Cheshire Antiques Consultant Ltd has dated this piece to the Victorian era.
Subject equestrian portrait of an important lady on horseback in side profile riding a graceful brown bay hunter horse horse, she is in traditional Victorian equestrienne black dress and wearing a hat, holding the reigns to her beloved horse, she is looking towards the viewer. Set in English countryside with open field green grass all around, to her left is a large lush tree and in the distance to the right are 3 other horses with riders facing left and a group of other gentleman standing around together, with hills in the distance above mainkt overcast sky with some blue shining through. To the left above the lady yu can see jumping fence and poles.
Title "'Equestrienne Lady Dorothea".
Artist biography & inscribed verso exhibited RA.
Signed in the bottom corner by the known artist Rosa Frances Corder.
Rosa Frances Corder was an English artist. She was the daughter of Micah Corder (1808-88), a lighterman, and Charlotte Hill. From c. 1873, she was the mistress of Charles A. Howell, entrepreneur, rogue and sometime associate of JW's. Their daughter Beatrice Ellen Howell was born in 1883. Victorian artist and artist's model.
Life: She trained as a portrait painter under Felix Moscheles and Frederick Sandys and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Grosvenor Gallery. Her portrait of Edward Bouverie Pusey was considered "the best likeness" of the scholar by the editors of his collected works and was engraved as the frontispiece to his biography.
She had a studio in Southampton Row and another in Newmarket, where she painted racehorses, building a reputation among the sporting fraternity. She painted both animals and portraits of jockeys, including Frederick Archer.
She also took to art and from Charles Augustus Howell and learnt to make copies of eighteenth century portraits and erotic drawings by Henry Fuseli. JW taught her etching. D. G. Rossetti seems to have met her in 1874 and her name was later associated with drawings allegedly his. She also made a copy after John Everett Millais' Vale of Rest(1857). For a time she had a studio at Newmarket and painted racehorses. Corder also painted portraits. Her sitters included Algernon Graves in 1878 and F. R. Leyland in 1882, both of whom also sat for JW. Corder's portrait of Graves was reproduced in Graves' Art Sales, from early in the eighteenth century to early in the twentieth century (1918). There is a drypoint of her by Mortimer Menpes.
Some time after 1873 Howell commissioned JW to paint Corder's portrait for £100 and said he would arrange with the London printsellers H. Graves & Co. for an engraving to be published. Corder posed for Arrangement in Brown and Black: Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder y203 in a brown dress against a darkened doorway. The work, which was finished in September 1878, was received favourably by the press. W. Graham Robertson, who described Corder as 'gentle and crushed looking', declared that JW's painting made 'her proud and stately'. It was one of the paintings that JW exhibited at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1898. She and JW were in correspondence around the time of the painting of the portrait.
Corder was painted by Whistler in his Arrangement in Black and Brown, in the Frick Collection. The portrait was commissioned by Howell.[11] Whistler may have had a dalliance with her at the time.[8] She was also portrayed by Mortimer Menpes. Her relationship with Howell was caricatured by Max Beerbohm in Rossetti and his Circle(1922)
Bibliography: Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer and Hamish Miles, The Pai
Cheshire Antiques Consultant Ltd has dated this piece to the Victorian era.
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Oil Painting Equine Lady Dorothea on Bay Hunter by Rosa Frances Corder
