Portrait of Edith Williams, later Lady Griffith-Boscawen, bust-length in profile to the right with her hair flowing over her shoulders signed with monogram and dated '1879' (lower left) pencil and coloured chalks 251/4 x 181/4 in. (64.4 x 46.6 cm.) PROVENANCE Apparently commissioned by Mrs Williams, the sitter's mother, through Leonard Valpy. Edith Williams, later Lady Griffith-Boscawen, and by descent. Anon. sale; Sotheby's, London, 15 March 1983, lot 52. LITERATURE Joseph Knight, Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London, 1887, p. XVII, no. 378. W.M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, London, 1889, pp. 107, 288 (no. 365). Oswald Doughty and J.R. Wahl (eds.), Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oxford, 1963-7, vol. IV, pp. 1612, 1631-2. Virginia Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raison‚e, Oxford, 1971, vol. I, p. 201, no. 537. EXHIBITION Norwich, City of Norwich Museums, 1977-1982, lent by Miss F.G. Boscawen.

NOTES The sitter was Edith Sarah, daughter of Samuel Williams of Greenwich and Boons Park, Edenbridge, Kent. Born in Greenwich c. 1851, she was about twenty-eight when Rossetti drew her, at which time she was living with her widowed mother at Shirley Park, Tunbridge Wells. She had two brothers, Charles, two years older, who was in the army, and Frederick, possibly her twin (both were aged thirty at the time of the 1881 census), who was described as 'a Kentish squire' when he died in 1931. On 28 July 1892, when still living at Shirley Park, Edith married Arthur Sackville Trevor Griffith-Boscawen (1865-1946). A bright young Welshman, educated at Rugby and Queen's College, Oxford, Arthur had nursed political ambitions from an early age, and in 1890, soon after leaving university, had been adopted as the Unionist (Conservative) candidate for the Tunbridge Division of Kent. Tunbridge Wells was in the constituency, and no doubt he and Edith met at some point between his adoption and his successful election to Parliament two years later. This event, in which he beat a Liberal by 933 votes, took place on 8 July 1892, three weeks almost to the day before the couple were married. They were unusual in that he was twenty-six and she some fourteen years older, a big gap for that date, with the bride, perhaps already over forty, well past what would normally have been considered a marriageable age. One can only conclude that it was a love-match, each party presumably accepting the fact that they were unlikely to have children, as indeed proved to be the case.

What Arthur saw in Edith we can only surmise, but his published reminiscences, Memories (1925), show that he was the sort of man she might well have found attractive - lively and intelligent, with a well balanced mind and a good sense of humour. Unfortunately, the book says almost nothing about his private life, being almost exclusively, despite the title, devoted to his political career. Nonetheless, the few references that it makes to Edith are invariably warm and affectionate. The political bias of the book is not suprising. Politics dominated Arthur's life, and he remained an active member of Parliament for over thirty years. He held the Tunbridge seat until 1906, when he lost it in a general election which saw the Tories almost annihilated.

However, he returned to Parliament in 1910 as member for Dudley, and he continued to represent this Worcestershire town until 1921, after which he sat briefly for Taunton. During this long period he held many governmental posts, from an early spell as private secretary to Sir Michael Hicks-Beach when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer (1895-1900) to the eventual command of two ministerial departments, Agriculture in Lloyd-George's postwar coalition government, and Health in Bonar Law's government, which came to power in 1922. A staunch churchman, Arthur was also involved in all manner of good works. He was a JP, sat on the LCC, served as a Charity Commissioner, and was Chairman of the Housing of the Working Classes Committee, not to mention being Honorary Treasurer of the Church Army, a member of the Church Assembly, Chairman of the Church of England Pensions Board, and so on.

Not surprisingly he was knighted in 1911. Whether or not it was so at the outset, politics and worthy causes were clearly a great bond between Edith and her husband. In a brief reference to their marriage, Arthur describes his wife as 'for twenty-seven years my constant companion and helpmeet', and he firmly believed that her death, which occurred on 7 July 1919, helped to lose him the Dudley seat two years later. 'My dear wife...had been immensely popular in the town', he wrote, 'where she had lived and worked among the people all the time that I was soldiering in France' - a reference to his First World War service, when he commanded a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment between spells of parliamentary activity. Edith's loyal support of her husband is also stressed in her Times obituary, which speaks of her having 'taken a great part in assisting (him) in his elections and political work at Dudley and elsewhere'.

Yet another common interest was travel. After the general election of 1895, following the final resignation of Gladstone, the couple decided to go round the world, embarking at Liverpool on the Cunarder Etruria, crossing America from New York to Salt Lake City, going on to make an exhaustive tour of Japan, and finally returning to England via Shanghai, Hong-Kong, Ceylon and Egypt. A further extended visit to South Africa took place in 1906-7, following the disastrous election in which Arthur lost the Tunbridge seat. Yet Edith was far more than her husband's shadow. According to her obituary, she 'was herself a good speaker.' She was Chairman of the Women's Branch of the National Unionist Association, an office of considerable political importance. She was also 'connected with many other public movements, including war pensions and war savings, and she had 'worked hard in the recent campaign in favour of the Victory Loan.' Had she lived in a later age she might well have entered Parliament herself, and even risen to ministerial rank.

