Of all the painters who shaped the visual imagination of the Victorian age, few reached higher ground than George Frederic Watts. He was the painter of Hope (1886, Tate Britain) and Love and Life (1884-5, Tate Britain) – both part of his ambitious but unfinished cosmic cycle he called the House of Life – the friend and portraitist of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone, Robert Browning, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, whose likenesses he gathered into the great Hall of Fame now in the National Portrait Gallery. Twice, he refused a baronetcy from Queen Victoria. In 1902, on the institution of the Order of Merit, he accepted his place among the original twenty-four members, as he put it, on behalf of all English artists. To his great friend and ‘brother-in-art’, Frederic, Lord Leighton, he was, by then, ‘England’s Michelangelo’.

Watts’ artistic ambitions had been forged in Italy. In 1843 he won the Westminster cartoon competition for Caractacus Led in Triumph through the Streets of Rome (Victoria & Albert Museum), earning him £300 which funded a four-year stay in Tuscany that was the formative experience of his life. From 1843 to 1847, Watts lived at Casa Feroni in Florence and, in summer, at the Villa Medicea di Careggi in the hills above the city, as a guest of Henry Fox, fourth Baron Holland, the British minister at the Tuscan court, and his wife Augusta. He was given a garden studio at Careggi and uninterrupted access to the masters: Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel, Giotto at the Arena Chapel, Titian and Veronese in Venice and Florence. His portraits of Lady Holland, executed in those years, were already being compared by visitors to Veronese, his colour to Titian. For the rest of his career, he would aim, in his own words, 'at the highest things that have been done’; and the highest things, for him, were Italian.

This influence is seen in the present work, which is a study for the finished version, ‘Isabella – A Portrait of Miss Arabella Prescott’ (1857, private collection), which Watts exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859. It received high praise, with The Times critic writing: ‘a masterpiece of the tenderer harmonies of blonde colouring, in combination with such drawing as is seldom called to the service of portraiture’ (10 May 1859). It has a deliberate Renaissance quality, the sitter shown half-length with a cool, reserved expression. She turns at a slight angle and is set against a plain blue sky. Removed of detail, it enhances the presence of the figure framed against it. Her parted hair is drawn around her pale, oval face and crossed on the crown by a slender plaited band and gathered at the back, through which a rose is held. Her simple dress is softly painted in delicate tones, with its folds and details beautifully rendered. In the present study we see the underworkings of the artist, the dress and background still in plain washes which contrasts strongly with the face, making for a strikingly modern portrait.

Watts had first met Arabella’s father, William George Prescott, via mutual friends while he was residing with the artist Valentine and his wife Sara Prinsep at Little Holland House in Kensington, which was renowned for the salons Sara held there for the leading artists and writers of the period. Encountering Arabella, he was enchanted and asked to paint her – the fact it was not a formal commission accounts for its distinct and personal finish.

The painting has a distinguished provenance having been in the collection of notable discerning collectors through the 20th century. It first resurfaced with the dealer Robert Frank, who from the late 1920s through the 1950s ran a gallery at 4 St James’s Place. Frank was both dealer and collector, and the picture remained within his own holdings. His widow, Charlotte, sold the painting to Roderick Cameron (1913–1985), an American travel writer and aesthete with a beautiful villa at La Fiorentina, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. From Cameron the work passed to Henry Myron Blackmer II (1923–1988), a Denver-born banker who had settled in Athens after the Second World War and built a renowned collection of books, paintings, antiquities and furniture. His library was sold in a dedicated sale at Sotheby’s in 1989. The painting was then acquired by Christopher Henry Gibbs (1938–2018), the legendary London antique dealer and collector, who hung it at the Manor House at Clifton Hampden until his sale at Christie’s in September 2000, from where it has since remained in a private collection.