Photos: Jonathan Russell.

• Title(s): The Letter (Royal Academy).
• Description: A young, very well-dressed, girl stands in profile, facing to the viewer’s left, holding a letter in her hands (written words sketchily depicted but nothing readable by the viewer) which she is reading by the light of a window with ornate roundels, a couple of vases standing on the windowsill.
• Media: oil on canvas (Royal Academy).
• Dimensions: canvas “1016 mm x 482 mm”, frame “1234 mm x 710 mm x 70 mm” (Royal Academy).
• Signature/date/other text: monogram bottom right, the letters A, L and R combined. (Other examples of monogram use from 1879 and 1883.)
• History:
  • Early 1880s? – Period when Annie was using her ALR monogram and by similarities to The Visit).
  • 1934 Feb 9 – Auctioned Christie, Manson and Wood’s (posthumous studio sale; assumed to be the same work). “67 THE LETTER 39½ in. by 18½ in.” (Posthumous studio sale catalogue.)
  • 1934 – Purchased from A. E. Anderson by the Royal Academy with the Edward Stott Fund, original frame with original gilding. [Arthur Edward Anderson (1870-1938), art collector about whom little is really known, who donated works to many galleries.]
  • 1934 – Exhibited Royal Academy (cat. 644).
  • 1934 – Exhibited Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (cat. 945).
  • 1953 – Exhibited Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (cat. 93).
  • 1957-1964 – Arts Club, London (long term loan).
  • 1968-1969 – Exhibited Royal Academy Bicentenary Exhibition, 14 Dec 1968 to 2 Mar 1969 (Netherlands Institute for Art History, cat. 428).
  • 2018-2019 – Exhibited Manchester Art Gallery, 23 Feb 2018 to 6 Jan 2019.
• Location: Royal Academy.

This may be The Reading Girl, a painting recorded in a newspaper article as having been sent by Annie from Rome in 1883 for the Manchester Society of Women Painters annual exhibition

MANCHESTER SOCIETY OF WOMEN PAINTERS. The third annual exhibition … just opened at Miss S. Isabel Dacre's studio in South King-street … Mrs. Swynnerton, (née Miss Annie L. Robinson) sends from Rome some excellent work, notably "The Reading Girl," "Oleander," and a large fine seascape, "The Cruel Sea." [Manchester Evening News, 23 Nov 1883, p2, col. 2.]

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Page last updated 27 May 2025.