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Lot Essay
The rococo revival shines through this luminous portrait of Mrs Geoffrey Blackwell. In her setting before an open sky and coastal landscape, the blond harmonies of Boucher and Gainsborough are re-imagined and her restraining presence irradiates. Shirley Maud Blackwell (née Lawson Johnston) of Beckett, Shrivenham in Berkshire married Geoffrey Blackwell on 5 October 1909. They had five children – sketched as babies by Henry Tonks. Her husband was the son of Thomas Francis Blackwell, one half of the food manufacturing company, Crosse and Blackwell. At the time when Geoffrey Blackwell entered the company in 1905, it was the largest producer of tinned and bottled produce in Britain. Blackwell inherited his collecting instincts from his father, a client of Agnew’s, and on 22 April 1909 he read C.J. Holmes’s review of Steer’s current exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in the Times. This led ‘the newcomer’ into the gallery and placed him before the artist’s ‘more important and ambitious efforts’. Visiting the show, Blackwell was hooked. Secretly he bought the Whistlerian Boulogne Casino and other pictures quickly followed. It was at this point that he commissioned his wife’s portrait.
Laughton correctly points to the high Victorian revivalism of the young Mrs Blackwell’s attire and looks back to Steer’s grand manner portrait of Mrs Violet Hammersley (1906-7, Art Gallery of New South Wales). He also makes useful comparisons between the present work and its smaller version (Blackwell family), contrasting in this case, the careful finish of the head with the swiftly-confected figure and background. In essence this betrays Steer’s and Tonks’s frequent recourse to the well-springs of English Art, in which the fancies of eighteenth-century portraiture were recycled through the filters of Victorian illustration. A picture hat in the present instance, frames the face, and is essential to the subtlety characterisation. From pictures like this, younger Jazz Age portraitists such as Ambrose McEvoy took note.
KMc.
Laughton correctly points to the high Victorian revivalism of the young Mrs Blackwell’s attire and looks back to Steer’s grand manner portrait of Mrs Violet Hammersley (1906-7, Art Gallery of New South Wales). He also makes useful comparisons between the present work and its smaller version (Blackwell family), contrasting in this case, the careful finish of the head with the swiftly-confected figure and background. In essence this betrays Steer’s and Tonks’s frequent recourse to the well-springs of English Art, in which the fancies of eighteenth-century portraiture were recycled through the filters of Victorian illustration. A picture hat in the present instance, frames the face, and is essential to the subtlety characterisation. From pictures like this, younger Jazz Age portraitists such as Ambrose McEvoy took note.
KMc.