Cowper was called ‘the last Pre-Raphaelite’ by the time he died in 1958, more than a century after the original Brotherhood had been formed - but as a young man he had been dubbed a ‘neo-Pre-Raphaelite’. If he hadn’t known it before, Cowper would certainly have seen Byam Shaw’s Queen of Hearts (dated 1896) in the spring of 1898, when it was shown at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, for it evidently prompted him to paint our picture shortly after. Cowper wrote to his mother in 1899: ‘Now I feel what I never felt before and that is confidence in painting, because I have got a method and understand it. Certainly, [Denis] Eden and I understand the theory of Pre-Raphaelitism perfectly now, and as far as the method of painting is concerned, we understand it better than all the P.R.B. (except Millais) did themselves’ (RA Archives, COW 2/1).

For their subject, both Shaw and Cowper ignored Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland of 1865, with Tenniel’s illustrations, and followed instead Randolph Caldecott’s hugely popular illustrated edition of the original English nursery rhyme The Red Queen, published in 1881 when Cowper was but four years old, and Byam Shaw was nine. We are indebted to Friend of the Gallery Scott Thomas Buckle, who has enjoyed identifying the people in the picture as friends and family of the artist: the couple back left of the painting are Cowper’s parents, Edith and Frank (they must have separated some time after this). Cowper had three sisters, Gladys, Gwen and Nesta. Nesta, the youngest of the three, is probably the Queen of Hearts, and leaning over her is probably Gladys, and therefore the one with the spoon should be Gwen. She is spoon-feeding ‘Stewed Rhubarb’ to Cowper’s friend the painter Denis Eden, whose portrait Cowper exhibited at the RA in 1899, alongside one of another friend WAE Erskine, who might be the ginger-haired man wearing a chef’s hat. To the right is Cowper himself, kneeling beneath an oversized cookery book and giving a knowing wink to the viewer.