
Leo Webster
Senior Specialist
£500 - £700
Senior Specialist
Sale Coordinator
Sympathy was one of Riviere's most popular compositions. When the original version (Royal Holloway College) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878, the critics went out of their way to praise it. The Times, the Illustrated London News, the Magazine of Art, the Graphic, the Academy and the Athenaeum were among its many admirers. Even John Ruskin's resistance to academic painting was overcome by such a winsome image of innocence. As Ruskin states 'It is long since I have been so pleased in the Royal Academy as I was by Mr Briton Riviere's "Sympathy". The dog is uncaricatured doggedness, divine as Anubis, or the Dog-star; the child entirely childish and lovely, the carpet might have been laid in by Veronese. A most precious picture...' (for full details, see Jeannie Chapel, Victorian Taste: the complete catalogue of paintings at the Royal Holloway College, 1982, pp. 126-7.)