William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)
Rocks at Wady Zuara, the Dead Sea
£3,200
Euphrosyne Cassavetti, 1896
Constantine Alexander Ionides, 1896-1900
Christie's, 24 November 1998, lot 167
Private Collection, London
Burlington Fine Arts Club, 'Drawings and Studies by Edward Burne-Jones', 1899, no 24 as 'Portrait Study'
Burne-Jones Catalogue Raisonné
Burlington Fine Arts Club, Drawings and Studies by Edward Burne-Jones, 1899, no 24 as 'Portrait Study', p 8
Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, Faber & Faber, 2011, p 202
Until its re-emergence on the London market in 1998 this handsome life-size drawing had not been seen in public since it was exhibited at the memorial show of Burne-Jones’s drawings mounted by the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1899. Entitled Portrait Study and dated about 1868-9, the sitter was the cultured, dynamic and slightly eccentric Euphrosyne Cassavetti. A woman of strong personality, nicknamed ‘the Duchess’, Madame Cassavetti commissioned several pictures from Burne-Jones. She was the mother of Maria Zambaco, the talented sculptress and ravishing beauty with whom Burne-Jones conducted a tempestuous affair in the late 1860s. Our drawing was owned by Euphrosyne’s nephew, Constantine Alexander Ionides, the great patron of the English Aesthetic Movement, whose collection of over a thousand pictures was left to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
