Anna Louisa Swynnerton

London, Royal Academy, 1882, no. 704.

'Miss. Annie L. Robinson', The Graphic Christmas Edition, 1883, reproduced as a chromolithograph.

The visit is an early picture by one of the most interesting female painters of the late-nineteenth century. Annie Robinson had begun exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1879 and this was only the fourth of many exhibits there – in 1922 she was elected as the first female Associate Member. This picture was painted when she had moved from Manchester to London and a year before she married the sculptor Joseph Swynnerton. It depicts two little girls, dressed impeccably and on their very best behaviour, seated on a large settle decorated with a golden crown. The subject and composition recalls the child portraiture of John Everett Millais, particularly the pair of pictures My First Sermon and My Second Sermon. The bulls-eye window in the background, also appears in the undated The Letter (Royal Academy of Art, London) – it probably derives from Northern Renaissance paintings such as Jan Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, or perhaps Millais’ 1851 Mariana.

Swynnerton's rise to fame was not easy, as she told a journalist later in life: ‘I have had to struggle so hard. You see when I was young, women could not paint – or so it was said. The world believed that and did not want the work of women, however sincere, however good. I refused to accept that. I fought and I suffered.’¹ Fortunately her great talent was recognised in her lifetime and John Singer Sargent wrote of her to his patron Viscountess Nancy Astor: ‘I think she is a genius or words to that effect – really I am not exaggerating… it is difficult to describe her style if you have never seen anything of hers, it is very powerful and rich…’²

¹ The Evening News, 15 February 1933, in K.J.T. Herrington and R. Milner, Annie Swynnerton – Painting Light and Hope, 2018, p. 32.

² A letter from Sargent to Astor, 13 May 1911, in Herrington and Milner, 2018, p. 22.