Miss Aimée de Burgh (Mrs Quartermaine) by Edward Arthur Walton RSA PRSW (1860

Miss Aimée de Burgh (Mrs Quartermaine)

Edward Arthur Walton RSA PRSW (1860–1922)

Oil on canvas

40 x 24 inches; 101.7 x 61 cm.

Signed

Exhibited: Glasgow, Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1904, no.7 (as Mrs Quartermaine)

Private collection

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Commentary by Kenneth McConkey

With the expansion of portraiture in the eighteenth century, actors, musicians and literati became part of a new aristocracy based on wealth and celebrity. In Walton’s day, the internationally fêted Sarah Bernhardt would charge portraitists by the hour – recognizing that her face might help to make a young artist’s career. Even with this proviso, Bastien-Lepage’s portrait of the great tragedienne, an aesthetic delight in pearl greys and pinks, was only achieved amidst tantrums, evasions and unkept promises. No such subterfuge is likely to have featured in Walton’s sittings with a young actress who was yet to make her London debut. [Continued below]

Aimée de Burgh (d.1946) first appeared on the London stage in 1900, two years after her portrait was painted. Her many roles included that of an artist’s model in The Light that Failed, a play adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same name, which ran at the Lyric Theatre in 1903. She married the actor, Leon Quartermaine, who starred as Lord Monteith in Proud Maisie, based on Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, which was staged two years before. The marriage ended in divorce when Quartermaine took up with Fay Compton..

At a time when Sargent’s pyrotechnics dominated portraiture at the Royal Academy, James L. Caw declared that Walton’s portraits were ‘pervaded by a certain “shy” beauty’. Writing in 1902, he recalled ‘with pleasure’, the portrait of ‘Miss Aimée de Bourgh’, (sic) as, ‘… an exquisite exercise in white and ivory tones, associated with a pretty face and a graceful pose’ (Caw 167). Here was a painter who eschewed flashy brushwork in favour of Whistlerian decorum. While Walton responded to contemporary fashions that aped the eighteenth century in hats and hairstyles, subtle and sympathetic observation of personality characterize his treatment of Miss de Burgh.

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References

Caw, James L. ‘A Scottish Painter: E.A.Walton arsa’. The Studio 16 (August 1902): 167, 169 (illus.).

MacSporran, Fiona. Edward Arthur Walton. n.d. Foulis Archive Press), p.69 (illus. p.71 as Mrs Quartermaine, unlocated)

McConkey, Kenneth. Lavery and the Glasgow Boys. Exhibition Catalogue. Clandeboye, County Down: The Ava Gallery; Edinburgh: Bourne Fine Art; London: The Fine Art Society, 2010. No. 22.

Last modified 5 October 2011