George Henry, R.A., R.S.A., R.S.W. 1858-1943

STRUCTURE This picture is relined and in very good condition with clear colouring throughout. Upon close inspection there are visible stretcher bar marks. Some years ago the canvas was unfolded and upon close inspection the stretcherbars have left indentations in the paint surface. The picture is clean and ready to hang with rich texture. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There are retouchings around the edges ofv the picture where the canvas has been opened out to be enlarged. FRAME Contained in moulded plaster frame. SPECIAL NOTE If you would like a more comprehensive condition report for his picture, please refer to the department.
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The Milliner's Window was presumably painted c.1894 when Henry painted The Fruitier (FIG 1. private collection) a smaller painting depicting a similar sbject of two fashionably dressed young girls passing a grocer's shop window. The Fruitier was exhibited at the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Art in 1895 and again in 1978 long after the artist's death, but an exhibition history for the present picture has not been established and the picture may therefore have been a direct commission.

The present picture was painted at a turning point in Henry's carrier when he moved from the rustic subjects of peasants and field-workers painted at Cockburnspath, typified by works such as Playmates of 1884 (private collection) and Noon of 1885 (private collection), to paintings of more elegant and metropolitan subjects of women dressed in fashionable clothing and millinery. The mid 1890s were also important in Henry's career as it was in 1894 that he and Edward Atkinson Hornel went to Japan and began a series of pictures of beautiful geishas, much inspired by the flat perspectives of Japanese wood-block prints. The Milliner's Window and The Fruitier were presumably painted before the visit to Japan and it is interesting that the latter picture was exhibited in Glasgow with the first of Henry's depictions of a geisha (private collection) in which the artistic formalities are very different. In the pictures inspired by Japan the square brush technique had given way to a cleaner and more defined use of tones and colour and the lines were more simple.

The Milliner's Window may have been influenced by Degas' series of pictures of milliners shops in Paris and the painting certainly has a much more continental feeling than most of Henry's paintings. The Milliner's window was probably on one of the fashionable streets of Glasgow and Henry depicts the refined young lady pausing momentarily to gaze through the window at the hats displayed through the shop window. Henry's friend James Guthrie had painted many pictures of elegantly dressed women in the latest fashions and Henry himself was to find a lucrative career as a society portrait painter who was able to make his female sitters appear very glamorous in their portraits. The painting captures and age of flamboyant style and consumerism and Henry has delighted in the rendering of the velvet and chiffon of the woman's outfit and the broken glimpses of the hats within the shop.