Wood nymph after a work by Samuel Woodforde RA
Product Details
We fell in love with this lovely little pencil drawing of a young girl carrying wood. She is such a charmer! The artist is unknown as he or she signed it only with the initials SM (we wish it was SW, but we read it as SM), but he or she was truly talented. We have not seen or located the original painting but noted that a print of this work dated 1787 exists in the British Museum archive, which is called Wood Nymph.
We have reframed this lovely little pencil drawing using museum quality mount board. The golden frame itself is old and a bit tatty, but not antique. It does go very well with the drawing and sets if off nicely. Size: framed 34 x 29 cm, the drawing measures 18 x 13 cm.
When researching the drawing Mrs. B. visited the very interesting website of somethingaboutdartmoor.com which shows a drawing of a similar young lady. She left a little comment on the website about the interesting blog posts and how we have currently this little drawing which bears a strong resemblance to the drawing of the young lady featured on this website. After this Mrs. B. got side tracked in reading more about the Bronte family and ended up on the websites of the Bronte museum and the British Library. Mrs. B. learned lot about the Brontes, but found no further reference to our little drawing. At the end of October 4, we just googled "Georgian girl" and "firewood" and found the required data and added it to this product description.
On October 5, Mrs. B. revisited the site of somethingaboutdartmoor.com to reread the very interesting post about hats and noted that the webmaster had commented on her comment. She had never thought that her little comment would be worth replying to. Good grief, it showed all the information we wanted to know. We could have saved ourselves so much time if we had only checked back, but then Mrs B. would not have read up on the Bronte family.
And then Mrs B. had most unintentionally hurt the webmaster's feelings by not replying to her post (as she had not checked) and posting information we had found during our research, which matched the information the webmaster had provided in her reply but without giving her credit. We were so sorry !! The webmaster is a very gracious and forgiving woman, who was most understanding when we explained what had happened. She dedicated her very kind blogpost of October 6 to Mrs. B. and featured the drawing of Wood Nymph in her post named Some Bonnet and Black Hat Good Vibrations: The ‘Wood-Nymph’ by Samuel Woodforde.
The painter of Wood Nymph was Samuel Woodforde, who was born in 1763 at Castle Cary, Somerset and from an early age was patronized by the Hoare family of Stourhead, Wiltshire. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1782 and left for Italy in 1786 to study the Italian Old Masters. After his return in 1792 he began to exhibit frequently at the Royal Academy, showing portraits, historical and literary subjects. After his marriage in 1815, he went back to Italy, where he died in 1817. If you find the time to visit Stourhead, please do, as it is a beautiful house with magnificent gardens.
