Cupid Cameo (Dont forget to look at the shawl!) An oval shell cameo carved with Cupid and framed within a textured rope-twist gold border had been a gift from Holman Hunt to his first wife Fanny Waugh (it was probably purchased from Guiliano). It features twice in the artists work: in a portrait of Fanny painted shortly after she died in childbirth in 1866 that is now in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, and again in the 1868 picture The Birthday that depicts her younger sister Edith. It was during the sittings for this painting that Edith revealed her love for Hunt - a scandalous match that saw the pair shunned by friends and family when they married in Switzerland in 1875 (a union prohibited under British law). In Diana Holman Hunts 1960 memoir titled My Grandmothers and I, she recalls Edith (a widow of two decades) telling her as a child: This cameo brooch was my sisters. Holman gave it to her on her their marriage and when she died it came to me. The inscription to the reverse reads Fanny and Holman to Edith I.M. 20 Dec 1866. love DArtagnan.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 17:00:02 +0000
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