Portrait of a Young Girl
Alexander Roche RSA (1861–1921)
Oil on canvas
18¼ x 14¼ inches; 46.4 x 36.2 cm.
Signed
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
See commentary below]
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Commentary by Kenneth McConkey
Early writers on Alexander Roche attributed his ‘romantic blood’ to the fact that his father was French and his mother hailed from the Borders. Although five years younger than Lavery, his friendship with the painter predates their studentship in Paris, where Roche not only worked at Julian’s, but was for a time, a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme. Like Lavery, he believed that recognition at home in Glasgow was contingent upon success achieved in exhibitions in London and Paris and accordingly, his early masterpiece, Good King Wenceslaus was shown to acclaim at the New English Art Club, while A Squall on the Clyde received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon and was reputedly purchased by the French artist, Gaston La Touche (MacFall).
By 1890 Roche was exploring Italy, spending his summer at the village of Anticoli in the Sabine hills. In the autumn of 1892 he and Lavery travelled to Munich, Basle and Venice with the intention of journeying south. The purpose was fourfold. They would be fêted as famous artists in Munich, would visit an artist friend of Roche’s in Basle, would sightsee in Venice and return to the Sabine village where Roche had formed a liaison with a peasant model named Jovenilla. According to an unpublished manuscript in private collection, he had proposed marriage to this young woman and according to Lavery, she ‘rejected him very wisely telling him that he was a lord and that she was a poor peasant’. The hapless Roche on the evening of the wine festival embraced her in public ‘before all the village’, and she drew a knife on him, ‘saying that her body was sacred and if he came near her she would kill him’. ‘He was sober in an instant’, Lavery records. Nevertheless they continued their relationship, exchanging knives as friendship tokens – ‘he giving her one with so many instruments in one handle that it kept the village interested for days’.2 In 1892, with Lavery in tow, Roche hoped to renew his relationship with Jovenilla, again hoping marriage. However, when in Basle, his German artist friend produced a knife to cut his cigar, saying he had bought it from an Italian model for one lira. It was Roche’s pocket knife – and the infatuation ended in that moment.
Regional costume in central Italy is similar to that worn by the model in the present picture, and at least two other head studies of similar canvas size are known: Portrait of a Girl, sold Sotheby’s 28 August 1990; An Italian Beauty, sold Christie’s 14 February 1992 It would seem logical to identify the subject of the present canvas as Jovenilla and observe the stylistic changes which were overtaking Roche’s work in 1890.
References
MacFall, Haldane. ‘The Art of Alexander Roche RSA’. The Studio . 37 (1906): 206–208. Roche’s A Squall on the Clyde was reputedly purchased by the French artist, Gaston La Touche.
McConkey, Kenneth. Lavery and the Glasgow Boys. Exhibition Catalogue. Clandeboye, County Down: The Ava Gallery; Edinburgh: Bourne Fine Art; London: The Fine Art Society, 2010. No. 16.
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Last modified 5 October 2011