Portrait of Mollie Panter-Downes by Eileen Robey
After my mother died last year my sister and I sold almost all the paintings, drawings and prints that she and my stepfather, an art dealer, had amassed over fifty years. One of the eight hundred items loaded onto a van was a youthful portrait of my grandmother, the writer and journalist Mollie Panter-Downes. A few months later I was sent a draft of the auctioneer’s catalogue. The portrait had a reserve of £300 and the artist had been identified as Eileen Robey, the daughter of Sir George Robey, one of the great music hall performers. The women were born a few years apart, Eileen in 1902 and Mollie in 1906.
Eileen Robey is a shadowy figure despite her obvious talent as a painter. Portraits by her occasionally surface at auctions but she is not represented in any of the national galleries and my attempts to research her career were unsuccessful. The auction house catalogue meanwhile described Mollie as a writer, ‘largely forgotten today’. If the portrait were sold to a private buyer, I thought, wouldn’t I be helping to deepen her obscurity? I also felt a sense of injustice. If it had been a portrait of a male writer by a male artist, would the description have been so dismissive and the price so low? I withdrew the painting from the sale.
Read more about A Portrait of the Journalist as a Young Woman
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