Portrait of Mrs Thoby Prinsep, c.1835 (coloured chalks on paper)

Sara Prinsep (nee Sara Pattle, 1816-1887) was the third of the seven Pattle sisters who played such a significant role in the annals of Victorian art. Her famous elder sister was Julia Margaret Cameron, the celebrated photographer. In 1835 Sara married Henry Thoby Prinsep, an Indian civil servant. In the 1850s and 1860s she held a salon at their London home, Little Holland House in Kensington, which was frequented by everybody who was anybody in the worlds of science, politics, literature and art. Mrs. Stirling wrote of her famous Sunday afternoon at homes: A breezy Bohemianism prevailed. That time of dread, the conventional Sunday of the early Victorian era, was exchanged for the wit of cynics, the dreams of the inspired, the thoughts of the profoundest thinkers of the age... Among the habitues of Little Holland House were Carlyle, with his rugged genius, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Browning and a score of others whose names now enrich the sun of England's greatness. George Frederick Watts was her resident genius, living in the house. In his studio there he painted portraits of many of the distinguished guests. The eccentric and fiery Sara had rescued him from a life of poverty and ill health, taking her newfound protege under her wing and nurturing his every need; dominating his life for some twenty years. Only a year older than Watts, but formidable in contrast to his frailty, Sara would, at times, almost devour the artist's sensitive nature with her adulation. His paintings lined the walls at Little Holland House. Here, according to Mary Watts, he used to carry a small ivory covered notebook and metalpoint, so that whenever he noticed a particularly beautiful posture or line of drapery he could raise his hand and call out to Sara or her sisters, Oh, pray, stay where you are for a moment, while he drew a monumental outline on to the small page. Wilfrid Blunt, England's Michelangelo, A Biography of George Frederic Watts, London 1975, page 77