Artware Fineart has dated this Edwardian Charcoal Portrait Drawing to the 19th Century.
Portrait of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917)
Signed/Inscribed:
pencil , charcoal and monochrome wash on card
33 x 22.50 cm. (13 x 9 in.)
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, [real name Herbert Draper Beerbohm] (1852–1917), actor and theatre manager, was born on 17 December 1852 at 2 Pembridge Villas, Kensington, London, the second of the four children of Julius Ewald Beerbohm (1810–1892) and his wife, Constantia Draper. His father, a London corn merchant, was German-Lithuanian and his mother was British. Sir Henry Maximilian (Max) Beerbohm was his youngest half-brother, from his father's second marriage.
Beerbohm received his education at various schools in England, including Mrs Adams's Preparatory School at Frant, Dr Stone's school in King's Square, Bristol, and Westbourne collegiate school in Westbourne Grove, London; he then attended the school where his father had been educated, Schnepfeuthal College in Thuringia, Germany. At the age of eighteen he joined his father's business, but he spent his free hours performing with amateur theatrical groups, and after eight years he left his clerical job to pursue a vocation as an actor.
During the late 1870s he assumed the name Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and performed with amateur groups. After a successful appearance as Grimaldi in Boucicault's The Life of an Actress at the Globe Theatre (1878), he began his professional acting career when he joined the Bijou Comedy Company for a brief provincial tour. In the autumn of 1878 he secured his first London engagement, at the Royal Olympic Theatre under the management of Henry Neville. Except for an occasional metropolitan stint, by 1880 his experience had been limited mainly to provincial productions of foreign melodramas and farces in which he played German barons, French marquesses, and other eccentric members of the foreign gentry. One such provincial performance, the old Marquis de Ponstable in Madame Favart, garnered Tree an invitation from Genevieve Ward to enact Prince Maleotti in a revival of Forget-me-Not at the Prince of Wales's Theatre during April and May 1880. For the next four years he continued touring the provinces and had a few unremarkable performances in London theatres. On 16 September 1882 he married an actress, Maud Holt (1863–1937), with whom he had three daughters. Treeenjoyed his first major success on the London stage in March 1884, when Edgar Bruce, the manager of the Prince of Wales's, commissioned him to play the Revd Robert Spalding in Charles Hawtrey's adaptation of The Private Secretary. Immediately afterwards, Tree took the part of Paolo Marcari in Hugh Conway's Called back, and the contrast between the timid parson and the dashing Italian spy helped to establish his reputation as a versatile character actor. His career then ebbed, and from late 1884 to 1886 his London appearances in such plays as Pinero's The Magistrate and W. S. Gilbert's Engaged were commonplace and lacked the distinction of his earlier successes. In the autumn of 1886 Tree joined Frank Benson's company for a week at Bournemouth, where he played Sir Peter Teazle and Iago. After this provincial run he returned to London and the Haymarket Theatre, and his career rallied when he turned his minor role of Baron Harzfeld in Charles Young's Jim the Penman into a main feature of the production.
By the spring of 1887, aged thirty-four and with nine years of both amateur and professional experience, Tree had secured a sufficient reputation to embolden him to venture into theatre management, and in April he took over the Comedy Theatre in Panton Street. He inaugurated his managerial career with a successful run of W. Outram Tristram's Russian revolutionary play The Red Lam
Artware Fineart has dated this Edwardian Charcoal Portrait Drawing to the 19th Century.
You can view the stock and full dealer information on the Artware Fineart Profile Page
Francis, (Frank) O. A. Haviland , D. 1912 Portrait of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917)
