Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys

The subject and title of the oil painting Miranda (private collection, illustrated on the dust-jacket of Betty Elzea’s catalogue raisonné of Sandys’ work) was not known until this drawing re-surfaced in 1984 after being lost for many years. It identified both the drawing and the painting as depicting the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Tempest but essentially they are portraits of Sandys’ muse and lover Mary Emma Jones. 

Mary Emma Jones was born in 1845 in Hull, daughter of a customs inspector at the docks. She first modelled for Sandys in 1862 when he was living in Norwich - she was probably visiting Norfolk as part of a travelling company of performers - but she disappeared from his pictures until 1866. By this time she had moved to London with her sisters who also made their living as models and actresses. She became Sandys' regular model and his lover with whom she had twelve children between 1867 and 1886 (ten survived infancy). At this time Mary Emma was known in artistic circles as 'Sandys' little girl' or as ‘Mrs. Neville’ a pseudonym extended to Sandys who called himself ‘Mr. Neville’ to assume a level of respectability in their relationship - he was estranged from his wife and his former muse and mistress Keomi Gray with whom he also had several children. Mary Emma also used the stage-name 'Miss Clive' and enjoyed some success on the stage in the 1870s but ultimately her career was deemed a failure. She appeared in many of Sandys' greatest paintings, drawings and illustrations and was immortalised by the poet Gordon Bottomley in his memorial poem written after her death in 1920; 'Now she is deathless by her lover's hand, To move our hearts and those of men not born, With famous ladies by her living hair - Helen and Rosamund and Mary Sandys.'

This drawing is among Sandys' earliest depictions of Mary Emma from their period of budding intimacy, made circa 1867 or 1868 at a time when Sandys was living with Rossetti and their work developed with parallel objectives. Sandys' depictions of Mary Emma contribute greatly to the emerging Pre-Raphaelite fashion in the 1860s for voluptuous red-haired 'Stunners' - Rossetti's word for beautiful models. The majority of Sandys' contemporary studies of Mary depict her as personifications of love or characters from well-known romantic stories. The three versions of Love's Shadow and the twelve versions of Proud Masie have strong sexual symbolism whilst Helen of Troy (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Danae (Bradford Art Gallery) are remarkably erotic depictions for the era. Miranda, like Perdita painted a year earlier in 1866 (Collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber), takes its title from the love-interest in a Shakespeare play and is a more sensitive depiction of Mary Emma, with less of the overt sensuality of Sandys' petulant femme fatales.

The drawing of Miranda belonged to James Anderson Rose (1819-1890), a solicitor with an office off the Strand and a large house on Wandsworth Common. Rose was a friend of many artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, several of whom shared his passion for collecting Chinese blue-and-white porcelain including Whistler, who Rose represented in the infamous slander case against Ruskin. He owned a large collection of pictures by Sandys, including the superb paintings Queen Eleanor (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), Mary Magdalene (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington), a portrait of himself (untraced, a study for which was sold Christie's, London, 11 June 2018, lot 79) a portrait of his wife Susanna (Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio) and around forty-five drawings, of which Miranda is among the finest, with the quality that led Rossetti to describe Sandys as 'the greatest living draughtsman'.