"Study for Adeline" by William Maw Egley (1826

Study for Adeline, by William Maw Egley (1826–1916). Pencil on paper. 10 x 5 3/4 inches (25.2 x 14.4 cm). Collection of the British Museum, registration no. 1968,1214.2. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Image courtesy of the British Museum under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

This drawing is an illustration to the poem "Adeline" (see below) by Alfred Tennyson first published in 1830. It shows a beautiful fair-haired young woman standing in front of a doorway. Her left hand is raised to her chin as she looks straight ahead of her. The background to the left is a room featuring a Renaissance revival "Savonarola" armchair. In the right foreground are flowering plants with a brick wall in the right background. In the finished oil painting Egley added a blue ceramic jardinière to the left foreground to better balance the composition.

The painting for which this was a study sold at Bellman Auctioneers in Billinghurst on April 20, 2016, lot 1627.

Faintly smiling Adeline,
Scarce of earth nor all divine,

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But beyond expression fair
With thy floating flaxen hair;
Thy rose-lips and full blue eyes

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Whence that aery bloom of thine,
Like a lily which the sun
Looks thro' in his sad decline,
And a rose-bush leans upon,

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