Sir James Jebusa Shannon, R.A., R.B.A., R.H.A.

The artist’s estate and thence to his daughter Kitty Keigwin and her husband Walter Skarrat Keigwin and thence by descent to their daughter Julia

London, Leicester Galleries, Paintings by the Late James J. Shannon, R.A., 1923, no.28;
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1923, no.295;
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1928, no.970

STRUCTURE Original canvas. There are two minor spots of paint loss, one by the upper right corner and the other by the lower left corner. There are some areas of craquelure to her shawl and near the wine glass; otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT UV light reveals small localised areas of retouching around the sitter's head and another small area in the lower right corner. FRAME Held in a gilt plaster frame under glass; unexamined out of frame.
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‘Among all our younger artists there is scarcely one whose mastery over materials and grasp of executive difficulties can be said to equal his. He paints with astonishing ease and certainty, with the most straightforward recognition of what is necessary in the way of brushwork to express the subject on which he may be engaged; and he uses the devices of a painters practice with a distinctively rare appreciation of the exact value of each one, and with an extremely intelligent judgement of the manner in which they aid him to realise his aesthetic intention. He is, in fact, a manipulator with exceptional sense of technical fitness, a worker whose technical skill carries him far indeed in the direction of success, and gives him pictorial results of a quite memorable kind.’ (Alfred Lys Baldry,’J.J. SHANNON, PAINTER’, in The Magazine of Art, November 1896, p1)

Like many successful artists of the early twentieth century, Shannon recognised the importance of his home reflecting his taste and elegance. The houses that he and his wife decorated, firstly at 3 Holland Park Road and from 1909 at number 10, were beautiful, spacious and comfortable with an elegant combination of modern and antique styles. They owned a particularly fine collection of European and Chinese porcelain and many of his paintings include items from his own home. The present picture takes it's title from an eighteenth century Sevres plate which had originally been unpainted but was decorated in the nineteenth century when the bronze stand of two putti holding vines was added to create a fruit compote (private collection). The elegance is emphasised by the model's hairstyle which has exposed her beautiful long neck, and her shawl which appears to be one of the hand-painted Spanish mantilla's that were highly fashionable at this time.

It is difficult to date The Sevres Vase as it is not among the pictures exhibited during his lifetime at the Royal Academy (it appeared in two posthumous exhibitions in 1923 but was clearly painted much earlier). Stylistically it appears to date from around 1910, in the period that he painted works such as Black and Silver of 1910 (Royal Academy of Art Diploma Collection) in which he also exploited the dramatic possibilities of a limited colour scheme. Black and Silver depicted his daughter Kitty, like many of Shannon's pictures of this type, and it is likely that The Sevres Vase also depicts her.

Although Shannon did not train in Paris, his paintings demonstrate a marked influence by the Impressionists, particularly the work of Manet, who had a penchant for the colour black. Shannon's work also often approaches the elegance of John Singer Sargent's portraits. As his friend Walford Graham Robertson (who had been painted by Sargent) wrote, Shannon became: ‘Sargent’s most formidable rival among portrait painters’ (W. Graham Robertson, Time Was, 1931, p.234)

In the early twentieth century Shannon enjoyed several decades as one of the most fashionable portrait painters and although he was confined to a wheelchair for the last years of his life following a riding accident, his art lost now power of expression. He painted sitters of the highest ranks in society, including Princess Patricia of Connaught, the Marchioness of Salisbury, Lady Tennant, the Countess of Ilchester and several portraits of Violet, Ducchess of Rutland. As Lewis Hind wrote, Shannon combined a perceptive ability to capture the charachter of a sitter along with their physical elegance and beauty: ‘The fleeting suggestion of a beautiful soul shining forth from the eyes of a beautiful body, or that still more fugitive and rarer air of Distinction, seldom elude him.’ (Lewis Hind, ‘The Work of J.J. Shannon’ in Studio, 1896, p67) This is never more apparent than his paintings of his pretty daughter Kitty of which The Sevres Vase is arguably the most beautiful.