Art Institute of ChicagoPublic domain

The Lovers

William Powell Frith · 1855

Provenance

Ownership history

Commissioned from the artist by Alfred Brooks; his estate sale Christie's, London, May 17, 1879, lot 77 to William Vokins [according to annotated copy of sale catalogue at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown]. English private collection; sold Sotheby's, London, March 12, 1997, lot 75, bought by Agnew's and the Maas Gallery, London; sold to John Schaeffer, Sydney, Australia, 1998 [according to Martha Wolff's email correspondence with Gabriel Naughton, Agnew's, March 26, 2003]; sold to the Art Institute through Nevill Keating Pictures Ltd., London, 2003.

Recorded by Art Institute of Chicago.

Exhibitions

London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1855, no. 126.
London, The Maas Gallery, Victorian Pictures, 4 June-18 July, 1997, no. 53.
Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Pre-Raphaelites and Olympians: Selected Works of Victorian Art from the John and Julie Schaeffer and the Art Gallery of New South Wales Collections, 2001, catalogue by Richard Beresford, p. 11.
Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, Love and Death in the Age of Queen Victoria, 2001, catalogue by Angus Trumble, p. 112.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Building a Collection: New Acquisitions and Promised Gifts of British Art, May 1–June 20, 2004, no. 21.

Literature

Review of Royal Academy exhibition, The Art Journal (1855), p. 172.
Review of Royal Academy exhibition, The Athenaeum, no. 1437 (May 12, 1855), p. 558.
William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, London, 1887/1888, pp. 263-264.
David Layne Montgomery, "William Powell Frith (1819-1909). A Reevaluation of his artistic career", PhD. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1997, pp. 115-116, 657.

Comparables