JOHN MACALLAN SWAN, R.A., R.W.S. (BRITISH, 1847-1910)

Born in 1887 and named after her paternal grandmother, Elfrida was the eldest child of Sir William Eden and his wife Sybil. In 1909 she married Leopold Guy Francis Maynard Greville, Lord Brooke, who succeeded his father as 6th Earl of Warwick on 15 January 1924.
Probably painted in the early 1890s, this charming portrait by Macallan Swan shows an engaging young girl wearing a fashionable loose fitting dress, as favoured by advocates of the Aesthetic movement and popularised by Liberty, set in a contemporary interior of rich greens and purples.
However, by October 1893 Sir William was clearly unsatisfied with the likeness and wrote to David Croal Thompson of The Goupil Gallery to ask him to help dispose of it. Further correspondence between Elbert Jan Van Wisselingh and Whistler in 1895 (by which point the latter was already embroiled in his dispute with Eden over the portrait of Lady Eden - see lot 142 for further details) reveals that the Dutch dealer Van Wisselingh had been shown the picture by Ernest Brown of the Fine Art Society around two years previously when Sir William was looking for a buyer for the portrait. Sadly the remaining correspondence doesn't reveal if the Fine Art Society managed to find the eventual purchaser of the work. However, it was clearly sold at some stage to William Lawson Peacock as the picture appeared in the sale of his estate in these Rooms in 1925.