Elisabeth Sonrel

Elisabeth Sonrel was a painter of portraits, romantic figurative subjects, landscapes and rural subjects. Sonrel’s early paintings, whether in oil or watercolour, almost always represent scenes from literature or the theatre, and usually show beautiful young women. It seems that the painter had the opportunity to study Renaissance art in the course of a journey to Italy, and that she particularly admired – and sought to emulate in her own work – the paintings of Botticelli. During this period she took subjects from Arthurian legend and Dante (the present painting showing Dante’s first sight of Beatrice as he passed her when walking in the streets of Florence is undoubtedly the product of this first phase in the artist’s career). 

Whether Sonrel was also familiar with the work of the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, particularly that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is uncertain. Her early paintings are analogous to the works that British painters such as Henry Holiday and Edmund Blair Leighton painted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in emulation of Pre-Raphaelite works of the 1850s. Sonrel may have been led to English Pre-Raphaelitism by the enthusiasm that French symbolist painters had for the works of Rossetti and Burne-Jones in the 1890s and in the first decade of the twentieth century.