2-970-011 - /Heritage Images

"The Lily" - painted by C. Baxter - from the Exhibition of the Society of British Artists, 1856. 'One of the sweetest pictures in the Suffolk-street Exhibition...is "The Lily"- a half-length of a girl of twenty - from the facile and graceful pencil of Mr. Charles Baxter. It is a something between portraiture and poetry. It is, in a word, Mr. Baxter's ideal of a beautiful woman. We could have wished that Mr. Baxter had found some other title for this representation of female loveliness than the hackneyed title of "The Lily." Our poets and romance-writers would easily have yielded him a name more appropriate and certainly less hackneyed. To our thinking (and we are fresh from a fifth perusal of "Tom Jones") Mr. Baxter's "Lily" has something of a Sophia Western look'. From "Illustrated London News", 1856.