Portrait of Julia Smith Caldwell. 1889. Oil on canvas. 44 x 19 ½ inches (112 x 75 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Sotheby's. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Betty Elzea has described this portrait in this way:
Three-quarter-length of a young woman, dressed in a white silk crêpe ball gown with a cross-over bodice and ruched sleeves, with a prominent bustle. She faces half to left. Her reddish-gold hair is dressed with a bun at the back and a rolled fringe at the front. A yellow rose is pinned at her breast, and she wears one long white kid glove on her right hand, which holds its pair and a folded mother-of-pearl fan. Her left hand is buttoning the glove on her right hand as if she is preparing to go to a ball. She is seen in an interior. To her side (on the left of the picture) is a rose bush with new growth. Behind her (filling most of the background) are flowering, evergreen shrubs, one a myrtle. Behind the shrubs, on the left, there is a dark gold drapery, or perhaps a folding screen, embroidered in gold with flying cranes, beyond which, to the right, can be seen a landscape of parkland, trees, woods, and distant low hills. [276]
The sitter was Julia Smith Caldwell (1873-1933), the sixteen-year-old daughter of Josiah Caldwell and his wife Anita Smith Caldwell, both of whom Sandys had previously made portraits of in coloured chalks. The family was wealthy and from Stamford, Connecticut but were living in England at the time. A preliminary drawing was made in coloured chalks for Julia's portrait as well. Julia proved to be a reluctant sitter with Sandys writing in his diary on 18 July 1889: "My sitter takes no interest in the work on the contrary [is] horribly bored by it" (qtd. in Elzea 276). Not uncommonly for a sixteen-year-old girl she presumably preferred other pastimes that were more congenial to a girl of her age. Sandys was therefore unable to get more than three hours a day of sittings from her.
Family legend has this portrait being painted at Easton Lodge, Essex, the ancestral estate of the Countess of Warwick. Documentary evidence from Sandys's diary and letters suggests it was actually painted at Forest Hall, the Caldwells' home at Ongar in Essex, where he had made his preliminary drawing of Julia, and at one of the Carlyle Studios on Kings Road, Chelsea, in London. The Caldwells had moved to England, living there in the 1880s and 1890s, in order to introduce Julia to aristocratic society. Julia eventually married Loftus Joseph Wigram Arkwright (1866-1950) of Parndon Hall, Parndon, Essex, on 6 June 1894. The couple had at least three sons. The marriage proved not to be successful, however, and they were later divorced in 1917.
Bibliography
Elzea, Betty. Frederick Sandys 1829-1904. A Catalogue Raisonné. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Antique Collectors' Club Ltd., 2001, cat. 4.66, 276-77.
Fine Victorian Pictures, Drawings and Watercolours. London: Christie's (6 June 1997): lot 40, 38-39.
Victorian Pictures. London: Sotheby's (12 November 1992): lot 152m, 100-01.
Created 21 July 2025