Sir James Jebusa Shannon, RA, RBA, RHA

(British, 1862-1923)

Portrait of Lady Gundrede O'Brien (nee de Trafford of Trafford Park)

Footnotes

Provenance
The sitter.
By descent.
The estate of Timothy James Price, the sitter's great-grandson.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above).

Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1893, no. 570.

Literature
'Royal Academy', Athenaeum no. 3418, April 29, 1893, p. 546.
'Fine Arts. The Royal Academy. (Fourth Notice. The Portraits)', Athenaeum no. 3423, June 3, 1893, pp.704-5.
The County Gentleman (Sporting Gazette), April 29, 1893, p. 528 (in which the writer mistakenly attributes the portrait to another artist).
'How Things Are Done . . . A Comic Guide to the Royal Academy', Sunday Times, April 30, 1893, p. 8.
'Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition', Surrey Mirror May 13, 1893, p. 3.
'The Royal Academy', Leeds Mercury, May 16, 1893, p. 8.
'The Royal Academy. (Third Notice.)', North British Daily Mail, June 20, 1893, p. 2.

The American-born portrait specialist James Jebusa Shannon was well on his way to a lucrative international career when this portrait of Mrs. T. Carew O'Brien was shown at the London Royal Academy's annual summer exhibition in 1893. As one writer put it, 'Among the younger portraitists Mr. J. J. Shannon is first favourite. . . . All his canvases represent people more or less well known in fashionable London society, and as usual Mr. Shannon is happiest in his depicture [sic] of ladies.' ('Round the Studios in London', The Glasgow Herald, April 3, 1893, p. 7). Shannon not only possessed artistic talent; he also had an outgoing, magnetic personality, a characteristic that was usually deemed essential for the success of portrait specialists who often found it necessary to entertain their subjects while they posed. Then, too, Shannon's currency on the portrait market was further enhanced by his 1892 acquisition of an imposing property in London's Holland Park Road (next door to the Royal Academy's estimable president, Lord Leighton), which served as his home and studio until his death in 1923.

It is likely that the present portrait was one of the first Shannon executed in his Holland Park Road studio and it is just as likely that the sitter's social status is indicative of the painter's rising celebrity. Born in Barton upon Irwell, Lancashire, Gundrede Annette Teresa de Trafford was the second daughter of the wealthy Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 2nd Baronet of Trafford Park – a massive ancestral property that was sold in 1896 and later developed into the largest planned industrial estate in the world. Gundrede de Trafford married the famed 'gentleman' cricketer and heir presumptive of Sir Patrick O'Brien, Timothy Carew O'Brien (1861-1948) on September 22, 1885, thus joining two notable Roman Catholic families. In that regard, it is possible that Shannon gained the commission for the present portrait partly because of his own Irish (albeit lapsed) Catholic heritage.

With a writer for the Athenaeum declaring the portrait 'one of Mr. Shannon's best pieces of portraiture . . .an excellent piece of art, charming in the flesh colour, and a vivacious design' (Athenaeum, no. 3418), Mrs. T. Carew O'Brien was gauged the more pleasing of the two canvases by Shannon on display at the 1893 Academy exhibition. What is more, the portrait fared well in the context of other examples of his work that were on view simultaneously at the New Gallery and the Society of Portrait Painters, all of which received considerable and largely positive critical attention. As noted by one reviewer, 'Mr. J. J. Shannon's portrait of Mrs. T. Carew O'Brien is an effective portrait of a fair, delicate-looking lady in a white gown and rose-coloured sash.' (North British Daily Mail). The image of the young mother of four (she would eventually have two sons and eight daughters) suggests a life of quiet dignity notwithstanding the apparent signs of luxury revealed by her fashionable white evening dress and bejewelled fingers. Her sober, direct gaze prompted another commentator to mention her 'air of determination' (Sunday Times) while another found her expression 'judicial' (The County Gentleman). Such impressions of a sitter's thoughtful inner existence rarely surfaced in critical discussions of society portraits of women, most of which allowed that the artists concentrated on flattering the sitter through idealization of face, fashion, and setting. Indeed, despite describing Gundrede O'Brien's pose 'a trifle stiff' and her 'expression . . .stern, if not peevish', a second review in the Athenaeum concluded that 'the flesh is painted with admirable freedom, while the colouration, although mannered, is excellent and pure.' (Athenaeum no. 3423). In the end, Mrs. T. Carew O'Brien stands as a fine example of the painterly, straightforward approach that characterized Shannon's art in the early 1890s as he established a career that ultimately took him to the heights of society portraiture in Britain.

We are grateful to Barbara Dayer Gallati for preparing this catalogue entry.