Lot 79: Lady Laura Alma-Tadema (British, 1852-1909)

Nothing Venture, Nothing Have
oil on canvas
15 x 24 in. (38.1 x 61 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1888, no. 977.

By descent in the family of Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, son of the novelist Charles Dickens.

PROPERTY OF A CANADIAN COLLECTOR

Unseen for more than a century, this picture has passed by descent in the family of Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, a distinguished lawyer and third son of Charles Dickens. When the novelist died in 1870, the nation mourned: Sir Luke Fildes's picture The Empty Chair, of the author's study at Gad's Hill was revered by many at the Royal Academy as a potent symbol of loss. However the author's work was promoted assiduously after his death by the Charles Dickens Foundation, which was founded in 1902. Laura's husband Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema acted as Vice President of the Foundation between 1902 and 1912.

That he should have done so bears witness to the close friendships enjoyed by the leaders of artistic and literary London at the turn of the century. Dickens's daughter Kate married first the artist Charles Alston Collins, brother of the novelist Wilkie Collins, and after his death the painter Charles Edward Perugini, a protégé of Leighton. She sat to Millais, and her likenss can be seen in the Royal Academy exhibit of 1860 The Black Brunswicker. Like Laura Alma-Tadema, she too became a painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, encouraged by her husband. Marcus Stone, whose house designed by Richard Norman Shaw adjoined Leighton's in Holland Park, also owed much of his commercial success to Dickens's early patronage, having started his career as an illustrator to Our Mutual Friend.

Alma-Tadema was a notoriously generous host, and it is probably that several members of the Dickens family would have attended the soirées held at his house in Grove End Road during the 1880s and 90s. Although childless herself, Laura Alma-Tadema adored children, and they form the subjects of several of her pictures. Although the sitters in this work have not been identified, the ages of the children correspond to some of those of Sir Henry and Lady Dickens: Enid was born in 1877, Gerald in 1879, Olive in 1881, Elaine in 1883, Philip in 1887, and Cedric in 1889.

The protagonists are dressed in 17th Century costumes in a Dutch interior: (a wall of Delft tiles can be seen to the right). Certain studio props such as a copper footwarmer are also found in other works by Alma-Tadema of this genre.

Perhaps more than any other this picture encapsulates Alice Meynell's comments on the artist in the Art Journal of November 1883, pp. 345-6: 'In the details of domestic life, Dutch habits, Dutch furniture, and Dutch dress of the gentler and more coutrly sort of the 17th Century, Mrs Alma-Tadema has found unconventional, honest, and...homely grace...The artist has surrounded herself by relics and remains of the time and the country she loves,...and thus her pictures seem to be produced within a genuine little Holland, in a genuine 17th Century, without the blunders of ordinary historical research.'

We are grateful to Professor Vern Swanson of the Springville Museum of Art, Utah, and Andrew Xavier of the Dickens House Museum, London, for their help in preparing this catalogue entry.