Sir Frank Dicksee P.R.A.

Commissioned by the sitter and her husband Charles William Mills, 2^nd Lord Hillingdon of Vernon House in London, Hillingdon Court and Overstrand Hall;
Purchased in 1979 by Christopher Wood by whom sold in 1993 to a private collector in America

Royal Academy, 1905, no. 158

E. Rimbault Dibdin, Frank Dicksee - His Life and Work, special issue of The Art Annual, 1905, p.20, illustrated p.27;
Christopher Wood, Dictionary of Victorian Painters, 1978, (unpaginated) illustrated

Original canvas. The work appears in excellent overall condition with rich passages of impasto, ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals an area of retouching below her left hand, on her right elbow, and a few very minor flecked retouchings in her hair.
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'Portraits supplant the individuals they represent. They function as analogues, existing in parallel to their subjects. They fix a moment within a lifetime, within an era. They therefore provide communication with the past of a most significant kind.' (Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits - Images of an Age of Opulence, 1987, p.9)

'Dicksee had a distinctive, thickly impasted and textured style of painting; his sensitivity to the qualities of surface is evident in the portraits he painted, where he emphasises the contrasts of textures between materials and the skin and hair of his subjects, as in any of his subject pictures.' (Society Portraits 1850-1939, exhibition catalogue for Colnaghi and The Clarendon Gallery, 1985, p.78)

Frank Dicksee began his career as a painter of medieval romance and contemporary melodrama and in the 1880s and 1890s he was highly celebrated as one of the most fashionable painters of narrative art. As the twentieth century approached, the vogue for this style of painting began to wain and Dicksee used his abilities at capturing beauty to forge the path to becoming the most successful English portrait painter of his day, rivalling the American John Singer Sargent and the Hungarian Philip de László. He gained a reputation for flattering his female sitters and for emphasising their beauty with accessories and glorious fabrics. As Stanley Olson ventured in 1985, Edwardian portraiture represents more than merely the depiction of sitters in fine garments; ‘…they are more than the chattels of the past; they amass as the human directory of previous generations, speaking the romantic language of opulence, in a grammar much unchanged since Van Dyck. But time has played the ancestral gallery foul, disturbing the established logic: the sitter has ceased to matter and the distorting lens of nostalgia has been lowered into position. And what was originally meant to be visual upholstery of genealogical graphs has become the souvenirs of the past.’ (Society Portraits 1850-1939, exhibition catalogue for Colnaghi and The Clarendon Gallery, 1985, p.10)

Dicksee painted the wealthy wives and daughters of men of industry, politics and aristocracy with a technical panache which captured the lustre of high society, of polished mahogany and the sparkle of diamonds and shimmer of fine silk. Among his most successful female portraits were those of the Duchess of Westminster, Miss Elsa Hall, Lady Aird and Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos. In 1905 a journalist who interviewed Dicksee for an article in the Art Annual noted the artist’s increasing concentration on portrait commissions; ‘Last year those who look to Mr. Dicksee as a leader among the faithful remnant that still believe in imaginative art which has the added interest of a practical story or meaning – who hold that art has concerns beyond and above even colour, tone, composition and brushwork – these looked with some dismay on the evidence of a steadily-growing addiction to portraiture given by three portraits from his easel.’

Dicksee’s popularity as a portrait painter coincided with a financial boom in the Edwardian era and a desire by the wealthy elite to represent themselves as people of refined taste and elegance. This reflected a flourishing of portraiture that had taken place in the eighteenth century and Dicksee sought to emulate the great painters of that period in his own work. He recognised that the aristocratic families of Britain wanted portraits that complimented, rather than contrasted, the ‘Swagger Portraits’ of their forebears by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney. In a recent exhibition catalogue, this connection has been explained: 'Portraits from the early twentieth century shared certain characteristics with those from the eighteenth that were often executed on large-format canvases with unrestrained bravura. Both responded to a need for artworks that registered concerns about public display and status.' (Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Roger (eds.), Edwardian Opulence - British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, 2013, p.78) 

The present magnificent portrait depicts the aristocratic Lady Hillingdon dressed for a summer garden party and seated on a curvaceous sofa upholstered in golden silk. Her extended gloved hand is resting on the handle of a parasol whilst the other is bare to reveal her substantial ruby and diamond rings glittering on her long white fingers. Her fashionable straw-hat is decorated with mauve feathers and a silk ribbon that harmonises with the bow on her parasol and at her throat she has a spectacular diamond choker. These accessories compliment the wonderful cascade of her taffeta gown which is an exceptionally fine example of drapery painting. The setting and pose suggest that the sitter has rested momentarily before greeting her guests at an elegant society soiree. However this is artistic artifice and the truth is that Dicksee had carefully controlled every aspect of the portrait and few of the elements had been chosen by Lady Hillingdon. The setting is not one of the Hillingdon’s homes; the portrait was painted at Dicksee’s studio at Greville Place in St John’s Wood. The sofa was one that appears in many of his portraits, part of a suite of chairs that he purchased in his first years of living at Greville House. The tapestry was also his and the gilt candle-bracket was also part of the studio decoration. These elements had been carefully arranged to reflect the Rococo splendour of the frame which was integral to the portrait as a work of art. Lady Hillingdon could not even claim credit for choosing the gown which was a dress that Dicksee had amongst his collection of costumes that had been made for various pictures. The ruffled sleeves and long pelmets had been taken from a dress originally made for One of Our Conquerors of 1903 (Manchester City Art Gallery) which depicted the modern-day heroine of a popular play. The crimson corsage pinned carefully to her own was probably Lady Hillingdon’s own choice as roses were a particular passion for her; five years later the rosarians Lowe & Shawyer bred a variety of rose that was named in her honour.

Lady Hillingdon, Alice Marion Mills (née Harbord 1857-1940) was the fourth daughter of the 5th Baron Suffield. Her husband was the wealthy banker and businessman Charles William Mills, the 2^nd Lord Hillingdon whose father owned an exceptional collection of eighteenth century portraits. It is most likely that the portrait hung at Overstrand Hall in Norfolk, the large home given to the Hillingdon's as a wedding present by the bride's father and altered by Edwin Lutyens. The Hillingdons had married in 1898 but it was not a happy union and Lady Hillingdon’s diary in 1912 contains the following famous aphorism which betrays her feelings towards her husband; 'I am happy now that Charles calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old.  As it is, I now endure but two calls a week and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs, and think of England'.

'These portraits, particularly of women, were disproportionately influential in terms of the contemporary discourse they generated, and they have remained some of the most emblematic visual objects of the Edwardian period.' (Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Roger (eds.), Edwardian Opulence - British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, 2013, p.79)