Lot 198: LINDSAY, Sir COUTTS (1824-1913, painter in oils and watercolours, founder of the Grosvenor Gallery)

PORTRAIT BY JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (1815-1879),
photograph, albumen print, head and shoulders, in a cape, inscribed on the mount in an unidentified hand 'From Life Julia Margaret Cameron', slight surface abrasions and with marks that are part of the collodion process, 10 x 8 in (25.4 x 20.3 cm).

REFERENCE: The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, 1996, edited by Susan Casteras and Colleen Denney.

Whistler called Coutts Lindsay 'the handsomest man in London'. For Julia Margaret Cameron see under Darwin in this catalogue.

This portrait is no. 707 in The Complete Photographs, 2003, edited by Julian Cox and Colin Ford. It was taken in 1865 on the lawn of Little Holland House, the home of Mrs Cameron's sister Sara Prinsep who gave G.F. Watts a home there for thirty years.

Sir Coutts and his wife Blanche (1844-1912), both amateur artists, started the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 to serve as an alternative to the Royal Academy and as a challenge to the latter's pole position as the arbiter of art. Blanche was especially keen on promoting 'lady painters.' Although the Gallery only existed for thirteen years, it became a major force in the art market, closely associated with the Aesthetic and Symbolist Movements and influential in the evolution of modern-day museum practice. As the location for the celebrated 'paintpot in the face of the public' jibe by Ruskin about Whistler's paintings, it was central to the issue of 'art for art's sake' as against moral content.