Charles Edward Perugini - Silvia

signed with a monogram l.l.
oil on canvas
24 x 20"

Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 42,000 GBP
Commissioned by the Graphic magazine, 1889

The dimensions of the present picture confirm that this painting is Silvia, Perugini's contribution to the series of paintings commissioned by the Graphic magazine for a volume entitled Heroines of Shakespeare, which was published by Sampson & Low in 1889. Twenty-one artists were involved in the volume, each painting a different female figure from the bard's tales. Among the more notable pictures in the series were Alma-Tadema's picture of Portia from The Merchant of Venice, Leighton's Desdemona from Othello (Leighton House), Waterhouse's Cleopatra (private collection) and Calderon's Juliet. The series proved extremely popular and Queen Victoria was so impressed by the paintings that she invited the managing director of the Graphic, William Luson Thomas, to Osborne House to inspect the pictures herself.

Perugini chose to paint Silvia, a character from one of Shakespeare's sonnets rather than a heroine from a play. His elegant depiction of a voluptous red-haired model illustrates the following lines;

Who is Silvia? What is she?
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.

Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness:
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness;
And, being help'd, inhabits there.

Then to Silvia let us sing,
That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling:
To her let us garlands bring.

Who is Silvia? What is she?
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.

Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness:
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness;
And, being help'd, inhabits there.

Then to Silvia let us sing,
That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling:
To her let us garlands bring.

The Graphic had commissioned another series earlier in the 1880s and invited artists to paint their favourite model to form a compendium of different types of female beauty. The series commissioned in 1889 gave the artists a more specific theme. However, inevitably ‘… the result is merely a dressing up in a new garb of the most attractive model obtainable at the moment. When the completed "studies," as they are called, of the Heroines, were shown last year in London, this was certainly apparent in more than one instance.’ (The Art Journal, 1889, p. 96).

The present picture has traditionally been thought to be a portrait of Perugini's wife Kate Dickens, daughter of Charles Dickens and was sold as such in 1980. However the auburn hair are the girl in this painting is not consistent with descriptions of Kate.

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