Lady Dalrymple by George Frederic Watts RA (1817-1904). c.1851–1853 Oil on canvas. H 198 x W 78.7 cm. Accession no. COMWG 200, bequeathed by Sir Weldon Dalrymple-Champneys, 1981. Collection of Watts Gallery Trust. Reproduced here from images accompanying the press release for Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters exhibition at the Watts' Gallery, Compton (27 November 2025 - 4 May 2026). Caption material from Art UK; commentary and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
As the youngest of the Pattle sisters at Little Holland House, Sophia Dalrymple (née Pattle) was born in Chandernagar in West Bengal, and educated in Versailles before marrying John Warrender Dalrymple of the Bengal Civil Service, and coming to stay with her sister Sara in Kensington while her husband was on postings. It was here that her daughter Virginia was born in 1850. She might have been expecting her next child when Watts painted this portrait, although, says Stacey Clapperton, "this type of free-flowing and unfussy dress was characteristic of the Pattle sisters’ style, as evident in the double portrait of Sara and Sophia" — at any rate, Clapperton continues, it would have appealed to Watts, and it certainly gives his subject here something of "the character of a Greek sculpture."
Sophia was, in fact, at the very heart of the Little Holland House coterie, and evidently much admired — perhaps especially by Edward Burne-Jones, who put together an album of drawings and poems, including some by Rossetti, for her: "he depicts himself in the frontispiece, the courtly lover-musician marked out by the word ‘AMOR.’ He signs letters to his ‘Dearest Auntie’ [he was several years younger]in terms of hopeless passion such as ‘Your abjectly devoted dog Ned’" (MacCarthy 90).
Related Material
Bibliography
Clapperton, Stacey. "Object in Focus: Lady Dalrymple." (1 February 2022). Web. 13 December 2025. Watts Gallery Artists' Village. Web. 13 December 2025. https://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/blog/object-in-focus-lady-dalrymple
Lady Dalrymple, G.F. Watts. Art UK. Web. 13 December 2025.
MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Created 13 December 2025