Provenance: - Christie's South Kensington, 2002
-Private collection to 2011
Talbot Hughes was a famous Victorian genre painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy regularly from the age of seventeen until 1913. The French classist painter Jean-Louis Ernes Meissonier was a huge influence on Hughes and his idealisation feminine beauty and the tribulations of romantic love.
Meticulous in his attention to detail and the historical accuracy of his paintings, he gathered together a extensive collection historical costumes in which he adorned his the models for his allegorical, figurative and historical paintings, styling their hair and accessories accordingly. His collection was famously displayed in 1913 at Harrod’s and then donated to the Victoria and Albert museum as a gift to the nation. He also published a major study ‘Dress Design: an account of costume for artists and dress makers, illustrated by the author from old examples’.
In a 1902 article in The Magazine of Art, Marion Hepworth Dixon commented on Hughes's "dexterity of hand, the extraordinary facility with which he renders the different surfaces of stuffs, woods, and metal, together with the agility of his outlook and the verve and spontaneity of his eighteenth century designs."

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