A girl with a basket of tulips, lilacs and other flowers, on a balcony before a landscapee
(c. 1836)
Medium
oil on canvas
Measurements
76.1 × 63.2 cm
Credit Line
Purchased with funds from the Eva Mandel Bequest and Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, 2026
© Public domain
Gallery location
Not on display
About this work
Emma Soyer was a child prodigy during the late Georgian and early Victorian eras. Born Emma Jones in London in 1813, she studied initially under the Belgian painter François Simonau, who had married her widowed mother in 1820. In 1823, at the age of ten, Soyer had her first work exhibited at the Royal Academy and is reputed to have drawn more than one hundred skilful portraits from life before she was twelve. In 1837 she married the renowned chef Alex Soyer; she was pregnant with his child when she died unexpectedly in 1842, aged twenty-nine. Her obituaries record that she had made more than four hundred paintings by the time of her death, and critics compared her expressive work to that of the Spanish master Murillo.
Artwork Details
Department
International Painting