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Creator:
Frederic Leighton, 1830–1896
Title:

Ellinor Guthrie (née Stirling)

Former Title(s):

Mrs. James Guthrie [1866, Royal Academy of Arts, London, exhibition catalogue]

Date:
1865
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
83 x 54 1/2 inches (210.8 x 138.4 cm), Frame: 96 × 68 inches (243.8 × 172.7 cm)
Inscription(s)/Marks/Lettering:

[Possible monogrammed signature lower right on top of chair leg]

Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1978.43.10
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
botany | chair | costume | flowers (plants) | mother | painting | portrait | science | vases | wife | woman
Associated People:
Guthrie (née Stirling), Ellinor, (1838–1911)
Access:
On view at the Yale University Art Gallery
Note: To make an appointment to see this work, please contact the Paintings and Sculpture department at ycba.paintings@yale.edu. Please visit the Paintings and Sculpture collections page on our website for more details.
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:5016
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Frederic Leighton trained in Frankfurt, Paris, and Rome, only settling in London in 1859, where he helped introduce Continental ideas about aestheticism and “art for art’s sake.” He became president of the Royal Academy in 1878. Leighton was selective about painting portraits but was sympathetic to Ellinor Guthrie (1838–1911), the daughter of James Stirling, the first governor of Western Australia. Born in Perth but raised partly in England, Ellinor married the Scottish merchant banker James Alexander Guthrie in 1856. The Guthries lived in the fashionable and affluent Portland Place in London, and, between 1857 and 1868, they had nine children. Sittings for this portrait took place after Ellinor had recovered from the birth of her fifth daughter in October 1864. In April 1865 she went into mourning when her father died, which may explain her somber, though luxurious, black dress.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020



Ellinor Guthrie (1838-1911) was one of eleven children of Admiral Sir James Stirling, the first governor of the Swan River Colony (Western Australia). Her maternal grandfather was a member of the so-called Reform Parliament of 1832. Ellinor Stirling married the wealthy Scottish merchant banker James Alexander Guthrie in 1856. In London the Guthries lived in some style in Robert Adam's magnificent Portland Place, adjacent to Regent's Park, and between 1857 and 1868 produced nine children. Sittings for this portrait took place in October 1864, after Mrs. Guthrie had recovered from the birth of her fifth daughter. The flowers, vases, embroidered tablecloth, ornate chair, and large history painting in the background, which were probably furnishings of the artist's studio, suggest a refined world of beauty, art, and culture.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2005
Ellinor Guthrie was born in 1838 in Perth, Australia, the daughter of James and Ellen Stirling. Her father, a naval officer of Scottish background, had led the party of British colonists who settled Perth and Fremantle in 1829 and was Western Australia's first governor. When Ellinor was still an infant, her father left the governorship to return to active service in the navy, eventually becoming an admiral. She and her ten brothers and sisters were brought up at the family home in Guildford, England, and a succession of naval stations in the Mediterranean and Far East. In 1856, aged eighteen, she married James Alexander Guthrie, a successful Scottish merchant banker of the firm of Chalmers and Guthrie; they lived in London, in the fashionable and affluent Portland Place, and between 1857 and 1869 had nine children. Sittings for the present portrait took place after Mrs. Guthrie had recovered from the birth of their fifth daughter in October 1864.
The Guthries probably commissioned the portrait, although Leighton may possibly have painted it as an expression of friendship; he seldom accepted portrait commissions and felt uncomfortable painting sitters who were not also friends. Certainly he was drawn to Mrs. Guthrie's Mediterranean-looking features and after the portrait used her as the model for the central figure of a priestess in his large friezelike painting of The Syracusan Bride (1865-66; private collection).
The work typifies the movement in advanced British painting of the 1860s away from the intensely factual and didactic manner of the Pre-Raphaelites toward an art of unashamedly decorative and sensual appeal. Under the Aesthetic Movement, as it came to be called, the artist regarded his first duty as the creation of beauty-often through the representation of people and things beautiful in themselves, always by means of the most exquisitely refined technique. Mrs. Guthrie is shown surrounded by objects of decorative art that seem to pay homage to her beauty. In the flowers and vases the colors appear as a separating-out of those subtly blended in her complexion. The ornate chair and the large Baroque painting in the background, which were probably in Leighton's studio, suggest the idea thatshe is not only beautiful herself but the inhabitant of a world-albeit a hothouse world-full of beauty and culture. The inclusion of the painting also serves to associate Leighton's brilliantly animated brushwork, displayed especially in the treatment of the dress, with the painterly tradition of the Old Masters.
Mrs. Guthrie's husband died young in 1873, when she was only thirty-five, leaving her a large fortune. Later she married as her second husband Guthrie's cousin, Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot; he was a translator and publisher of Oriental literature who collaborated with Richard Burton on the first English edition of the Kama Sutra. She died in 1911, aged seventy-three.



Malcolm Warner

Malcolm Warner, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 162, no. 66

YUAG European Galleries (Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-12-01 - 2025-01-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art (Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-03-24 - 2023-12-03) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

Figuring Women - The Female in Modern British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2008-03-28 - 2008-06-08) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of South Australia, 1998-09-16 - 1998-11-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Queensland Art Gallery, 1998-07-15 - 1998-09-06) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998-05-01 - 1998-07-05) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

Frederic, Lord Leighton PRA (Royal Academy of Arts, 1996-02-15 - 1996-04-21) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

The Swagger Portrait (Tate Britain, 1992-10-14 - 1993-01-10) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Acquisitions : The First Decade 1977-1986, Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1986, p. 15, no. 34, N590.2 A7 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Timothy J. Barringer, Frederic Leighton, antiquity, renaissance, modernity , v. 5, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, London, 1999, pl. XVI, NJ18 L531 F73 1999 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Susan P. Casteras, The substance or the shadow : images of Victorian womanhood, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1982, pp. 49, 82-3, no. 50, pl. 8, N7630 C27 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Malcolm Cormack, Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 144-145, N590.2 A83 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Figuring women, the female in modern British art. , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2008, p. 5, V 1925 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Frederic Leighton, 1830-1896, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1996, pp. 188-9, no. 33, NJ18 L531 J65 1996 + OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, Frederic Leighton : death, mortality, resurrection, Ashgate Publishing, Burlington, VT, 2015, pp. 35-36, 118, fig. 1.9, NJ18.L531 H36 2015 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Debra Mancoff, Seeing Mrs. Morris, Photographs of Jane Morris from the Collection of Dante Gabriel Rosetti , Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. LXII, No. 3, Spring 2001, p. 383, fig. 10, X325 P92c (SML) [ORBIS]

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden : Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 162, no. 66, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Leonee Ormond, Lord Leighton, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, New Haven, 1975, p. 155, no. 107, NJ18 L531 +O73 Oversize (YCBA) [YCBA]

Paul Mellon's Legacy : a passion for British art [large print labels], , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, v. 1, N5220 M552 P381 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Duncan Robinson, Acquisitions : The First Decade 1977 - 1986, , Burlington Magazine, vol. 128, October 1986, p. 15, no. 34, N1 B87 128:3 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Andrew Wilton, The swagger portrait, grand manner portraiture in Britain from Van Dyck to Augustus John, 1630-1930 , Tate Publishing, London, 1992, pp. 184-85, no. 61, ND1314 W545 1992 + (YCBA) [YCBA]


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