"Louise Jopling," Sir John
Everett Millais, 1879. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery,
London.
LONDON - The National Portrait Gallery has acquired one of
Millais's greatest portraits with the generous support of the
Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the National Art Collections Fund
(Art Fund).
Louise Jopling (1843-1933) was one of the most important British
women painters of the later Nineteenth Century as well as a
central figure in artistic and literary circles of the period.
Millais's painting of her is widely acknowledged as being among
his greatest portraits; James McNeill Whistler, who also painted
Jopling, called it "a superb portrait" and "a great work."
It was completed in five sittings in the summer of 1879 and was
exhibited to critical acclaim at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880.
In its use of a plain background, this portrait is comparable to
Millais's other female portraits of the same period, such as
those of Lillie Langtry and Kate Perugini. It combines a strong
sense of design with decisive handling and conveys Jopling's
strength and independence as well as her undoubted glamour.
The portrait has been purchased from a private collection for
£430,000 and the acquisition was made possible by a Heritage
Lottery Fund grant of £240,000 and an Art Fund grant of £100,000.
Born Louis Goode, the fifth child of a Manchester railway
contractor, Jopling studied art in Paris in the mid-1860s and
married the watercolorist Joseph Jopling in 1874. She exhibited
portraits and subject paintings at the Paris Salon from 1869, the
Royal Academy from 1871 and the Grosvenor Gallery from its
inception in 1877.
Her autobiography Twenty Years of My Life records her
close friendships with the leading figures in the literary,
theatrical and artistic circles of the time, especially her
fellow painters Whistler and Millais himself. Jopling established
her own art school to train women as professional artists in 1887
and was a supporter of the National Union of Women's Suffrage.
Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) entered the Royal Academy
Schools in 1840 and exhibited his first painting at the RA in
1846 when he was 16. With William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, he was a founder of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and,
as a painter, its most accomplished member. In the later 1850s
Millais broadened his style and became the most admired and
successful portrait painter of the later Victorian period. He
became the first English artist to be made a Baronet and was
elected president of the Royal Academy in 1896, but died a few
month later. Millais's portraiture was the subject of an
exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1999.
For information, www.npg.org.uk.
