William Powell Frith - Isabelle Frith, reclining

signed and dated 'W P Frith 67' (lower right)
oil on board
11 1/8 x 15 in. (28.2 x 38.1 cm.)

This portrait presents an interesting conundrum. For many years it was thought by the Frith family to be a portrait of Frith's first wife Isabelle. Although dated 1867 a handwritten note on the reverse ascribes a date of 1846, the year after Frith married Isabelle Baker. The artist's daughter, also named Isabelle, was aged 21 in 1867. It is possible that this could therefore be a portrait of her, rather than her mother who would then have been aged 45. At that date, the family had been established in considerable style and comfort for over a decade at 10, Pembroke Villas, Bayswater. Isabelle married Charles Oppenheim: their first child was born in 1871.

Frith fathered nineteen children between his first wife Isabelle Baker, and second wife (also, controversially, his ward) Mary Alford. As Jeremy Maas wrily observed, 'Frith liked crowds'.