Lot 296: Thomas Reynolds Lamont (1826-1898)

The Prince's Choice
signed 'T R.Lamont' (lower left) and further signed, inscribed and dated 'The Prince's Choice/T R Lamont '78/Stanhope Street (on the frame)
oil on canvas
60 x 102 3/8 in. (152.4 x 260.1 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1878, no. 610.

Royal Academy Notes, 1878, p. 57.
Art Journal, 1878, p. 178.
The Magazine of Art, 1878, p. 103.

Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 21 June 1983, lot 37 (£8,000).
with The Leicester Galleries, London.

Scottish born, Lamont studied in Paris with George du Maurier, E.J. Poynter, Thomas Armstrong and Whistler. His name has become immortalised as du Maurier used him as a model for the Laird in his novel Trilby (1894). He also appears in some of du Maurier's cartoons.
Possessed of private means, it appears he did not pursue his artistic career with any vigour after 1880, prefering to live at his house in St. John's Wood, and on his estates in Scotland, near Greenock. Occasionally he showed watercolours at the Old Watercolour Society.

One of his best known pictures is Hard Times (or 'At the Pawnbroker's') which was sold at Sotheby's, London, 11 March 1998, lot 65 (£31,050), and reproduced in Christopher Wood, A Victorian Panorama, pp. 112-3. Painted with painstaking detail, it depicts a widow whose husband has been killed in the Crimean War thus depriving her and her child of their sole means of support.

The Prince's Choice, undoubtedly the artist's largest picture, and probably his masterpiece, shows him working in a lighter vein. Described by the Magazine of Art as an 'elaborate composition of vaporous manner and excessive delicacy of colour', it pre-empts by almost a quarter of a century the medieval romances of Blair Leighton and Byam Shaw. Its colonnaded composition clearly derives from the artist's time in Paris where he would have studied Veronese's Wedding at Cana in the Louvre. The colour too is Venetian, although of the 18th Century rather than the 16th. No doubt the artist was also influenced by Leighton, whose processional, neo-classical compositions were enjoying such critical success at the Academy at this date.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.