Mrs Patrick Campbell

Florence Kate Upton was born in New York in 1873, the daughter of English émigrés to America. Following the death of her father in 1889, she returned with her mother to England and began painting and illustrating to assist her family financially. Together with her mother Bertha, she devised the Golliwog books, Bertha writing the stories while her daughter made the illustrations. Although she made her living largely through illustration. She was nonetheless a very accomplished painter in her own right, described by her biographer, Edith Lyttleton as”'a considerable artist . . . accessible beyond the normal to sense impressions of color and form.” Upton studied under George Hitchcock in Egmond Hoef, Holland and became great friends with both George and Mrs. Hitchcock. She exhibited at the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy, including several paintings depicting Holland, with which she had a particular affinity. In 1905, she exhibited “Le salon Jaune” at the International Exhibition in Nantes and gained the Médaille d’honneur. After the exhibition, Florence was made “Sociétaire” of the “Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.” After her death, the picture was purchased by the “Friends of Art” society in Baltimore and now hangs in their gallery. She was also an excellent portraitist and her subjects included her friend, the celebrated actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, indeed Upton's portrait was considered to be one of the finest of her and the actress cherished it until her death in 1940. In March 1917, Christie's opened a 12-day sale, which was an interesting feature of the third day, where the original Golliwog and his Dutch Doll companions, with the original drawings and MSS of the eleven famous Golliwog books, were presented by Upton herself. The set of dolls has since been presented to the London Museum. The amount Florence raised was used to purchase a Golliwog ambulance that was sent to the front in France. She died on 16th October 1922 and is buried in Hampstead Cemetery. Her obituary in The Times rightly recognized that she was first a painter and second a children's book illustrator.

Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

Find a collection of authentic Impressionist art on 1stDibs.

An elegant and sophisticated decorative touch in any living space, portrait paintings have remained popular throughout the years and are widely loved pieces of art for display in many homes today.

Portrait paintings are at least as old as ancient Egypt, where realistic, lifelike depictions of the recently deceased — commonly known as “mummy portraits” — were painted on wooden panels and affixed to mummies as part of the burial tradition.

For centuries, painters have used portraiture as a means of expressing a subject’s nobility, societal status and authority. Portraits were given as gifts in Renaissance Europe, and a portrait artist might have been commissioned to help mark a significant occasion such as a wedding or a promotion to high office. Prior to the advent of photography, which eventually replaced painted portraits as a quicker and more efficient way of capturing a person’s essence, the subject of a portrait had to sit for hours until the painter had finished. And during the 18th century in particular, if an artist commissioned for a portrait struggled with how to adequately memorialize and capture a subject’s likeness, sometimes a portrait painting wasn’t completed for up to a year.

Whether it’s part of the gallery-style approach to your living-room or dining-room walls or merely inspiration as you devise an eye-grabbing color scheme in your home, a portrait painting is a timeless decorative object for any interior. A landscape painting or sculpture might give you the kind of insight into a specific region of the world or a different culture that you can ascertain only through art. Similarly, when you take the time to learn about the subject of a portrait painting that you bring into your home — the sitter’s history, the relationship between the sitter and the artist should one exist, the story of how the portrait came to be — that work can become intensely personal in addition to its place as an object for an art-hungry corner of your apartment or house.

On 1stDibs, visit a vast collection of famous portrait paintings or works by emerging artists. Search by medium to find the right portrait paintings for your home in oil paint, synthetic resin paint and more. Find portrait paintings in a variety of styles, too, including contemporary, Impressionist and Pop art, or search by artist to find unique works created by painters such as Mark Beard, Steve Kaufman and Montse Valdés.