The following painting was likely reduced in size at some point and compares to a portrait by Soyer in the collection of Tintinhull House in Somerset. Though undated, it depicts Letitia Mary Napier (1814-1839). She holds a Skye terrier, an unusual breed, popularised during the reign of Queen Victoria. It is worth mentioning that Soyer’s studio sale of 1859 included a portrait of “girl nursing a Skye terrier.” The style also accords with two other portraits by Soyer, where sitters are accompanied by dogs. Their heads seem to emerge from a profusion of jagged impasto, painted rapidly and decisively, with two slightly startled brown eyes staring directly at the viewer.

The following painting of a clergyman belongs to a trio of studies by Soyer that surfaced in Cirencester recently. All of them were on the same canvas type and appear to have been cropped in size.  

Among the 50 lots sold at Christie’s in 1859, three were head studies. The titles are too generic to be definitive, though one depicted a “gentleman.” Until recently, the present study had been obscured by a mass of Victorian overpaint. The body was entirely the work of another hand, while the hair had been supplemented with black paint, distinguishable from the original pigments because of the presence of bitumen.

Perhaps these additions are explained by the priestly collar, though it is more likely to be a simple misreading of Soyer’s style, which often used the bare canvas to convey shadows and contrasts. Later restorers, mistaking this for thinness, have often sought to ‘improve’ her paintings. Soyer’s depictions of the old and middle-aged are among her most interesting works, possibly because they tested her technique in ways that younger, more beautiful sitters could not.  The painting is comparable to a rediscovered portrait of George Beckett in Faversham, as well as a remarkable portrait of William Timms, the 95 year-old Thames waterman, who had served 2 Kings, 1 Queen, and 3 separate Dukes of Northumberland.

A letter of 1849 suggests that Beckett sat for the portrait “some twenty years ago”, thus suggesting a date of 1829.  Soyer’s connection to Kent is substantial. Her address is listed as St George’s Place, Canterbury in 1832 and Ramsgate in 1833. She was also known to have painted “The English Ceres” in Maidstone in 1835, as well as “The Two Inseparables” in Margate in 1837 and the burial of her mother at Gravesend in 1839 would also suggest a familial connection. It is even possible that she was baptised in the town of Loose on 21stMay 1809. The names of her parents are correctly given as George and Elizabeth Jones in the baptismal records.

Soyer’s date of birth is generally given as 1813, but this is inconsistent with the “32 years” on her gravestone. Writing in 2024, Charlotte Yeldham gave 1809 or 1810, while in her dissertation of 2018, Gabriella Ramsden suggested 1809, but felt it unlikely that a birth certificate could be found for a common name like ‘Emma Jones.’ Older brother Newton was easier to trace, with his birth recorded on 26 September 1804 in St. Mary Newington, as well as the death of a George Jones in 1814. This would fit with Alexis’s biographies, which recall how “her father died when she was just four years of age.

Rebuilding the Oeuvre of Emma Soyer

Connoisseurship struggles to untangle the networks of famous painters, successful enough to employ assistants and influential enough to attract followers, but Emma Soyer did not have followers. Nor did she follow in any obvious artistic tradition, and for her to have formed a studio of assistants (invariably male) would have represented a difficult departure from the social conventions of her period.

Soyer’s paintings are recognisable because they do not resemble the works of her contemporaries. The are also distinct for their unusually good condition, the opacity of the flesh tones, and their use of a fine-weave canvas.  Broadly they follow two formats, with an outdoor background and an indoor one. The indoor background is generally reserved for named portraits, utilising various shades of brown, which darken from the left of the canvas to the right. This would suggest that she illuminated her sitters from right-hand window or light source.

The outdoor backdrops suggest dusk or evening, using a blue-grey sky with reddish hues at the horizon line. Sometimes it is broken up by a rocky outcrop, a wall or a column in the foreground. In contrast to the generous use of paint in her sitters, Soyer’s backgrounds are sparsely painted and she is quite willing to rely on a thin translucent glaze, making it possible to perceive the canvas weave between the blues, reds and browns. Her light pigments are also unusual and under scrutiny become an interesting  combination of colour. Much as she uses blues and greys as a way of giving depth to flesh pigments, she also highlights white collars and fabric with flashes of blue, yellow and red.