Edith Frances Rosamond Orpen (1859/60 - 1939), later Mrs Charles Frederick Carlos Clarke,aged 13

Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen was an Irish amateur painter of the Pre-Raphaelite sympathy who decorated the chapel and rooms of Baddesley Clinton, the moated manor house in Warwickshire that she shared with her aunt and two other women in an unusual communal domestic arrangement. This 1873 portrait of her niece Edith Frances Rosamond Orpen, then about 13, is a personal family record in a Pre-Raphaelite manner. Orpen's paintings at Baddesley Clinton form a remarkable body of decorative and personal art created by an educated Victorian woman within the domestic sphere, and the house — now managed by the National Trust — preserves this work in its original setting.

Orpen adopts the careful, slightly linear technique of Pre-Raphaelite influence, rendering the young girl's face with patient attention and a cool palette giving her skin a porcelain clarity. The handling is earnest rather than professionally fluent, with the directness characteristic of a gifted amateur working in an established style.