A portrait of a beautiful laundress, which was bought by a soap powder billionaire, is to be sold at auction for the first time in almost a century, and is expected to fetch up to £6m.
A Christmas Carol, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was once part of the largest collection of English paintings ever assembled by one man – William Hesketh Lever, first Viscount Leverhulme, who made his fortune from Sunlight Soap. Lever kept the painting all his life, when most of his pictures went to a gallery in the model village created for his factory workers.
It will be sold with two more Victorian masterpieces bought by his son: Tuscan Girl, by William Holman Hunt, and A Visit to the Yacht, by James Tissot. The three pictures, to be sold at Sotheby’s, London, in December, are valued at up to £14m.
Grant Ford, a 19th-century expert at the auctioneers, said: “I have been here nearly 27 years, and I really think these are the best Victorian pictures we’ve had in that time. To see one Victorian painting of such quality would be remarkable, to get three in together is extraordinary.”
In 1917 the Rossetti was bought by Lever, who already owned several drawings by the artist but yearned for an oil painting. The model was Ellen Smith, a laundress whose beauty was spoiled when her face was slashed by an admirer jealous of her success as an artist’s model. She went back to washing clothes for a living.
Most of Lever’s enormous collection went to the Lady Lever Gallery, which he created to improve the minds of his factory workers at Port Sunlight beside the Mersey – where the three pictures have been on loan for the last few years.
Lever kept the painting at Thornton Manor, a Victorian mock Tudor mansion which eventually held more than 20,000 art objects, where it hung in the magnificent drawing room
He slept under an open-sided canopy on the roof in all weathers, rising at 4.30am to plunge into a bracing cold bath.
“He had a great eye and great advisers – and great wealth, of course,” Ford said. “By rising so early, by 9.30 his business was more or less done and dusted and he could devote the rest of the day to collecting.”
Lever’s heirs continued collecting, if on a less epic scale, and added the Holman Hunt of the little girl with her pet dove, painted in Italy and still in its original frame, and the Tissot of lackadaisically elegant figures on a yacht on the Thames, with a terminally bored little girl in the foreground.
The pictures will leave England for the first time this month when the auctioneers send them on tour to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow, New York and Los Angeles, before they go on show in London in early December.