Signed and dated
FMB (in monogram) 68.

Collection Details
Painted for F R Leyland; his sale, Christie’s, 28 May 1892, lot 32: bt by Agnew for Alexander Henderson, later 1st Lord Faringdon; included in his sale, Sotheby’s, 13 June 1934, lot 98, when it was bought by Lord Faringdon.

Literature
F M Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, 1896, pp. 232, 441.

Exhibition Details
Glasgow, 1901, No. 250; Manchester Art Gallery, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites, 1911, No. 79.

Background
Hueffer (op cit, p. 221)describes a watercolour, begun in February 1866 and finished in 1869, as the original of the composition (bought from the artist by James Leathart). It was exhibited at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, Paintings from the Leathart Collection, 1968, No. 22. A pen and ink drawing of 1867 for Leighton’s Lyra Germanica is now in the Birmingham City Art Gallery (27’16). Another drawing appears to have existed, for in a letter to Shields, of 3 March 1871, Brown writes that he has despatched it to Craven (a patron) and that ‘in the opinion of such as have seen it, [it] is the finest piece of colour I have yet produced’. The two existing drawings differ from the present painting in being of oblong format and they include a mother and child kneeling at the right.

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Copyright © The Trustees of the Faringdon Collection 1999. All rights reserved.