Jane Elizabeth Hawkins appears to have been a painter of oil portraits and figure subjects (including in watercolour) but more evidently a portrait copyist. That she exhibited one watercolour Portrait of a Lady at the Royal Academy in 1879 shows she painted them, but other originals need to be found to establish to what extent. Of seven by her in UK public holdings four are copies after Sir Francis Grant, one after James Rannie Swinton, and one an oil after a pastel portrait by Eden Upton Eddis. Only one, of Laura Russell (Lady Arthur Russell), in Tavistock Town Hall, was not previously listed as a copy but is after a portrait that G. F. Watts painted in 1872 and showed at the RA in 1874. (Russell, née de Peyronnet, 1836–1910, wife of the Liberal politician Lord Arthur Russell, was herself an amateur portraitist/copyist, mainly of members of the Russell family, and presented a number to Tavistock, for which her husband was MP.)

Text source: Art Detective


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