Lot 778: Valentine Cameron Prinsep (British, 1838-1904),

Valentine Cameron Prinsep (British, 1838-1904), "Portrait of a Blonde Boy", oil on canvas laid down on board, signed lower right, two "Brown Heath, Texas" framer's labels en verso of frame, 24 1/8 in. x 20 1/4 in., in a giltwood frame. Provenance: Descended in an Austin, Texas family. Note: Prinsep was born in Calcutta to a socially prominent literary and artistic family; his maternal aunt was the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and his first cousins once removed were Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. He received his education in England where family friends included such luminaries as John Ruskin, William Gladstone, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. The artist George Frederick Watts lived with the Prinsep family for some time, and it is he who encouraged the young man to pursue a career in painting. Prinsep studied in Paris under Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre (Swiss, 1806-1874); his fellow students included James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Edward Poynter. Upon his return to England, Prinsep befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti and soon became associated with the then emerging Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He assisted Rossetti and William Morris in the execution of the murals at the Oxford Union in 1857 and taught at the Working Men's College under the direction of John Ruskin. He later traveled to Rome with Edward Coley Burne-Jones. Prinsep eventually moved away from the stylistic credos espoused by the Brotherhood and, under the influence of his neighbor the Academic artist Frederic Leighton, adopted a more formal approach to painting. Known for his genre and history paintings, Prinsep also produced a small group of highly regarded portraits; his image of Ruskin is in the permanent collection of the Ashmoleon Museum. In those portraits, as in the example here, Prinsep strove to not only accurately recreate the features of the sitter, but also to create an atmosphere hinting at the feelings and emotions of the sitter. Prinsep exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, where he was elected an Associate in 1878 and named a full Academician in 1894 Reference: Bénézit. Dictionnaire des Peintres, Librairie Grund, 1976, vol. VIII, p. 496 Obituary. Magazine of Art. Vol. VI, 1883 "Passing Notes". Art Journal. 1905 pp. 33, 34.