Studio RT Ltd

Description

We are delighted to offer for sale this superb watercolour by the artist Matilda Austin Carter, who has signed the painting in the lower right hand corner M. A. Carter and dated it 1867. The painting depicts a beautiful young lady, dressed in a white satin gown, with a bodice and overskirt patterned with gold. The bodice is edged in gold, as is her cap, from which a white veil is flowing. She is wearing a pearl bracelet on one wrist and a gold and pearl bangle on the other. She is seated by a window, with a landscape visible to the right of the dark green curtain on the left of the painting. There is a carved bookstand in the background with a large book upon it and a red cushioned kneeler in front.

Matilda Austin Carter, lived in Torquay in her early years of exhibiting, according to Graves Dictionary and exhibited 19 paintings at London exhibitions between 1862 and 1873, 18 at Suffolk Street and l at the Royal Academy. These exhibitions were listed as 'dramatic' and were mostly Shakespearean works. However she appears later as Miss M. Austin Carter with a London address, exhibiting flower paintings at the New Watercolour Society.

She is listed in The Dictionary of British Artists ( Collectors Club) as Miss Austen M. Carter with a London address in 1880 and Torquay in 1898, where her death is registered as Miss Matilda A. Carter in 1923 at the age of 88 years. In Christopher Wood's Dictionary of Victorian Painters, she is listed twice as Miss Austin Carter, Painter of Literary subjects and portraits mostly in watercolours and again as Miss Matilda Austin Carter as a London painter of flowers.

She was elected a full Member of the Royal Miniature Society in 1898.

Her auction records appear variously as Mathilde Austin Carter, Matilda Austin Carter, and Austen M. Carter. She exhibited a painting called 'A Honiton Lacemaker' at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1874 and a watercolour entitled 'A Song of the Olden Time' at Christie's achieved £600 plus premium in 2008.

The painting has been newly double mounted in two tone acid free mountboard and is newly framed in a 1 3/8" gilt frame to suit. It will be supplied wired and ready to hang.

Medium Watercolours with gum arabic.