Cherry Ripe (painting): Difference between revisions

Painting by John Everett Millais

Cherry Ripe is is an 1879 oil painting by the English artist John Everett Millais. It depicts a young girl sitting on top of two sacks of cherries. She wears Georgian-style dress, inspired by Sir Joshua Reynolds‘s 1788 portrait of Penelope Boothby.^[1]

The painting was commissioned in 1879 by William Luson Thomas, founder and editor of The Graphic. His four-year-old niece Edie (Edith) Ramage had attended a fancy-dress ball dressed as Penelope Boothby in the Reynolds portrait, and Thomas was so charmed he wanted to commemorate the event.^[2] The Graphic paid 1,000 guineas for the commission, which figure presumably included the copyright, as in 1880 The Graphic offered a coloured reproduction of the image to subscribers.^[1] The print was very popular, becoming “a sentimental adornment in every Victorian and Edwardian nursery”.^[2]

The proprietors of The Graphic sold the painting to Charles J. Wertheimer. It then entered the collection of noted art collector Sir Joseph Robinson, and from there to various private collectors.^[1]

Cherry Ripe was sold by Sothebys in 2004, in their ‘Important British Pictures’ auction. The estimate was £800,000 to £1,200,000.^[1]

Edie Ramage later married Francisco de Paula Ossorio, and was identified as the sitter in 1958, when the painting was on display in “The Robinson Collection” exhibition the Royal Academy in London. The president of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Wheeler, took some trouble to track her down. Edith Ossorio visited the painting and told Wheeler some details of the sittings.^[2][1] Wheeler’s wife, Muriel, Lady Wheeler, painted a portrait of Ossorio that same year. Ossorio died in 1970 aged 96, and is buried in Budleigh Salterton.

• 1898. M. H. Spielmann, Millais and his Works, Edinburgh, catalogue no. 202; pp. 139–140, 174, 179.
• 1899. John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, two volumes, London, vol. 2, reproduced p. 119; pp. 117–121; 479, 495.
• 1958. Ellis Waterhouse, The Robinson Collection, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, reproduced p. 61.
• 1986. Nicholas Penny, Reynolds, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, p. 319 (as part of the discussion of Reynold’s portrait of Penelope Boothby).
• 1991. Lauren Bradley, “From Eden to Empire. John Everett Millais’s ‘Cherry Ripe'”, Victorian Studies vol. 34, no. 2 (Winter, 1991), pp. 179–203.
• 1992. Pamela Tamarkin Reis, “Victorian Centerfold: Another Look at Millais’s ‘Cherry Ripe'”, Victorian Studies vol. 35, no. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 201–205.
• 1999. Peter Funnell and Malcolm Warner, Millais: Portraits, exhibition catalogue, National Portrait Gallery, London, p. 23, reproduced p. 23.