Miss Katherine Grant (The Lady in White)

In 1885 a great painting was instantly hailed. This was Hubert von Herkomer’s Miss Katherine Grant.

By 1892, when W.L. Courtney wrote his sketch of the life and work of Herkomer it was already abundantly clear how important Miss Grant’s portrait had been. It caused, he declared, ‘quite as much excitement as the ‘Chelsea Pensioners’’. He was of course referring to The Last Muster, (Lady Lever Gallery, Port Sunlight) the painting which had made Herkomer’s reputation back in 1873. The picture had begun life as Sunday at Chelsea Hospital, an illustration in The Graphic, but like Luke Fildes’s Applicants to Admission to a Casual Ward … it had been ‘reproduced’ as a large canvas for the Academy audience. Thereafter the artist adopted social realist themes and genre subjects which often took him back to his native Bavaria. While his portrait practice flourished, in the present case, the painting preceded its reproduction as an engraving entitled The Lady in White, and published by Obach & Co., Berlin, in 1887. The release of the high-quality print reminds us of the way in which a great picture would instantly become known universally. By the 1880s, widespread reproduction was a by-product of popularity.

For many, the ‘Chelsea Pensioners’ was a vivid group portrait that led to further commissions in the occasional Graphic ‘Heads of the People’ series – admired and collected by Vincent Van Gogh. However, with interests in music, the theatre, and in opening a school, it seemed that Herkomer was becoming something of a polymath. He had, said one critic, ‘too many irons in the fire’ and ‘people said that knowing all the arts he would excel in none’. This was far from the case for, by all accounts, when Miss Katherine Grant appeared at the Royal Academy in 1885. ‘He has this year come out stronger than ever’, said one reporter, and,
'…. If we were asked which is the best portrait in the Academy, we should unhesitatingly point to his Miss Katherine Grant. He has painted a lady in white, or whitey grey against a white background. He seems to have been happy in his subject, for the face is full of character, and the execution makes one of the most powerful pictures we have seen from Mr Herkomer’s hands.' (Syndicated to Rutland Echo and Leicestershire Advertiser, 16 May 1885, p. 3, and other papers).

This new departure was the result of friendship formed with an earlier sitter, Owen Grant, Clerk in the House of Lords, but it was only when the artist’s wife recommended him to paint the youngest of Grant’s daughters, the nineteen-year-old Katherine (1865-1952) that the idea germinated. (The artist contended that because he had only received commissions for male portraits, it ‘began to be voiced’ that he could not paint women, so ‘I naturally wished to remove this odium as I was considerably piqued’; see Herkomer, vol II, 1911, p. 247.) There are various, possibly conflicting, records of Katherine Grant’s parentage. While Herkomer is silent on the subject – merely mentioning Owen Grant – some accounts indicate that she was the daughter of a soldier, General Owen Edward Grant.
When she appeared, it was in a white muslin dress ‘of her own devising’, that, according to Herkomer, ‘followed no particular fashion’. (Herkomer, 1910, p. 134.) This is not strictly the case since in many respects the dress follows the classical lines of aesthetic dress. Lee MacCormick Edwards refers to the ‘forceful characterisation’ of the figure and with great acuity, compares the treatment of Miss Grant’s voluminous draperies to those of the Elgin Marbles. (Edwards, 1999, p. 92.) The depth of Herkomer’s absorption of classical sources in this respect is comparable to that of Albert Moore (fig. 1, Tate) and Frederic Leighton. Initially the painter followed convention, using a dark background, but he soon realized that the full subtilty of his subject’s delicate complexion would only become apparent with a lighter background, supplied initially by a large blank canvas placed behind her. This produced a problematic scheme of ‘white on white’ that, as he recalled, ‘Bastien-Lepage, in his small portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (1879, Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco), had already solved … with dazzling virtuosity’. (Herkomer 1910, p. 135; quoted by Edwards, 1999, p. 92.) The only limiting feature of Miss Grant’s attire was the pair of currently fashionable long gloves that she wore. (Edwards also notes a ‘very distant nod to Whistler’ in the present work. While this is less clear, and less verifiable historically, Herkomer must have seen Whistler’s Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander, 1872-3 (Tate) when it was re-exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1881 and Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux, 1881-2 (Frick Collection, New York), when shown in 1882.)

