Harley St. Painting By Artist Florence Rowley Bristow. Entirely Fresh to the Market Having Never Before Been Offered for Sale

Harley St. Painting By Artist Florence Rowley Bristow. Entirely Fresh to the Market Having Never Before Been Offered for Sale Florence Rowley Bristow Née Florence White, Rowley Bristow was a talented amateur artist who had trained in the studio of Walter Sickert at Rowlandson House. In her monograph on Sickert, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006), Wendy Baron briefly discusses Rowley Bristow and her reminiscences of her time in the master’s studio: ‘Mrs [Rowley] Bristow, as Florence White a pupil of the artist at Rowlandson House, told [me] that Sickert made many versions of this subject (figures watching or waiting while a funeral passes in the street below), altering the figure groupings at will’ Rowley Bristow was married to Walter Rowley Bristow, an eminent Harley Street surgeon after who the Rowley Bristow Clinic in Lyne, Surrey, is named. After his death in 1947, his widow Florence continued to serve as a keen trustee. As a talented amateur and a lady of means, her artistic output is not well documented. As far as we are aware, no paintings by the artist have ever come to market and the only reference found to her work may be a 1964 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition catalogue where a painting by a Florence Bristow, probably one and the same, was exhibited as item no. 225, titled ‘Garden in London’. If this is the same Bristow, she was then living at 25 Albert Court, London SW 7. Sickert gifted his painting The Coffee Mill to Rowley Bristow, testament to his lasting affection for his former pupil, and her talent is obvious from the quality of the present works. We are delighted to have the opportunity to bring the career of this hitherto little-known artist to light.