GEORGE PRICE BOYCE RWS (1826-1897)    Biography
Pre-Raphaelite, England (founded 1848)

Portrait of Annie Miller (England, 1854)

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Pencil on paper
Signed with monogram and inscribed sketch of AM / Febr. 27, 1854 / Annie Miller lower left

Dimensions:

12.50cm wide   17.00cm high (4.92 inches wide  6.69 inches high)

Provenance:
William Holman Hunt OM RWS, 1858
Anonymous (Sale, Sotheby's London, June 23 1981, Lot 18, illustrated)
Christopher Wood Gallery, London

Literature:
Violet Hunt, The Wife of Rossetti, London, 1932, illustrated opposite page 90
Virginia Surtees, The Diaries of George Price Boyce, Norfolk, 1980, pages 20-21, 82
Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, London, 1985, figure 16, illustrated
Christopher Newall and Judy Egerton, George Price Boyce (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1987, page 43

Exhibition History
New Haven, Yale Centre for British Art, The Edmund J. and Suzanne MacCormick Collection (Suzanne P. Casteras ed.), 1984, pages 22-23, number 3, illustrated
Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix Art Museum, English Idylls: The Edmund J. and Suzanne MacCormick Collection of Victorian Art, 1988, number 3

Description / Expertise
In 1854, William Holman Hunt embarked on a trip to the Holy Land, leaving his fiancée Annie Miller in London. He had discovered her working as a barmaid in a Chelsea slum. Hunt had seen in her his ideal of Pre-Raphaelite beauty and had ‘rescued’ her with the intention of moulding her into a lady to be his wife. Before leaving he had issued strict instructions to her that she should not model for any of his artist friends (especially Rossetti). George Price Boyce had met Hunt the previous year in the studio of his good friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Despite describing Hunt as a thoroughly genuine, humorous, good-hearted, straightforward English like fellow, Boyce ignored his wishes and characteristically, succumbed to Annie’s will to model for him and to have a good time.(1) Boyce was renowned for his weakness for female beauty and this delicate drawing of Annie as a young girl, made shortly after Hunt’s departure for Syria, is a result of this forbidden liaison. In January 1858 Hunt requested and then insistently demanded Boyce’s 1854 Portrait of Annie Miller.(2)

After Hunt’s return and his break from Annie in 1860, Boyce and Rossetti began to fiercely battle for sittings with her; Rossetti being the consistent winner in this competition. In Boyce’s diary of 1860, we see that his appointments with Annie were constantly usurped. He notes on several occasions how Rossetti would interrupt his sittings with her, even to the point of taking her away. In one taunting note from his competitor, Rossetti jeers: Dear Boyce, Blow you, Annie is coming to me tomorrow. I’m sure you won’t mind, like a good chap.(3) No wonder Rossetti’s wife, Lizzie Siddal, became jealous and threw his drawings of Annie out the window.


1. Surtees, Virginia (ed.)The Diaries of George Price Boyce, Old Watercolour Society, 1980, page 9
2. Christopher Newall, George Price Boyce, The Tate Gallery, introduction to the exhibition catalogue, London 1987, pages 17-18.
3. Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter and Poet, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999, page 209.