my-server
← Wiki

Mrs Charles Freeman (Millais painting)

Mrs Charles Freeman is an 1862 oil painting by the English artist John Everett Millais. It shows a seated older woman in near-profile. She wears a dark dress with a floral design, and lace collars and cuffs. It is signed with Millais' monogram and dedicated 'To Charles Freeman' and dated '1862', in the lower left corner.

The painting

Charles Freeman was an architect and surveyor who helped Millais purchase and then redesign the interior of his new home at Cromwell Place in South Kensington, London in 1861. Millais undertook this portrait of Freeman's wife Caroline in 1862, and presented it to Freeman as a gift.

The painting hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1862, catalogue number 356, along with Millais' The Ransom and Trust Me. A review of the exhibition in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art described the painting:

while The London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, & Society was a little less complimentary:

The painting was bequeathed by Caroline Freeman to her friend and executor Edward Matthey, c. 1880. It was sold on 20 July 1966 by an anonymous vendor at Sotheby's London auction, Lot 359, to D. S. Shaw, for £65. It was again sold on 22 November 1968 by an anonymous vendor at Christie's London auction, Lot 64, to the husband of the 2011 vendor for 95 guineas. It was sold on 16 March 2011 at Christie's "Victorian & British Impressionist Pictures Including Drawings & Watercolours" sale in London, Lot 70, for £10,000 to an anonymous buyer.

An earlier painting by Millais, Wandering Thoughts of c. 1854, was at some point in its history incorrectly identified as Mrs Charles Freeman. It was bought by Manchester City Art Gallery from the Manchester art dealer Charles A. Jackson in 1913 under this title.

See also

References

Further reading

  • M.H. Spielmann, Millais and his Works, with Special Reference to the Exhibition at the Royal Academy 1898, 1898, p. 169, no. 69. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/Jf27WpyoK6MC?hl=en&gbpv=1
  • J.G. Millais, The Life & Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1899, vol. 1, p. 371, vol. 2, p. 471.
  • Mary Bennett, PRB Millais PRA, 1967, exhibition catalogue, p. 47, no. 54 (illustrated).
  • Malcolm Warner, 1985, The Professional Career of John Everett Millais to 1863, with a Catalogue of Works to the Same Date, London: Courtauld Institute, p. 500, no. 608.