Walter Scott Boyd

(British, born 1860)

Portrait of Miss Eugenia Gertrude Smallwood

Footnotes

Provenance
The family of the sitter
Thence by descent

Walter Scott Boyd lists St. Vincent Street, Glasgow as his address for his Royal Academy exhibits of 1883-1886. However, he also is recorded as having a studio at Broad St. Corner, Birmingham from 1879-1905.

During this period, Boyd exhibited some forty-four pictures -including romantic genre, landscapes and portraits- at the Royal Society of British Artists. Among these was a portrait of George Smallwood Esq. (Autumn 1886, no.482). The present portrait of Eugenia was a private commission of the following year, and appears not to have been exhibited.

An intimate portrait of quality and charm with exquisite attention to detail, the present lot has strong echoes of John Atkinson Grimshaw's Dulce Domum (RA, 1885, no.947), a painting with which Boyd would almost certainly have been familiar. Here, the sitter is surrounded by objects and pictures that would typically have been found in the home of a wealthy merchant in the late 1880s. As in Dulce Domum, pictures adorn the far walls and light plays off the objects in a tour de force of observation. There is even a hint of the garden beyond in the reflection in the display cabinet.

George Smallwood was a successful Jewish watch and clock manufacturer and jeweller, who had premises at 143 High St., Bordesley. Eugenia was his only daughter. The accompanying photograph shows the young Eugenia outside her father's shop some years earlier.