Mary Sandys

Frederick Sandys

Date: c. 1871 - 73

Materials: Coloured chalks; in original frame

Mary Emma Jones, who acted under the name Miss Clive, first sat to Sandys in Norwich at the age of seventeen. From the 1860s they lived as man and wife, although Frederick had married as a young man and never divorced; Mary bore him at least ten children, of whom the eldest, Winifred, was born in 1873.

Although Sandys's drawings are in a lighter, more linear style, Rossetti felt that this type of highly finished chalk portrait was an imitation of his work, and a rift developed between the two friends in 1869 that was fully healed only six years later.