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SARAH HENRIETTA PURSER, RHA (1848-1943), Oil on canvas, A double portrait of Constance and Eva G...

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SARAH HENRIETTA PURSER, RHA (1848-1943), Oil on canvas, A double portrait of Constance and Eva G...
SARAH HENRIETTA PURSER, RHA (1848-1943)
Oil on canvas
A double portrait of Constance and Eva Gore-Booth as young girls in a woodland setting, Constance standing holding a blossom, Eva sitting on the woodland floor
60 x 411/2in. (152cms x 105cms)
e30,000/50,000
LITERATURE: J. O'Grady, The Life & Works of Sarah Purser, Dublin, 1996, No. 77
Sean O'Reilly, 'Lissadell, Co Sligo', Country Life, 25 September, 2003, p.114 (illustrated in situ).

THE ITALIAN PICTURES AT LISSADELL
Sir Robert Gore-Booth, 4th Bt (1805-1876) not only built Lissadell but was also responsible for furnishing the house.
As his inheritance from his first wife, Caroline King, daughter of the 1st Viscount Lorton, made possible the
construction of the new mansion between 1830 and 1835, so his prolonged sojourn in Italy with his second wife,
Caroline Susan, daughter of Thomas Goold, a successful Dublin lawyer, led to the acquisition of a collection of pictures that must have transformed the interiors of Lissadell.

The house complete - and the process of furnishing it with the £3,000 a year that was calculated to be available in 1833
no doubt well under way - the Gore-Booths set out for an extended Italian tour. While eighteenth-century Irish travellers on the Grand Tour who collected pictures tended to do so in Rome - the 1st Earl of Milltown was only the most energetic of their number - the Gore-Booths bought theirs in Florence. In the decades after Waterloo, Florence, then the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, increasingly attracted visitors and an expatriate community. Collectors of more advanced taste who spent prolonged periods in Florence, like the diplomat William Fox-Strangways, later 4th Earl of Ilchester, and the poet Walter Savage Landor, were already searching for early pictures: 'primitives'. The more conventional Rev. John Sanford pursued both these and works of the Tuscan secento. Sir Robert's taste was for the secento and he was indeed one of the last British collectors to form a major holding of Florentine pictures of that period. A list of 'Pictures left for Packing at Signor Gerardis' records a total of 48 works, and a number of associated notes, presumably extracted from an account book, document payments for many of these and, in some cases, for frames.

The large size of the Staircase Hall and Gallery at Lissadell clearly called for pictures of appropriate scale. Many of the lesser components of the collection are no longer in the house, but the sale includes five large canvases that fulfilled Gore-Booth's furnishing requirements and demonstrate his taste. The two pictures (lots 283 and 284) attributed without qualification to Luca Giordano in the Gerardi list, '1 Large Luca Giordano & frame' and '1 do without frame', must always have been intended to flank the staircase, acting almost as substitutes for the murals Sir Robert would have seen in Italian palazzi.

The three large works acquired for the Gallery were also listed. The characteristic Lucretia by the Perugian, Giovanni Domenico Cerrini (lot 282), who owed so much to the example of Reni, appeared as '1 Lucretia by Guido -'; it cost 400 paoli on 12 February 1837. The Saint Agnes attributed to Biliverti (lot 281) was listed as '1 Magdalen by Belliverty'; Gore-Booth apparently bought this through Gerardi on 20 July 1837 for 250 paoli from Petrini; 10 paoli were paid for gilding the frame. Puzzlingly the Saint John the Baptist (lot 280), which is related to a picture in the Corsini collection formerly given to Marinari but now to Biliverti, is not on the Gerardi list, although it is noted elsewhere ' St. John', but scored through, in a list of works of 'middle sizes': presumably it was acquired towards the end of the Florentine sojourn and after the Gerardi list was prepared.

Lissadell is a marvellously uncompromising neo-classical house. Sir Robert understood how well lavish baroque frames would complement his disciplined architectural taste. It is fascinating that, despite his protestant loyalties, Sir Robert should have chosen to enrich his house with pictures of which so many reflected the religious imperatives of post counter-reformation catholicism.