Lot 112: MARIE SPARTALI STILLMAN
19th Century European Art including Sporting Paintings
April 25, 2006
New York, NY, USA
PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
SELF PORTRAIT IN MEDIEVAL DRESS
25 by 20 in.
63.5 by 50.8 cm
signed Marie Spartali Stillman/ de Ipsa fecit and dated London 1874 (upper right)
gouache and pastel with gum arabic on paper
Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York
David B. Elliott, A Pre-Raphaelite Marriage: The Lives and Works of Marie Spartali Stillman and William James Stillman, London, 2006, p. 232, illustrated as the frontispiece and on pg. 91
Marie Spartali Stillman, daughter of Michael Spartali, a wealthy merchant and Greek Consul-General in London, was introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite circle through another prominent Greek family, the Ionides, known for their patronage of the arts. Immediately upon her debut at a garden party in the early 1860s, Stillman stunned the artists in attendance with her great beauty. The painter Thomas Armstrong recalled that "we were all à genoux before her", while Algernon Charles Swinburne noted she was "so beautiful that I want to sit down and cry" (as quoted in Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer, New York, 1998, p. 268). In the months and years to follow, Marie posed for Edward Burne-Jones, James Abbott MacNeill Whistler, and was photographed repeatedly by Julia Margaret Cameron (Fig. 1). Yet as Dante Gabriel Rossetti explained, Marie's outstanding, unique beauty was not easy to capture, as he found her head "about the most difficult I ever drew. It depends so much on real form as on a subtle charm of life which one can recreate" (as quoted in Wildman and Christian, p. 269). With this contemporary remark on the confounding quality of her beauty, it is particularly interesting to turn to the present work of a serenely, seemingly self-possessed young woman, a self-portrait.