Smerelda Bandinelli (after Sandro Botticelli)

Christiana Jane Herringham (1852-1929)

c.1888-97

Tempera on panel

Royal Holloway, University of London.

Presented to Bedford College by Sir Wilmot Herringham, before its amalgamation with Royal Holloway, and on display at the Christiana Herringham exhibition of 2019. [See commentary below, and bibliography].

Photograph and text by Jacqueline Banerjee.

Photograph reproduced here by courtesy of Royal Holloway, University London. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

This is one of ten or more copies made by Herringham of Botticelli's work, which had become popular at this time — so popular, said the gallery label at the Herringham exhibition (2019), that it became a kind of cult. Rossetti, who once owned the painting himself, had apparently tried to copy it but had been unsuccessful, though elements of it proved useful in other paintings of his: "the diaphanous overgown, the long-fingered hands and the direct gaze recur in the multiple versions of Rossetti’s La Pia de’ Tolomei, La Donna della Finestra, and Proserpine, and a chalk drawing of 1870, Silence ("Portrait of a Lady Known as Smerelda Bandinelli"). Purely as a copyist, Herringham fared better, reproducing it in tempera after Rossetti sold it to the art patron and collector Constantine Ionides. Botticelli's painting was among the many that Ionides bequeathed to what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Bibliography

Gallery label at the "Christiana Herringham: Artist, Campaigner, Collector" exhibition at Royal Holloway University of London, 14 January – 8 March 2019.

"Portrait of a Lady Known as Smerelda Bandinelli." Victoria and Albert Museum. Web. 6 November 2019.

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Created 6 November 2019