Galerie Betty Charles is pleased to present a rare and significant portrait by Edward Seago — “It is a work that speaks to both the exceptional nature of the subject and the artist’s own celebrated reluctance when it came to painting women”, says Founder of the gallery Lucy Charles.

Seago had learned, perhaps to his cost, that every woman holds a preconceived idea of her own appearance — a definite image of how she should look in a portrait — and that between her vision and the painter’s eye, there is often a world of difference. That he chose, in this mature and atmospheric work, to paint Lady Rosemary at all, suggests something extraordinary: a commission too prestigious to refuse.