Lady Dorothy STANLEY (1855-1926, English)
A Water Lily
signed "D. Stanley" and dated "1924" (bottom right)
oil on canvas
9 1/2 x 11 inches, inc. frame
Price: Sold
Dorothy Tennant was a Victorian neoclassicist British painter and illustrator. She was born in Russel Square in March 1855 in London. Her artistic life began very early, for she was drawing before she could read or write. She studied painting under Edward Poynter and M. Legros at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and with Jean-Jacques Henner in Paris where she spends three winters. In 1890, she married the explorer of Africa, Henry Morton Stanley and became known as Lady Stanley.
Henry Tate bought her work and she was one of the few female artists to be displayed in the New Gallery at its inauguration. She was part of a new breed of women who were embracing the new found freedom of higher university education.
She exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery in London, and at the Paris Salon from 1886 but she also managed to engage with the public in a different way by drawing the ‘little ragamuffins’ she saw on the London streets.
Lady Stanley depicted nymphs and bathers in bucolic settings often in her works. This charmingly named Water Lily is a very elegant example of the subject.