International Women’s Day: Who is Paxton’s Lady in Red?

A dark haired woman in a red coat holds a fan. She is looking down to the viewer's left. Her hair is up decorated with a white flower. This is Ellen Moxon in the year before her marriage to the painter, William Quiller Orchardson.

One of the most eye-catching portraits in the Picture Gallery at Paxton House is a full length portrait of a dark haired girl in a red coat with a fan. It’s a wonderful image but who is she?

She is Ellen Moxon, painted in 1872 when she was just 18 and newly engaged to the man who was to become her husband, William Quiller Orchardson. Orchardson was a painter, born in Edinburgh and just forging his career in London where he had lived since 1862. When they met he was newly returned from Venice from where he had had to dodge the disruption of the Franco-Prussian War to make it safely back to England.

A black and white photograph of a Victorian gentleman with a tinted nose and a generous moustache. He wears a white shirt with a soft collar, a black waistcoat and paler jacket with two tone lapels. He is the artist William Quiller Orchardson — William Quiller Orchardson

The portrait of Ellen shows his skill in capturing character and the influence of Japanese prints on artists at the time but he was to make his name as a painter of restrained domestic studies with limited colour, self conscious arrangement and sentimental themes. By 1877 he was a full member of the Royal Academy and by 1881 was one of the most popular painters in London.

Master Baby by William Quiller Orchardson, 1886

Ellen has, like so many Victorian women, slipped into historical obscurity. The marriage was happy and they went on to have four sons and two daughters. Luckily for us, we get tiny glimpses of her life through her husband’s work. We see her playing with one of their children in charming study from 1886 entitled Master Baby and see the drawing room of the family house in Portland Place in Her Mother’s Voice. The room is fashionable for the period and furnished in the Empire style that suited Orchardson’s scenes of upper class married life.

Of their seven children, only Celeste, born in 1876, died before she left infancy, the other six grew up to outlive their parents. William Quiller Orchardson was knighted in 1907 and died in 1910, still painting, at the age of 78. Lady Ellen lived on until May 1917, suffering the tragedy of the death in the First World War of her eldest son, Charles, who was also a painter and married with two children. His death was less than a month before her own. She left the portrait of herself as a girl, among other works, to the National Gallery in Edinburgh and portraits of her parents, Mr and Mrs Charles Moxon, to the Tate.

Paxton House reopens to the public on 29th March this year. Book here.