PORTRAIT OF AGATHONIKE SABINA CRAIES.

agathonike-sabina-craies-WM.jpg

Agathonike Sabina Craies (1885-1947), daughter of William Fielden Craies, a London barrister, and Euterpe Ionides, daughter of a wealthy Manchester cloth merchant and supporter of the arts. Agathonike would have been 6 or 7 at the time of the portrait.

… we do not like, “Agathonike, daughter of W. Craies, Esq.” (288). There seems to be in it a conscious striving after the odd and unusual, and the result is not happy. The bearer of this long Greek name is a little child, with thick masses of dark brown hair. She is dressed in a deep red frock, and faces us, her head ad bust forming almost an equilateral triangle, an unpleasing composition, which is very much accentuated by being forced out of the frame by a sapphire blue background devoid of graduations.

Birmingham Daily Post, 7 May 1982, p9.

Mrs. A. L. Swynnerton’s … portrait of Mr. W. Craies’s child … is full of vivacity and childlike grace, and combines with facial resemblance the more often absent qualities of an artistic composition.’

The Illustrated London News, 21 May, 1892.

Exhibited in the New Gallery, 1892, with the catalogue description “In pink frock, with blue background.” A painting, stated to have been ‘lent by Miss Craies’ for the 1956 Alpine Club exhibition was called “The Pink Frock,” and is assumed here to be the same work.

  • Media: oil on canvas (assumed).
  • Dimensions: ?
  • History: known from image in the The Illustrated London News, 21 May 1892, as on display in the New Gallery exhibition that year.
  • Location: unknown.

2 thoughts on “PORTRAIT OF AGATHONIKE SABINA CRAIES.

  1. Pingback: Alpine Club Exhibition, 1956 – new works and web site revisions – ANNIE LOUISA SWYNNERTON (1844-1933)

  2. Pingback: New identifications #2 – ANNIE LOUISA SWYNNERTON (1844-1933)

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