Portrait of Jane Fortescue Seymour, Mrs Coleridge, by Sir William Boxall, RA, FRS 1800-1879

Portrait of Jane Fortescue Seymour, Mrs Coleridge

Sir William Boxall, RA, FRS 1800-1879

Oil on panel

Exhibited at the Royal Academy 1855 (no. 76)

24 x 28 inches

The Maas Gallery, London has most generously given its permission to use in the Victorian Web information, images, and text from its catalogues. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Maas Gallery.

Readers should consult the gallery website to obtain information about recent exhibitions and to order their catalogues. [GPL]

Commentary by Rupert Maas

Boxall was a close friend of Sir John Taylor Coleridge, the husband of the of whose ancestors was the poet, Samuel. Jane was a talented artist, and here with a sketchbook open on her lap, her head turned alertly aw observing a subject for her pen.

Exhibited ai the Royal Academy in 1855, John Ruskin criticised the pie "excess of delicacy and tenderness" — the picture stood as the very antithesis of his creed of 'truth to nature', and he continued at considerable length: "the faces he paints are still little more than shadows — the reflection of the truth in a cloudy mirror," and "Mr Boxall will never satisfy himself, nor do his real talents he is content to paint, unaffectedly, as far as he is able, things as they are" Academmy Notes, 1855).

But the reviewer of the Art Journal that year thought the head "a charming study sweet to a degree in colour and expression" (p. 171). It was also included in Division of paintings in the International Exhibition of 1862, that constuted 800 pictures from 100 years back, starting with Hogarth, with Boxall one of the moderns.

References

The Maas Gallery. Exhibition catalogue. London, 2007. Catalogue no. 17.

Last modified 24 June 2007