A girl with a basket of tulips, lilacs and other flowers, on a balcony before a landscape
(1836)
Medium
oil on canvas
Measurements
75.4 × 62.9 cm (image) 76.1 × 63.2 cm (canvas)
Credit Line
Eva Mandel Bequest and with funds donated by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, 2026
Gallery location
18th & 19th Century Decorative Arts & Paintings Gallery
Level 2, NGV International
About this work
Born Emma Jones in London in 1813, Emma Soyer was a child prodigy. She began her studies 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 before she was twelve. In 1837 she married the renowned chef Alex Soyer; she was pregnant with their child when she died unexpectedly in 1842, aged twenty-nine. Her obituaries record that she had made more than 400 paintings and critics compared her expressive work to that of the Spanish master Murillo.