This is a fine example of Sandys’s prowess as a portraitist in coloured chalks, full of grace and luminous character. Clara Flower had married the merchant William Brand the year prior to the date of this portrait, and Betty Elzea has suggested that she might have sat for Sandys beforehand. There are blue irises behind her and forget-me-nots in her lap, and she has a flower in her hair. It is probably a pair to Sandys’s portrait of her brother, Cyril Flower, later Lord Battersea, that most elegant of Victorian patrons, which is also dated 1872 and also has a backdrop of flowers. Cyril was wealthy from marriage to a Rothschild and collected Pre-Raphaelite pictures, and probably commissioned both portraits. In 1873, when this picture was shown at the Royal Academy in 1873, The Art Journal described it as ‘a portrait drawn with instinct and thought. ... the expression upon the face is vague and delicate and refined. The hair is worked with the most tender and subtle workmanship, giving, with the rest of the drawing, the impression of something fragile - of a face in which the beauty is of so fine an essence that it vanishes suddenly and then quickly returns’ (p 240).