Name: JAMES COLLINSON (BRITISH, 1825-1881)
Brand: Study for 'For Sale'
Price: 15000.00 GBP
Availability: SoldOut

JAMES COLLINSON (BRITISH, 1825-1881)
Study for 'For Sale'
signed 'James Collinson' (lower right)
oil on canvas, painted oval
12 x 9³⁄₄ in. (30.5 x 23.8 cm.)

Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 13 October 1978, lot 88, as The Empty Purse.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 18 June 1985, lot 19, as For Sale.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 11 November 1998, lot 171, where purchased by The Forbes Collection.
Their sale; Christie's, London, 19 February 2003, lot 98, where purchased by the present owner.

Great Victorian Pictures, their paths to fame, exhibition catalogue, London, 1978. p. 28.
R. Parkinson, 'James Collinson' in L. Parris (ed.), Pre-Raphaelite papers, London,1984, p. 74.
S. Casteras (ed.), The Defining Moment: Victorian Narrative Paintings from the Forbes Magazine Collection, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1999, pp. 52-55, no. 9, illustrated p. 54.

Charlotte, Mint Museum of Art; Nashville, Cheekwood Museum of Art; Wilmington, Delaware Art Museum; Tampa, Tampa Art Museum; and New York, The Forbes Magazine Galleries, The Defining Moment: Victorian Narrative Paintings from the Forbes Magazine Collection, 15 January 2000 - 30 June 2001, no. 9.
Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Masterworks of Victorian art from the collection of John H. Schaeffer, 15 February – 16 August 2008.
Springville, Utah, Springville Museum of Art, The John H. Schaeffer collection of Victorian and European Art, 26 August 2009 - 28 February 2010.
Sydney,Art Gallery of New South Wales, Victorian Visions: Nineteenth-Century art from the John Schaeffer Collection, 20 May - 29 August, no. 5.

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Lot Essay

Another version of this composition can be seen at Tate Britain, entitled The Empty Purse, while the version shown at the Royal Academy of 1857 and which was included in Great Victorian Pictures (Arts Council, 1978, no. 5) is now in the Castle Museum, Nottingham. A further version, entitled At the Bazaar is in the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield. The picture was among Collinson's most popular compositions, and was widely reproduced in his lifetime through engraving.

As with To Let (see lot 67), the oval composition depicts a lady, three-quarter length, whose gaze directly confronts the viewer. To contemporary eyes however, the messages contained within the picture appear ambiguous. The bill to the woman's right advertises a church bazaar whose patroness is the Right Honourable Lady Dorcas. In the New Testament, Dorcas, a Christian exemplar, provided charity and clothing for the poor. Charity bazaars were a much enjoyed pastime amongst the Victorian middle class, whose female members were otherwise barred from commercial activity. The plethora of goods on offer, gaudy and inessential, also attest to an envigorated appetite for shopping. But what are we to make of the pictures various titles - For Sale and The Empty Purse? Does the empty purse signify, as feminist art-historians would have it, the sitter's lack of financial independence, and are we to regard the sitter herself as an item for sale, in a society where marriage was often regarded as a contractual arrangement, undertaken for reasons of finance rather than for love? The keen eyed viewer might have spotted a religious print of Christ bearing the cross inscribed 'follow me', perhaps an injunction to the viewer to leave worldly considerations behind, and follow a virtuous path. Collinson does not appear to have recorded his reminiscences in which to explain the picture.
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