Capri Girl with Flowers
This painting is inset into the mantelpiece in the Morning Room and was painted while the artist was living in the Isle of Capri, Italy. We believe that Merton chose this picture specifically for this location. He then commissioned a local carpentry firm, ‘William Mabey & Sons’, to make the ornate framing.
Sophie Anderson was born in Paris, and studied and worked in both America and England, where she exhibited at Royal Society of British Artists and the British Institution. Due to ill-health she and her husband moved to the Isle of Capri, Italy in 1871, where there was a thriving artists’ colony. She had a successful career which included Italian genre and neoclassical paintings. Returning to England in 1894 they settled in Falmouth and died there in 1903.