Perhaps it was her exertions in connection with the Great War that led to Edith's death from heart failure at the comparatively early age of sixty-eight. She succumbed at her London house, 80 Cornwall Gardens, but her obsequies were conducted amid the scenes of her early life, her funeral taking place at Langton Green, Tunbridge Wells, and her burial in Speldhurst churchyard. In her will she left a total of œ8,666-3s-6d, a surprisingly small amount which at least suggests that Arthur had not married her for her money. Arthur himself, who still had several years of busy political life ahead of him, went on to re-marry and father a daughter by his second wife. He died at the age of eighty in 1946. Almost none of this information has hitherto been noted in connection with Rossetti's early portrait of Edith. Indeed, the portrait itself is sparsely documented, although we can gather something about it from published records. In his account of his brother's work, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1889), William Michael Rossetti wrote as follows in his commentary on the year 1878: 'In the last month of the year Mr Valpy arranged with my brother that Miss Williams, the daughter of a lady residing at Shirley Hall, Tunbridge Wells, was to sit to him for a chalk portrait. It was finished in May of the following year.' Allowing for slight variations of date, this account is confirmed, and slightly expanded, by D.G. Rossetti's own letters. Leonard R. Valpy, who 'arranged' the commission, was a London solicitor of somewhat eccentric taste. A man of strict religious views, he had such a horror of the nude that he was said to be 'disaquieted even by a pair of bare arms'. Perhaps rather suprisingly, he was attracted to the sensuous art of Rossetti, becoming a patron in 1867. During the next few years he acquired a number of the artist's works, sometimes through the egregious Charles Augustus Howell. His most daring purchase, however, was made in 1873, when he agreed to buy the largest picture that Rossetti ever painted, the colossal oil version of Dante's Dream (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) after it had been returned to Rossetti by its first owner, William Graham, on account of its size. In 1878 Valpy in turn relinquished the picture when he was forced for health reasons to move to a smaller house in Bath. It returned a second time to Rossetti's studio, where it remained until it was bought for Liverpool in 1881, and Rossetti undertook to paint a number of pictures for Valpy up to the same value. The negotiations were complex and not without irritation to both parties. In the autumn of 1878 Rossetti described himself as 'bedevilled by Valpy', who had become 'Valpy the Vampire, greatly grieved by my commercial obliquities'. He was still working on pictures for Valpy at the time of his death in 1882.

The commission for Edith Williams's portrait was also apparently tied up with the return of Dante's Dream. 'As to my terms named (i.e. œ500 cash)', Rossetti wrote to his patron on 26 November 1878, 'should you wish to revert to the Sibyl subject [a reference to his composition Sibylla Palmifera ] instead of J[oan] of A[rc], - I may say that I would do additionally without charge the portrait drawing of the young lady you spoke of, which I should otherwise price at 50 guineas at least; indeed I have lately been in the habit of charging more than this for single heads, but I believe that was the price when I did Mrs Valpy's '. Evidently Rossetti had already drawn the solicitor's wife, although no such portrait seems to be otherwise recorded. Equally mysterious is the connection between Valpy and Edith Williams. It is possible that her mother was one of his clients, and he had simply recommended Rossetti when he heard that she wanted the girl's portrait drawn, but his evident financial involvement in the matter suggests that there was more to it than this, as if he was making a present of the drawing to Edith or her mother. Rossetti's readiness to undertake the portrait probably had something to do with his precarious financial position at this time. He was heavily in debt, and the current recession was making commissions hard to obtain. 'Times are hard' is a constant refrain in his letters of the late 1870s, while in November 1879 he told his mother that 'I hear there is a decided improvement in trade'.

After giving her details, he added: 'You may perhaps think this report not much in my line, but I view it as vitally wound up with the picture-market.' Whatever financial pressures lay behind the commission, they were not enough to make Rossetti abandon the autocratic manner that he so often adopted with his patrons. In a postscript to his letter to Valpy, he added: 'Were the portrait of the young lady to be done it must be at some moment suiting my arrangements.' That 'moment' evidently came the following spring, since we next hear of the portrait in a letter Rossetti wrote to his friend Theodore Watts on 18 April 1879: 'On Sunday I expect the last sitting from Miss W.' Ten days later he was able to tell the same correspondent that he had 'finished Miss W's head today from her.' These sittings would have taken place at Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, Edith Williams presumably travelling to London from Tunbridge Wells with a chaperone in attendence. It is interesting that neither artist nor sitter minded making an appointment for a Sunday, but one wonders what the pious Valpy would have thought, if he ever knew. It would be fascinating to have a photograph of Edith Williams (her husband's Memories are unillustrated, so there is no likeness of her there, even in later life) and to gauge the liberties that Rossetti has taken in trying to make her conform to his feminine ideal, He has done his best to turn her into a conventional Pre-Raphaelite beauty (the cascade of hair, the dreamy, faraway gaze), but beneath the glamorous surface we sense the strength of character that would later make her a good public speaker, a valliant campaigner on behalf of social causes, and an intrepid traveller.

The treatment of her hair is particularly intriguing. Did she normally wear it down, or was it released at the suggestion of Rossetti, for whom long hair had a powerfully emotive appeal? The effect is reminiscent of a study, dating from the early 1860s, of Mrs Beyer, a German woman who sat to Rossetti for his painting Joan of Arc (fig. 1). Mrs Beyer, who seems to have been a professional model, had almost certainly let down her flowing tresses at Rossetti's instigation, and it is possible that Edith Williams did likewise. Formally the outstanding feature of the portrait is the way in which the head and shoulders are silhouetted against a pale blue ground and arbitrarily cut off below with a sweeping s-bend line. Such silhouetting is not uncommon in Rossetti's later drawings, although admittedly it is seldom seen in such a striking form. For other examples, see a study for The Blessed Damozel, dating from 1876, in the Manchester City Art Gallery (Surtees 244B, pl. 356) and a drawing of Alexa Wilding, dated 1873, which was sold in these Rooms on 8 June 2000, lot 26. We are very grateful to Janet Grant for her help in preparing this entry.