Antique Frederic James Shield, Painting of a Young Girl With a Lantern
£690
Frederic James Shields (British, 1833-1911) showing a young girl with lantern illuminating her way along a rural path
signed and dated ‘F J Shields 1862’.
Watercolour and gouache on paper, presented in a gilt-wood frame
Frederic James Shields (14 March 1833 – 26 February 1911) was a British artist, illustrator, and designer closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites through Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown.
In 1865, he was elected an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society
Working predominantly as a watercolourist and decorator whose artistic career was determined when he saw the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. He later became a close friend of both Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown.
His two most substantial commissions were mural decorations for the Chapel of Eaton Hall, Cheshire for the Dukes of Westminster, and the Chapel of the Ascension, Bayswater Road.
We know that, for all his rather crabbed and prickly personality, Shields did respond intensely to female beauty. In 1874, at the age of forty, he married a very pretty but totally uneducated girl of sixteen, and proceeded, in true Victorian fashion, to try and turn her into a young lady. Indeed he also adopted her younger sister, Jessie. According to Ernestine Mills, his biographer, the early death of this ‘very lovely girl’ was ‘a terrible grief’ to the artist.
Provenance
Sotheby’s, 16 October 1986, lot 240.
