The present lot is a slightly modified version of the painting entitled The Parting included in The Pre-Raphaelites exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1984, no. 93. Both pictures deal with the oft depicted Victorian subject of farewell. In this instance a country girl is leaving for town, with Graham Reynolds noting that here Collinson ‘deals delicately with the distress of parent and suitor at the country girl’s departure for town, doubtless under economic duress’ (exhibition catalogue, p. 169). This present version is imbued with more emotional charge, as Collinson shows the young suitor carving the initials of his beloved into a tree, a detail which is absent from the other version.
Born in Mansfield, the son of a bookseller, James Collinson entered the Royal Academy Schools and exhibited there for the first time in 1847. The attention to detail in his work The Charity Boy's Debut, so impressed Rossetti that he pronounced Collinson 'a born stunner' and invited him to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Collinson later became engaged to Rossetti's poet sister Christina, but she broke off the engagement prior to his return to the Catholic faith, and his entry to Stoneyhurst in 1850. Having been nicknamed 'the doormouse' by fellow members of the Brotherhood, and teased by Hunt for needing 'to be waked up at the conclusion of the noisy evenings to receive our salutations', Collinson resigned his membership on the grounds that he could not 'as a Catholic, assist in spreading the artistic opinions of those who were not'. Collinson failed to complete his novitiate, and left the monastery and resumed painting in 1854.