GEORGE FREDERIC WATTS, O.M., R.A. 1817-1904

Alexander Constantine Ionides; his daughter;
Aglaia Ionides, later Mrs Coronio (1925); by family descent

Mary Watts, ‘MS Catalogue of [the] Works [of George Frederic Watts] compiled by his widow’, n.d., III, p. 74;
B.S. Long, Catalogue of the Constantine Alexander Ionides Collection [at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London], 1925, p. 65;
Luke Ionides, Memories, 1925 (reprinted 1996), p. 56;
Mark Evans, ‘Blake, Calvert – and Palmer? The album of Alexander Constantine Ionides’, Burlington Magazine, CXLIV, September 2002, pp. 539-549;
Veronica Franklin Gould, G.F. Watts – The Last Great Victorian, 2004, p. 8, fig.7 (where reproduced from an early photograph by Frederic Hollyer)

Alexander Constantine Ionides, who commissioned this magnificent group portrait of himself and his family from the still youthful and little known George Frederic Watts, represented the second generation of an Anglo-Greek family who had established as traders in textiles in London early in the century. By the early 1840s, when the painting was made, the Ionides family were well advanced in building the great family fortune which was to allow them to become among the most remarkable of all Victorian patrons of art. The decision to ask Watts to paint the family followed the birth of Alexander Constantine and Euterpe’s fourth child Alecco in 1840, but was perhaps also prompted by their move from 9 Finsbury Circus in the city of London, where they had lived close to the Ionides business premises in Gracechurch Street, to a beautiful and richly furnished house at Tulse Hill near Dulwich. That Watts planned the present composition at the Ionides’ new house, is established because the preparatory sketch (which exists as part of the Ionides Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum) bears an attached label which states that it was ‘painted at Tulse Hill / of Alexander Constantine Ionides / his wife & children by me / G.F. Watts’. This mansion no longer stands, and accounts of its style of decoration and contents are sparse. Nonetheless, the present family portrait by Watts must have been one of its principal ornaments.

The painting shows Alexander Constantine and Euterpe, with their four eldest children – Constantine Alexander (born 1833), Aglaia (born 1834), Luke Alexander (born 1837), and Alexander Alexander (known as Alecco, and who was born in 1840). Aglaia, who was eventually to inherit the painting after her father’s death in 1890, is shown as the child who puts her arms around her mother’s neck. Alecco, perhaps a year old when the painting was made, sits on his mother’s lap. The two boys on the right of the composition are Constantine Alexander and Luke Alexander, the latter seated and offering an apple to his brother. These two figures wear Greek national dress, a motif clearly introduced to demonstrate the pride that the family took in their Greek ancestry and their deliberate identification with all things Hellenic (the costume worn by Constantine Alexander survives in the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh). Three years after Watts had painted the present family portrait Alexander Constantine and Euterpe’s last child, a daughter named Chariclea (1844-1923), was born.

The relationship between Alexander Constantine Ionides and George Frederic Watts had commenced when the latter had been asked to make a copy of a portrait by Samuel Lane of Constantine Ipliktzis (Alexander Constantine’s father; see below), a work which appeared at the 1837 Royal Academy. The copy was to be shipped to Constantinople to be hung in the family’s business premises there. As Alexander Constantine affectionately recalled in a letter to Watts: ‘I recollect as if it was yesterday my visit with Mr E. Riley to see a po