Detail from The Canal, Amsterdam, 1889, James McNeill Whistler, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

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Head of Mrs Beaumont

Titles

Suggested titles are:

  • 'Head of Mr. [sic] Beaumont, friend of Sickert and Whistler' (1924, Christie's). 1
  • 'Head of Mrs. Beaumont' (1928, Christie's). 2
  • 'Mrs. Beaumont' (1929, Platt Hall). 3
  • 'Head of Mrs Beaumont' (1980, YMSM). 4

'Head of Mrs Beaumont' is the preferred form of the title.

Description


                    Head of Mrs Beaumont, Charles and Emma Frye Art Museum
Head of Mrs Beaumont, Charles and Emma Frye Art Museum

A head and shoulders portrait of a young woman with short dark curly hair, facing the viewer. She is wearing a brown dress with a red collar or scarf, and a brown jacket with narrow off-white reveres. The canvas is in vertical format.

Sitter

Winifred Beaumont (1875-1958), née Winifred Alice Elliot, daughter of Frederick Augustus Hugh Elliot and Constance Alice Impey, was born in Bombay on 24 March 1875. She died on 25 July 1958.

She registered as a full-time student at the Slade School of Art on 24 March 1892 at the age of seventeen. She studied there for three years, and obtained two certificates for figure drawing.

She was married in 1894 and went to live at l0 Westbourne Gardens, London. Her husband, James Arthur Beaumont, M.A., of St John's College, Cambridge, was curate of St Paul's, South Hampstead, 1892-1895, of St Paul's, Paddington, 1895-1899, and of St John's, Wood Road, from 1900. He died in 1920.

Mrs Beaumont later became a dressmaker. She married, secondly, John Godolphin Bennett, a Captain in the Royal Engineers, in May 1925.

Notes:

1: Christie's, London, 28 July 1924 (lot 79).

2: Christie's, London, 6 July 1928 (lot 117).

3: The Hugh Blaker Collection of Modern paintings and Drawings, Platt Hall, Rusholme, 1929 (cat. no. 36).

4: YMSM 1980 [more] (cat. no. 430).

Last updated: 29th May 2021 by Margaret