Frank Owen SALISBURY (1874-1962, English)
Portrait of the artist’s daughter, Sylvia
1929
signed
oil on canvas
112 x 87cm / 44 x 34in
Price: Sold
Provenance:
By direct descent from the artist
Exhibited:
Royal Society of Portrait Painters
Frank Salisbury was one of the most renowned and successful portrait painters of the early twentieth century. His father worked all his life as a plumber, decorator, and ironmonger and had eleven children. Frank was a sickly child and therefore deprived him of a full education. At the age of fifteen, he became an apprentice to his eldest brother Henry James Salisbury who managed an eminent stained glass company in Alma Road, St Albans. He quickly became proficient at this craft and displayed a particular skill for the painterly detail added to the glass before its final firing. Henry recognised Frank’s talent and sponsored him to spend three days-per-week at Heatherley’s School of Art; following this Frank won a scholarship to the Royal Academy where he studied for five years and won two silver medals and two scholarships. Works of his were included in over seventy of the Royal Academy’s annual summer shows. His art was consistently conservative and figurative – he was a staunch critic of modern art and particularly his contemporaries Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Piet Mondrian.
He found success on both sides of the Atlantic and was known as the ‘Painter Laureate’. While training as a stained glass artist, he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools and studied in Italy in 1896. This led to a providential meeting with Lord Wakefield, the Methodist philanthropist, who saw his introduction to society portraiture. Twenty-five members of the Royal House of Windsor sat for Salisbury and he was the first artist to paint HM Queen Elizabeth II. He also painted some of the most iconic portraits of Winston Churchill. Salisbury was remarkably successful in the USA where he was deemed to have fulfilled the American Dream. He made thirteen visits, basing himself in Washington and New York, where his portraiture would be a roll call of American wealth. He painted six Presidents, and his Franklin D. Roosevelt remains the official White House portrait.
There are paintings of Sylvia from childhood into womanhood. Our portrait was painted in 1929, the year before she married and became Mrs. Sylvia Crichton. It depicts her as a fashionable confident young lady with one hand on her hip and the other rested on her knee – she sits upright and has a characterful poise. She looks past the viewer into the middle distance which gives the image a relaxed non-confrontational atmosphere and one can easily imagine catching her gaze across a room at a society ball. Her clothing is typical of the time – stylish, but not overly decadent. Her haircut is up to the minute and coupled with her pearls she seems to be channeling Coco Chanel.