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Ellinor Guthrie was born in 1838 in Perth, Australia, the daughter of James and Ellen Stirling. Her father, a naval officer of Scottish background, had led the party of British colonists who settled Perth and Fremantle in 1829 and was Western Australia's first governor. When Ellinor was still an infant, her father left the governorship to return to active service in the navy, eventually becoming an admiral. She and her ten brothers and sisters were brought up at the family home in Guildford, England, and a succession of naval stations in the Mediterranean and Far East. In 1856, aged eighteen, she married James Alexander Guthrie, a successful Scottish merchant banker of the firm of Chalmers and Guthrie; they lived in London, in the fashionable and affluent Portland Place, and between 1857 and 1869 had nine children. Sittings for the present portrait took place after Mrs. Guthrie had recovered from the birth of their fifth daughter in October 1864.
The Guthries probably commissioned the portrait, although Leighton may possibly have painted it as an expression of friendship; he seldom accepted portrait commissions and felt uncomfortable painting sitters who were not also friends. Certainly he was drawn to Mrs. Guthrie's Mediterranean-looking features and after the portrait used her as the model for the central figure of a priestess in his large friezelike painting of The Syracusan Bride (1865-66; private collection).
The work typifies the movement in advanced British painting of the 1860s away from the intensely factual and didactic manner of the Pre-Raphaelites toward an art of unashamedly decorative and sensual appeal. Under the Aesthetic Movement, as it came to be called, the artist regarded his first duty as the creation of beauty-often through the representation of people and things beautiful in themselves, always by means of the most exquisitely refined technique. Mrs. Guthrie is shown surrounded by objects of decorative art that seem to pay homage to her beauty. In the flowers and vases the colors appear as a separating-out of those subtly blended in her complexion. The ornate chair and the large Baroque painting in the background, which were probably in Leighton's studio, suggest the idea thatshe is not only beautiful herself but the inhabitant of a world-albeit a hothouse world-full of beauty and culture. The inclusion of the painting also serves to associate Leighton's brilliantly animated brushwork, displayed especially in the treatment of the dress, with the painterly tradition of the Old Masters.
Mrs. Guthrie's husband died young in 1873, when she was only thirty-five, leaving her a large fortune. Later she married as her second husband Guthrie's cousin, Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot; he was a translator and publisher of Oriental literature who collaborated with Richard Burton on the first English edition of the Kama Sutra. She died in 1911, aged seventy-three.



Malcolm Warner

Malcolm Warner, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 162, no. 66