"Red Rose and White," by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1829-1904)

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Red Rose and White

Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys

1867

Black and red chalk on white wove paper

15 7/8 × 13 3/16 in. (40.3 × 33.5 cm)

Titled, initialed, and dated across top: Red Rose and White S 1867. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Lent by the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College (object no. 1973.68). Purchased Charles F. Olney Fund

Provenance: Mrs. L. G. Blackwell; Christie's, 1940; Sinclair, Leger Gallery; Christie's, 1969; Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1973.

Exhibited: Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts (Providence, 1985), no. 55. [See below for commentary.]

Catalogue Entry by Lisa Norris

Throughout his career Frederick Sandys frequently depicted single women in three-quarter length in oils, pastels, and drawings. Red Rose and White, one of these works, is one of a series for which the artist's commonlaw wife, Mary, probably sat. It clearly reveals Sandys's close association with Rossetti, from whose works dearly derive the woman's languorous pose, lush flesh, and masses of thick, waving hair. The two met in 1857 when Sandys published A Nightmare, a caricature of Millais's Sir Isumbras at the Ford in which he transformed the characters' features into those of the Pre-Raphaelites and the donkey into Ruskin. The two men became friends, and in fact Sandys lived with Rossetti in 1867, the year Sandys produced this drawing. After their friendship cooled, Rossetti accused Sandys of plagiarizing his art. Sandys's works of this kind typify the later Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with images of women who appear either as ideal visions or as femmes fatales.

From an early age Sandys showed talent as a draftsman. The son of a minor painter, he first studied with his father and then at the newly founded Government School of Design in Norwich. Suitably enough, the first work he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851 was a crayon portrait. Although he worked in oils, he was more successful in his drawings and skillful illustrations for periodicals and poetry, and his peers admired him for his outstanding abilities in these media. Red Rose reveals his talent in its delicate modulations of light and shadow and the subtle interweaving of red chalk lines, which give warmth to her face and contribute to its sensuous appearance.

Despite his acclaim as a draftsman, Sandys himself seems to have been dissatisfied with his work, and in this self-depreciation he echoes Hunt. When drawing his son Hugh, for example, he wrote that "the whole of the work ... is absolutely and damnably wrong and bad — how I could possibly have laboured and worked and have ended in such a catastrophe I do not know. Why is it I am so little a judge — and so unable to produce that which I know and desire?" (qtd. in Crane 16). Apparently he often despaired over his work, finding it inferior to his aspirations, yet like Hunt he persevered. The results, as seen in a work like Red Rose and White, show no mean achievement.

Caption material and text added by George P. Landow, with new image supplied by Dennis T. Lanigan. [Mouse over the text for links.]

Bibliography

Crane, Anthony. Frederick Sandys: 1829-1904. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 1974.

Red Rose and White. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Web. 17 August 2025.

Created 28 May 2007

Last modified (new image added) 17 August 2025