A blue-eyed lady who appears to be a singer, or an actress, stands on a stage before a curtained backdrop. She wears a white feather in her hair, strings of pearls around her neck and right arm, and has two ornate rings on her right hand. Her elaborate dress is of white silk or satin, with white lace trimming, a single red rose attached at its waist. In her left hand she holds a loose bouquet of flowers, some of which have fallen to the floor. Signed and dated at the lower right ‘Annie L. Robinson/1878’ (the artist’s maiden name), this exquisite life-size portrait by Annie Swynnerton reappeared on the art market in 2017 and now bears the descriptive title The lady in white, 1878. Details of its whereabouts between 1878 and 2017 have yet to be discovered, and the identity of its sitter remains unknown. It has been noted, however, that this portrait might reflect ‘Swynnerton’s experience of living with an actress/singer in the mid 1870s and her belief that women should be free to pursue careers in the arts’.1Katie J. T. Herrington, ‘Genteel portraits and vivid nudes: Annie Swynnerton’s Living Figures’, in Annika Aitken et al. (eds), She Persists: Perspectives on Women in Art and Design, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020, p. 98. The lady in white was painted a year before Swynnerton exhibited her first work at the Royal Academy in London in 1879, another painting also titled Portrait of a lady (currently untraced), although this time showing ‘the female figure in a grey citron dress, standing against a grey ground’.2‘The Royal Academy Exhibition’, The Athenaeum, 7 Jun. 1879, p. 734, in Annika Aitken et al. (eds), p. 98.
Annie Louisa Swynnerton was born Annie Robinson in Hulme, Manchester, in 1844, the eldest of seven daughters of solicitor Francis Robinson and his wife Ann. Swynnerton was initially homeschooled and, presumably, her early curriculum included training in drawing and watercolour. Along with two of her sisters, she commenced her art training at the Manchester School of Art in 1868.3Christine Allen & Penny Morris, Annie Swynnerton, Painter and Pioneer. The First Woman Associate of the Royal Academy, Sarsen Press, Winchester, 2018, p. 18. Note that Herrington & Milner (in footnote 4), give her date of starting at the Manchester School of Art as 1869. At art school she formed a close friendship with fellow student Susan Isabel Dacre, who had already studied art in Paris. From 1872 she shared a studio in Manchester with her two fellow artist sisters, and, along with Dacre, the three Robinson sisters contributed works to the annual Autumn Exhibitions at the Royal Manchester Institution. At the Manchester School of Art, Annie received a medal for painting in oil from life in 1871. In 1873 she won a National Art School Competition Princess of Wales Scholarship, the profits of which enabled her to travel to Rome with Dacre in 1874.4Rebecca Milner, ‘Opportunity, struggle and activism. Swynnerton’s early years in Manchester’, in Katie J. T. Herrington & Rebecca Milner, Annie Swynnerton. Painting Light and Hope, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, 2018, p. 10. The two friends also attended the Académie Julian in Paris together in 1878–79. Back in England, Swynnerton and Dacre became involved with the Manchester Society of Women’s Suffrage in 1880–81.5ibid. p. 11. In 1883 Swynnerton married the sculptor Joseph Swynnerton. Throughout the 1880s and up until 1910, she maintained a studio in London while also living in Rome for part of each year. In the 1890s and early 1900s Swynnerton’s art expanded beyond the realm of portraiture, which had hitherto been her principal interest, and incorporated mythological and allegorical subjects painted with a high-keyed luminosity. In 1922 she became the first woman to be elected an Associate of the Royal Academy since the eighteenth century.
Painted in Paris in 1878, The lady in white reflects the influence of Swynnerton’s studies at the Académie Julian, a progressive art school in Paris’s Passage des Panoramas. An ambitious and sumptuous life-size portrait, imbued with the French juste milieu (happy medium) blend of academic realism and Impressionist painterly freedom, The lady in white is a work that could have easily graced the walls of the Paris Salon. Equally, though, the exquisite rendering of the fabric in The lady in white’s dress reflects the artist’s love of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, in particular the bravura treatment of similar fabrics by Gabriël Metsu. Dutch painting of the golden age, with its uncompromisingly vivid realism, doubtless also contributed here to what Swynnerton scholar Katie Herrington has described as ‘the depiction of the figure’s prominent jaw, flushed cheeks and visible blue veins in her arms, [which] highlights the artist’s penchant for representing the unidealised human body’.6Herrington, p. 99.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
