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Additional notes:
   This is not a modern print. This impression is more than 130 years old. The strike is crisp and the lines are sharp.

Artist Biography:
  Sir William Quiller Orchardson was a noted Scottish portraitist and painter of domestic and historical subjects who was knighted in June 1907, at the age of 75. Orchardson's wider popularity dates from 1880. To that year's Royal Academy summer exhibition he sent the large Napoleon on board the Bellerophon, which was acquired for the national collection by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest for Tate. For a decade or more, Orchardson's work was eagerly looked for at the Academy. He followed up the Napoleon on the Bellerophon, with Voltaire at the Academy of 1883. Technically, the "Voltaire" is, perhaps, his high-water mark; the subject does not explain itself, but requires a previous knowledge on the part of the spectator of how Voltaire was beaten by the servants of the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, and how the duc de Sully failed to avenge his guest. Orchardson caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair, 1898 The Voltaire was followed, in 1884, by the "Marriage de convenance", perhaps the most popular of all Orchardson's pictures; in 1885, by "The Salon of Madame Récamier"; in 1886, by "After", the sequel to the "Marriage de convenance", and "A Tender Chord"; in 1887, by "The First Cloud"; in 1888, by "Her Mother's Voice"; and in 1889, by "The Young Duke", a canvas on which he returned to much the same pictorial scheme as that of the "Voltaire". Subsequently, he exhibited a series of pictures in which pictorial use was made of the Empire style, the subjects, as a rule, being only just enough to suggest a title. "An Enigma", "A Social Eddy", "Reflections", "If music be the food of love, play on!", "Music, when sweet voices die, vibrates on the memory", "Her First Dance"— in these, opportunities are made to introduce old keyboard instruments, Aubusson carpets, and short-waisted gowns. Orchardson in Master Baby connected subject-painting with portraiture. "Mrs Joseph", "Mrs Ralli", "Sir Andrew Walker, Bart.", "Charles Moxon, Esq.", "Mrs Orchardson", "Conditional Neutrality" (a portrait of Orchardson's eldest son as a boy of six), "Lord Rookwood", "The Provost of Aberdeen" and, notably, "Sir Walter Gilbey, Bart.", were distinguished portraits. The major commission received by Orchardson as a portrait-painter was that for the Royal group of Queen Victoria with her son (afterwards King Edward VII), grandson and great-grandson, to be painted on one canvas for the Royal Agricultural Society. He continued painting to the end of his life, and had three portraits ready for the Royal Academy in the final year of his life, 1910.

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