Signed and dated l.r.: Arthur Hacker/1909

Oil on panel, 26 by 35.5 cm

Hacker’s work took a strikingly different direction just prior to his election as a Royal Academician in 1910. Having previously made his reputation as a flamboyant portraitist and subject painter in a grand late Victorian-Edwardian style, this later work adopted a softer, more painterly style that is more about mood and tone than exacting detail. Such works are Hacker’s response to artists like the American painter James McNeill Whistler. Whistler had died in 1903 but his influence on British art extended from the 1880s to well beyond his death into the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.