Alice Mary Havers

London, Royal Academy, 1881, no. 379

Art Journal, 1881, p. 215;
Academy Notes, 1881, iilus. p. 44

STRUCTURE This painting is relined and in excellent condition with strong colours and fine detail throughout. There are areas of very fine craquelure on the table-cloth but this is only visible upon close inspection. The picture is clean and ready to hang. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There are cosmetic retouchings to the table-cloth and possibly very minor retouchings to the pink cheeks of the three principal figures although this may be reflection from the original pigment. FRAME This picture is contained in a Victorian-style moulded plaster gilt frame in good condition.
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The scene is set in a clearing in a forest of birches, where a springtime picnic is being laid out on the grass amid the wild narcissi. Three small children are making themselves comfortable and eating strawberries and oranges whilst the adult guests approach in a merry procession through the trees behind. Bottles of champagne have been placed in the shade of the trees and a pretty young woman is delving for the last of the bottles in one of the wicker hampers. The champagne demonstrates that this is a sophisticated, perhaps even aristocratic, picnic and a mouth-watering boiled lobster is one of the choice items of food that has already been laid out for the guests. 

The eighteenth century costumes of the figures demonstrate the fashion in the late nineteenth century for the style of dress found in the portraits of Gainborough and Reynolds. William Powell Frith and Valentine Cameron Prinsep occassionally adopted this style, whilst William Quiller Orchardson made it a speciality. The style is exemplified in the paintings of artists such as George Dunlop Leslie whose Hen and Chickens and Marcus Stone whose Recency romance Married for Love were exhibited at the Royal Academy with The First Arrivals. In the work of artists such as Edmund Blair Leighton and Stone, the eighteenth-century revival was extended a little into the Regency period and the Queen Anne style of furniture and architecture became the latest fashion, especially for the artist's houses of Kensington and the newly built suburb of Bedford Park, where Blair Leighton had a house. The book illustrators Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway adopted the style with their watercolour drawings of children in frilled Empire-style dresses and bonnets. The great exponent of the eighteenth century revival was John Everett Millais, whose famous Cherry Ripe (sold in these rooms, 1 July 2004, lot 21) was exhibited in 1879. Cherry Ripe, depicting a little girl dressed in a costume based on a Renolds' precedent, was a phenominal success and prints of the painting sold in the many thousands. Thus other artists, such as Havers, adopted the formula in their own paintings. Another painting by Millais that bears comparison with the present picture is Afternoon Tea also known as The Gossips (private collection) which was painted eight years after Havers picture. 

Alice Mary Havers was born in Norfolk in 1850 and studied at the South Kensington School of Art where she excelled. In 1870 she married the painter Frederick Morgan. She began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1872, with a picture entitled A Knotty Subject, and exhibited prolifically, specialising in subjects of rural childhood. It is likely that the children depicted in First Arrivals are Alice and Fred's own son and daughters, it is known that they had three children. Tragically Alice died aged only forty in 1890, leaving Morgan a thirty-six year old widower with three small children (he married again later that year).