Red Rose and White

Frederick Sandys's voluptuous drawing, executed in rich black and red chalk, is one of a small number of Pre-Raphaelite works in the AMAM collection. Active as a draftsman and illustrator as well as a painter, Sandys was educated first by his father and then at the Norwich School of Design. He relocated from his birthplace of Norwich to London by 1851, the year he first showed at the Royal Academy of Art. He exhibited regularly at the Academy until 1886.

Sandys first met the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1857, when he asked to draw Rossetti's portrait. Although the portrait was intended for Sandys's wood engraving A Nightmare-a satirical reading of Sir John Everett Millais's painting, A Dream of the Past, Sir Isumbras at the Ford-Sandys and Rossetti became friends. The two lived together at Rossetti's Cheyne Walk home for much of the year in 1866, but their friendship dissolved in 1869 when Rossetti accused Sandys of plagiarizing his art.

Red Rose and White is a superb example of Sandys's virtuosity as a draftsman. It also illustrates how he was able both to mythologize a type and to retain an acute specificity of characterization. From the late 1860s, Sandys made a series of drawings of almost life-size female heads, many depicting his muse and mistress, the actress Mary Emma Jones, who performed under the stage name "Miss Clive." Widely admired for her luxuriously thick, curly hair, she first sat for Sandys in 1862. In this sensuous drawing, two full-bloom roses are buried in her hair, and her right hand plays languorously with the mass of curls falling over her shoulder. Sandys sketched a mere suggestion of the neckline of Jones's dress, focusing instead on her partly opened mouth and her eyes, which gaze directly at the viewer. In 1867, the year this drawing was made, the couple was living together and Jones gave birth to the first of their nine children.