A three-quarter-length portrait of a young woman standing in a doorway, holding a tray. She wears Elizabeth costume: a pale dress with a starched collar, voluminous sleeves, a pointed bodice and full skirt; her blonde hair, however, is in distinctly Victorian ringlets on either side of her face. The silver tray bears a small wine glass and a decanter of red wine; to the left is a vine evidently framing the doorway.

Anne Page

William Powell Frith (1819-1909)

1852

Oil on canvas

45.9 x 32.9 cm 

RCIN 404603

Image credit: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

The marriage of ‘sweet Anne Page’ forms the romantic sub-plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Anne’s youth, beauty, and invitation to paint medieval English costume (to varying degrees of accuracy), made her a favourite with nineteenth-century painters.

William Powell Frith shows her with a decanter of wine in the door of her father’s house. The scene encapsulates the vision of happy English domesticity many saw in Shakespeare’s play, and Frith painted it many times.

In 1893, the widow of the art collector Sir Richard Wallace presented this painting to George, Duke of York and Princess May of Teck as a wedding present. Lady Wallace probably considered this 'sweet' Windsor painting particularly appropriate: the future George V and Queen Mary were scions of a Windsor-based monarchy that George's grandmother, Queen Victoria had worked hard to establish as domestic and familial.

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William Shakespeare

1910-17

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