Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M., R.A.

Tadema often gave sketches and watercolours of this type to friends and for charitable causes, sometimes decorating sections of fans which was a fashion in the late nineteenth century. The recipient of this particular drawing was Rose Mahala Colton, née Barker. She was born in 1878 in Hackney, the daughter of Frances and Alice Barker. In 1899 she married the art dealer Charles Colton, brother of the sculptor William Robert Colton. Colton was a member of the Royal Academy and president of the Royal British Society of Sculptors with a distinguished reputation as a sculptor of memorials. He lived close to Tadema in St John's Wood. The informal pose of the present work recalls Her Eyes are with her Thoughts and They Are Far Away of 1897 (private collection). Rose Mahala died in Tunbridge Wells in 1963.