Sir James Jebusa Shannon R.A., R.B.A., R.H.A.

Sale: Sotheby's, New York, November 10, 1998, lot 298a, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

London, Royal Academy, 1904, no. 281

Black and White: Royal Academy and New Gallery Pictures and Sculpture for 1904, p. 12, illustrated 
Academy Notes, 1904, p. 18
Art Journal, 1904, p. 187
Studio, vol. XXXII, 1904, p. 29

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This impressive work has recently been restored and should be hung in its current condition. The canvas has an old non-wax lining, and the paint layer is stable as a result. The work is well textured throughout and the restorations are accurate and good. A lot of the original paint reads very strongly under ultraviolet light, but there is very little retouching in the lighter colors of the clothing and figures. The hand holding the dog is very faint and may have received a few retouches, but there do not seem to be any real retouches within the figures except for a vertical line of restorations running about 8 inches from the left side. These restorations seem to address an original canvas join. There may be a few retouches in the dark background that are not visible under ultraviolet light, but the condition seems to be generally good.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The Heward Bells were a wealthy family from the North of England, who subsequently set up house in Wiltshire. William Heward Bell, father of the girls in the present work, was born in 1849 to a Durham coal-owning family. He married Hannah Cory in 1874, and lived at Cleeve House at Seend in Wiltshire. The brother of Lorna and Dorothy was Clive (Heward) Bell (1881-1964), the modernist art critic and husband of the painter Venessa Bell, one of the leading members of the Bloomsbury Group. Frances Spalding, in her biography of Vanessa Bell, makes clear that the Bell parents were not in any way artistic, implying that they were fairly conventional members of the late Victorian nouveau riche. It makes an interesting background to Clive Bell and to Clive and Vanessa's son Quentin Bell – one of the pioneers in the revival of interest in Victorian art, as the author of a biography of John Ruskin and the book Victorian Artists (1967).

Like fellow expatriate Americans James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, Shannon was a powerful presence in British painting during the nineteenth century's closing decades. Born in Aubrun, New York, he had spent an itinerant childhood in the United States before travelling alone to London in 1878. There,
he enrolled at the National Art Training School in South Kensington (later the Royal College of Art) and began to fashion a complete artistic identity under the tutelage of its reformist principal, the French-trained Sir Edward John Poynter. Shannon made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1881, with The Honourable Horatia Stopford, Queen Victoria's Lady-in-Waiting. The portrait had been commissioned by none other than the Queen herself, on Poynter's recommendation, and its showing at the Academy marked the beginning of a glittering career as a society portraitist within the British art establishment.

However, no doubt as a result of Poynter's teaching, Shannon also developed strong links with the British avant garde. As his stature and demand as a portraitist grew during the 1880s, he aligned himself with the new generation of French-taught painters grouped around Henry Herbert La Thangue and Sir George Clausen. Fired by the aesthetic politics of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Carolus-Duran, these artists generated one of the more profound challenges to the art institutions of their nation. Formed in 1886, the New English Art Club, of which Shannon was a founding member, was initially to have been called the Society of Anglo-French Artists and loudly proclaimed itself an alternative to the Royal Academy regime.

Indeed, while superficially a belle époque portrait of generic type, the present work reveals itself on closer examination to be a visually erudite work that fuses the elements of its creator's formation. Not least important is the painting's juxtaposition of the British tradition of academic portraiture – Gainsborough, through Reynolds and Lawrence – with trends of French modernism. The emphasis on form created through tonal values rather than line, which had been Poynter's dictum in South Kensington, is clearly in evidence in Lorna and Dorothy Bell. The bravura brushwork that plays off the dark taffeta and feather boa worn by Dorothy against the brilliant white organdy of Lorna's dress (as well as the velvet brown of their canine companion) demonstrates Shannon's conception of the work as at once a naturalistic representation and a two-dimensional aesthetic pattern.