The Art Gallery

Lily Delissa Joseph's Art Gallery is one of at least twelve paintings she made of the interior of the National Gallery in London. The portrait in a gold frame to the left of the doorway has been identified as probably of Mrs Siddons, as Mrs Haller in ‘The Stranger’ (1804) by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), which was in the National Gallery collection by 1868. (We are grateful to Isobel Muir for this information.)

Delissa Joseph favoured a restricted palette of of white, cobalt, rose madder, orange madder and black, obtained from the (now defunct) supplier Newman and executed here in a lightly impastoed Impressionist manner. Typically, she includes a figure within the interior, perhaps for scale.