Lot 90: Friendship Endangered

Frank Stone, A.R.A. (1800-1859) Friendship Endangered indistinctly signed with initials and dated '58' oil on canvas 45 x 35 in. (114.3 x 88.9 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1859, no. 254.
London, Alexander Gallery, Victorian Panorama, 1976, no. 7.
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, The Substance or the Shadow: Images of Victorian Womanhood, 1982, no. 85.
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, The Edmund J. and Suzanne McCormick Collection, 1984, no. 37.
Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix Art Museum, English Idylls: The Edmund J.
and Suzanne McCormick Collection of Victorian Art, 1988, no. 43.

Anonymous sale; Bonham's, London, 5 February 1976, lot 108.
with Alexander Gallery, London.
with Christopher Wood, London.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
Frank Stone's work builds upon an established Victorian canon of pictures depicting female rivalry over love. The dramatic aid of physical contrast (discussed in reference to Solomon's The Governess, see lot 89) is employed again here. The sisters, or friends, are obviously of a well-to-do family. The interior is fashionably decorated in rich colours and 17th Century-style art adorns the walls. An adjacent room reveals a window with stained-glass inserts: a feature of early gothic revival interiors.

The two girls, however, experience the first moments of potential friction. The blonde girl appears palpably downcast, and her seated posture suggests a degree of vulnerability. In her hand she grasps a lengthy letter. Her companion stands nearby, also holding what appears to be a shorter letter; she regards the other with a certain amount of calculation. We can infer any number of narratives; perhaps the dark girl has received a love letter which she now shows her companion - aware of its probable effect. The premise is certainly that of two competing for the affections of one.

Stone has used the device of an incriminating letter in Admonition, his Royal Academy exhibit of 1842, in which a girl upbraids her younger sister for receiving a love letter. Sometimes such subjects were more amicable; Thomas Brook's Roadside Gossip (1857), for example, celebrates female camaraderie.

Contemporary critics enjoyed speculating upon Friendship Endangered. The Art Journal offered its hypothesis: '[one girl] holds a love letter, it is presumed, in her hand, while the elder is venturing to give her sister a lecture upon the impropriety of receiving such a communication'. As Susan Casteras has noted, this idea recalls Admonition, and was inverted in the artist's Sympathy, 1850, which showed two girls: 'one of whom offers words of consolation to the other, whose countenance betokens both bodily and mental affliction'.