Katherine remembered that the picture would be painted immediately after breakfast during weekdays and before the painter set off to teach at his art school in Bushey. As a well-brought-up young woman, she was overwhelmed by his personality as he talked continuously while walking backwards and forwards between the easel and his sitter – the artist believing that ‘in portrait painting you must keep talking or the model will go to sleep!’ (Quoted from syndicated reports on a lecture given at Whitechapel Art Gallery, North Devon Gazette, 23 April 1889, p. 7, and other sources.) While this might be the case with Moore’s classical maidens, or with commissioned portraits of the great and the good, it was not so with Miss Grant. Her allure was in her eyes; she sat as a model, not a sitter; her picture was not commissioned, and it remained in the artist’s possession after completion. Katherine thought she must have posed for at least forty hours, but Herkomer disputed the claim, suggesting that the famous portrait had not taken quite so long. (Saxon Mills, 1923, pp. 149-150.)

At length Miss Katherine Grant was ready for the Academy where it was immediately greeted with a pean of praise. Reviewers described the work as ‘powerful’, ‘very original’, ‘charming’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘one of the surprises of the exhibition’, while The Times concluded that it was ‘quite the most brilliant’ of his contributions to the exhibition. Compared with his male portraits which had been becoming formulaic, this was a painting of great delicacy and refinement which, for The Magazine of Art, placed the painter ‘at odds’ with those staid Academicians who ‘are sworn to learn nothing’. At a time when there were great stirrings in the art world, when the majority of the older Academicians were perceived as time servers, this was emphatically not the case with Herkomer. (In 1885, as The Magazine of Art’s comments confirm, unrest was brewing at the treatment of younger artists – particularly those who had a European pedigree or were followers of the Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage.)

London reactions were a mere foretaste of what was to follow as the picture made its regal progress first to Boston, and then back to Europe where it moved from one major show to another. ‘Endless verses’ written by ‘susceptible gentlemen’, were sent to the painter, to be passed to his sitter, and such was its popularity in Berlin that fifty chairs were placed in front of it for the benefit of those who had become weak at the knee. Having come straight from the United States, the picture was hailed as die amerikanische Lorelei. (Saxon Mills, 1923, p. 154.) Herkomer refused all offers for it, including one from the Kaiser. Such was the curiosity about the subject that newspapers proposed that the ‘Miss Grant’ in question must be the beautiful American, Adele Capell (née Grant), who in 1893 became the Countess of Essex. This fiction went unchallenged at the time of the Countess’s death in 1922 and it persists to this day. (‘Drowned in Bath – Tragic end of Dowager Lady Essex – An American Beauty’, Northampton Chronicle and Echo, 29 July 1922, p. 7, and other press reports; see also Wikipedia entry for Adele Capell, Countess of Essex quoting http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post_30.html)

As these laudatory articles rolled out in the newspapers, Herkomer, now Slade Professor of Fine Art, had discovered a second muse, and as a demonstration of his powers, painted her, ‘black on black’, as Entranced, (The Lady in Black), the portrait of Miss Silsbee, a Bostonian (fig. 2, Leeds Museums and Galleries). The work was intended as a companion to the present picture and when shown at the Academy in 1887, it collected similar plaudits and was hung in the same position in the galleries in order to make the connection. (Magazine of Art 1887, p. 271; quoted in McConkey, 1987, p. 82. The picture’s full title was Entranced in some diviner mood of self-oblivious solitude.)

After its showing at the Exposition Universelle in 1889 and the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, The Lady in White, as she was now frequently known, returned to Herkomer’s studio and he only parted company with it to the banker, Hugh Greenwood Hammersley, in 1900 – Miss Grant’s brother-in-law. (Hugh Greenwood Hammersley (1858-1930) was a distinguished collector and around 1900 was friendly with Philip Wilson Steer and Henry Tonks.) The picture then transferred temporarily to the Hammersley residence at The Grove, Hampstead, where it would hang beside Sargent’s portrait of the banker’s wife, Mary Frances Grant, Katherine’s elder sister (fig. 3, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and other New English Art Club paintings, before being given to Katherine.

Even then, the painting was not forgotten; being recalled for the Franco-British Exhibition in 1907 and making its final appearance after Herkomer’s death in a memorial display included in the late Members’ exhibition at the Academy in 1922, where it hung side-by-side with The Lady in Black. The painter’s intention to display the full flowering of youth beside fading beauty was realized at last. Courtney’s belief in 1892, in the importance of The Lady in White was confirmed, and if those High Victorian classical maidens had sunk into history, jeunesse dorée in the portrait of Miss Grant was modern, and for all time.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.