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Nora Janet Beausire
Edward R. Hughes
Signed, inscribed, and dated 1887
Red chalk on paper
20 x 18 inches; 50.8 x 45.7 cm.
Mass Gallery, London
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Commentary by Dennis T. Lanigan
Hughes was well-known as a portraitist. Some potential clients who were unable to afford a portrait in oil could commission a portrait drawing, which thus allowed Hughes to expand his client base. Amongst his best portraits are those of children executed in red chalk and this drawing of nine-year-old Nora Janet Beausire, shown full face with a wide-eyed expression, is a characteristic example. She was the youngest daughter of Liverpool art collector Joseph Herbert Beausire and his wife Fanny Adela Mary Rust. The couple had ten children, including five daughters. In the same year that Hughes executed this drawing of Nora Janet he did another of her slightly older sister Henrietta Imrie. Nora Janet was born on 23 March 1878 in Birkenhead and died, age ninety-three, on 19 August 1971. She married Alfred Stewart Clapper in 1909.
Joseph Beausire was a Birkenhead businessman. He was Chairman of the West India and Pacific Steamship Company, formed in 1863 in Liverpool, that specialized in the South American trade. He was also a director of the Royal Insurance Company, the North and South Wales Bank, the British and Foreign Marine Insurance Company, and the Anglo-Chilean Nitrate Railway Company. His art collection focused on Liverpool School artists like William Davis, but he also collected works by Pre-Raphaelites like D.G. Rossetti and J.M. Strudwick, as well as landscapes by J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.
The Maas Gallery, London has most generously given its permission to use in the Victorian Web information, images, and text from its catalogues. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Maas Gallery.
Readers should consult the gallery website (link) to obtain information about recent exhibitions and to order their catalogues. [JB]
Bibliography
Drawings and Watercolours. London: Maas Gallery 2019, cat. 77.
Gorringes Winter Sale. Lewes: Gorringes (4 December 2018): lot 419.
Hartnoll, Julian. Burne-Jones and the Influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. Paris: Galerie du Luxembourg, 1972, cat. 32, 46-47.
Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Art and the Victorian Middle Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 390-91.
Victorian Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours. London: Sotheby's Belgravia (4 April 1978): lot 37, 6.
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Created 22 November 2019
Last modified 13 May 2026