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Lot 9: FREDERIC WILLIAM BURTON

Est: £0 GBP - £0 GBPSold:
Sotheby'sLondon, United KingdomMay 06, 2010

Item Overview

Description

FREDERIC WILLIAM BURTON 1816 - 1900 STUDY FOR DAYDREAMS titled under the mount pencil 20.5 by 31cm.; 8 by 12¼in.

Notes

The present lot is a study for Burton's Day Dreams (c.1861, Yale Center for British Art); a work that is closely related to one of his other seminal Aesthetic works, The Child Miranda (sold, Christie's London, 9υth June, 2004, lot 34). In both paintings the same model, with her distinctively wavy and voluminous locks, is placed along side or handling flowers. The carefully depicted natural elements betray not only Ruskin's influence on Burton, but the flowers, as examples of purity and fragility, are also a frequently used metaphor for childhood in the second half of the nineteenth century. John Everett Millais's paintings of children, such as his Portrait of Eveline Lees (1875), often depict them at one with nature, and allude to the transient, precious, nature of childhood, as in Bubbles (1885).

Having been educated in Dublin, Burton was living in London from 1858, where he was part of Rossetti's circle, frequently visiting the likes of Poynter, Morris, and Burne-Jones. Georgiana Burne-Jones stated in her husband's biography that the group frequently 'enchanted us all [with] their pranks, in which Morris and Edward Poynter occasionally joined, and Burton's beautiful face beamed on the scene, while Mrs. Morris, placed safely out of the way, watched everything from her sofa' (Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1904, ii. p.46). Burton and Burne-Jones were fast friends and in 1870 Burton withdrew from the Old-Watercolour Society in protest of the scandal facing Burne-Jones regarding the nude in his Phyllis and Demophoön.

The present lot's emphasis on languor and female beauty suggests Burton drew heavily from his association with this group of Pre-Raphaelite artists, as his earlier career had been largely dominated by austere portraits, miniatures and landscapes. In 1874 Burton gave up painting when he succeeded his friend Sir William Boxall as director of the National Gallery, London, a position he would hold for the next twenty years. During his tenure the museum acquired some of its most famous works including da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks and Hans Holbein the Younger's Ambassadors.

Auction Details

The Irish Sale

by
Sotheby's
May 06, 2010, 02:00 PM GMT

34-35 New Bond Street, London, LDN, W1A 2AA, UK