laden with ripe golden fruit to a rosy-cheeked child who reaches upward with delight. A doll has been cast aside among the daisies growing amongst the grass. The older girl, a sister of the infant perhaps, is dressed in an apron and has her sleeves rolled as though she had been working in the kitchen. A table has been brought into the sunshine, laid out with a white tablecloth upon which is a loaf of freshly baked bread. The painting is an essay in domestic harmony and a celebration of the simpler life of the countryside. The title is one that had been used by many artists, including George Dunlop Leslie (offered in these rooms, 11 December 2007, lot 13).

The model for The Daughters of Eve was a girl named Beatrice Stuart, who sat for many artists from the turn of the century onwards, including Dod Proctor, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Munnings and Augustus John.  She was the model for the bronze figure of Peace riding a triumphal chariot on the Wellington Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Dame Laura Knight who with her husband Harold had often painted Beatrice described her with much affection 'a beautiful young creature...by her grace and poise, as well as by her activity and apparent ease in climbing rocks on the Cornish shore, few people knew her terrible loss.'  The loss mentioned by Knight refers to Beatrice's leg, which was amputated a little above the knee when she was seventeen, a loss which did not prevent her from becoming one of the most popular models of her time.  Sir Alfred Munnings wrote upon one of his sketches of Beatrice when an album was compiled of drawings of her by various artists 'Most of your portraits are wrong. Some of them only a mess. Lambert has made your fingernails long. But Dicksee's is quite a success'.

The Daughters of Eve was admired at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1925 and sold for £500. Several years later a critic for The Times recalled the picture with admiration; 'Granting the gentleness of the theme and sentiment, it could hardly have been bettered, being perfectly consistent throughout.' (Times, 18 October 1928, p.21). The success of the picture was the lack of artifice in the subject of a modern-day rustic idyll that celebrates the innocence of youth, the maternal tenderness of womanhood and the beauty of the British countryside that the soldiers of the Great War had fought so hard to protect only a few years earlier. As with many of Dicksee's pictures, the painting was based upon a small watercolour of the composition which was exhibited at the British Institution of Watercolour Painters in 1927 (Bonham's, 14 November 2006, lot 165) and singled out by the art critic for the Times; 'a special word of praise must be given to the epitome of prettiness.' (Times, 24 March 1927, p.12)