With a landscape sketch (verso)

Bears inscription (under mount) Mrs Sutherland Orr/ an unpublished Portrait sketch/ by her brother, Lord Leighton, PRA

Charcoal heightened with white, 20.5 cm (8 ins) (diameter)

Alexandra Leighton (later Mrs Sutherland Orr) was a sitter in a number of the artist’s works and a prominent expert on the English poet Robert Browning. The drawing bears some similarity to a striking portrait of Alexandra in profile and in Renaissance dress from c.1853 (now in the Crowther-Obak Collection of Victorian Art). Apparently unpublished in the artist’s lifetime, the present portrait was reproduced in The Weekly Magazine following Alexandra’s death in 1903 (see fig.1).