Sir Frank Dicksee, P.R.A.

Donated by the artist to the Ypres Nun's Reparation Fund (sale: Christie's, London, 27 November 1922, lot 117, purchased by 'Burdett')
Probably Abbott & Holder, London
Private collection

Simon Toll, Frank Dicksee 1853-1928 - His Art and Life, 2016, Woodbridge, p. 236, FD.1909.2.C.

The Silent Prayer is one of two studies for The Shadowed Face (Sotheby's, New York, 1 November 1995, lot 205) exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1909. The other sketch (British Museum) varies in the position of the novice's hands on the feet of the carved wooden figure of Christ. As the art critic Alice Corkran wrote at the time of the painting's exhibition; 'I have often wondered at the use Dicksee makes of hands; they are full of expression, as are his faces. The nun touches those lacerated feet with an infinite compassion. On her face is such abandonment of love, of grief, of understanding, that I felt all girlhood's soul was expressed.' (Alice Corkran, 'The Romance of Girl Life in the Royal Academy', in The Girl's Realm, 1909, p. 611).

In 1922 Dicksee donated The Silent Prayer to be sold to raise money for the repatriation of the displaced Benedictines nuns of Ypres, who had been forced to leave their monastery for the first time in two-hundred-and-fifty years, during the Flemish city’s bombardment by advancing German forces in 1914.