This is one of a charming group of oil sketches that came from the artist’s family and their descendants. Shannon, of Irish-American extraction, came from the U.S.A. to London in his late teens and rose to become one of England’s most successful portrait painters of the early 20th century. Shannon was always a figure painter and his early pictures in the 1880s were typically genre paintings, showing an awareness first of the social realist movement and later, around 1890, of the general move to painting en plein air. These pictures would be the kind of works he exhibited at the avant-garde New English Art Club, of which he was one of the founder members in 1886. But his popularity as a portrait painter grew to the point where, from around 1900, he would paint little else. His sitters’ book was always full and increasingly with appointments with the grandest in the land. Along the way he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (1897), a full member in 1909 and would be knighted in 1922.

Not all artists keep their sketches and it is fortunate this group of pictures has survived. The sketches give us an understanding of Shannon’s working methods. We note here too that practice, common in so many artists, of using his family members as models. And where the finished pictures are known it is interesting to compare the sketch to the final offering. But most of all we have an opportunity to feel the seemingly effortless dexterity Shannon showed in getting his first thoughts down on canvas. The fluency of the brush-working of this highly competent artist is compelling.