Cecily was Frances Horner's eldest daughter, (For a brief account of her as a child, see: Time Remembered p 84-86, written by her Mother written in 1933.) An oil version was made from this portrait in which some of the spontaneity was lost.
In the case of the portrait of Cicely Horner, friendship was obviously an important motive, although even this was a commissioned picture and therefore presumably paid for. In Time Remembered Lady Horner quotes a letter from Philip Burne-Jones, Burne-Jones's son who was beginning to establish a modest reputation as a portrait painter. 'I think your little Cicely', he wrote to her on 22 June 1894, 'is the most beautiful child I have ever seen. I am going to ask you to let me try and make a picture of her ... It is simply wicked that no record should be made of her during these wonderful years.' In the event it was his father who was to 'make a picture' of Cicely, and no likeness by Philip seems to have materialised. The opportunity was provided by Frances's thirty-seventh birthday. According to Penelope Fitzgerald, quoting as her source a letter from Burne-Jones to Helen Mary Gaskell, 'in the spring of 1895 Frances Horner came to London, an honoured visitor, with her golden-haired daughter Cecily [sic]; Frances's birthday, as [Burne-Jones] well remembered, was in April, and Cecily's portrait was to be a present from her husband' (loc.cit). Precisely who took the initiative in this arrangement we do not know, but Frances herself was presumably eager, having had her own portrait painted by Burne-Jones sixteen years earlier, and no doubt being aware that he had drawn Francis Jekyll, the young son of her sister Agnes, in 1894 (see Burne-Jones et l'influence des Préraphaélites, exh. organised by Hartnoll & Eyre, Ltd., at the Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, 1972, no.24, repr. in cat., p.17). At least one more of her children was to sit to the artist who had played such a dominant role in her life. Cicely's younger brother Edward, who was to be killed at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, modelled for the boy in The Prioress's Tale (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington), which appeared at the New Gallery in 1898 and was Burne-Jones's last exhibited picture
In the summer of 1894, Edward Burne-Jones’s son, Philip (1861–1926), who was commencing his own career as an artist, asked Frances Horner if he might paint a portrait of her daughter, Cicely, ‘the most beautiful child I have ever seen’. He added that it was ‘simply wicked that no record should be made of her during these wonderful years’.1 His father had, however, already made the present drawing of Cicely, which is dated 1893. In January 1883 Frances Graham (1854–1940) married Sir John Horner (1842–1927). Their first child, Cicely, was born in November. In her autobiography, Time Remembered (1933), Lady Frances Horner wrote that Cicely ‘entered into her beauty when she entered the world, with her large eyes, and a complexion like Rose Red and Snow White.’2 Edward Burne-Jones was by this time an intimate friend of the family and had known Cicely from birth. According to Lady Horner, when Cicely was young she referred to Burne-Jones as ‘Mr Rosey, as he always brought bunches of moss roses from his garden to the sick room’ where William Graham, Frances’s father, was cared for during his final illness. He died in 1885.2In the present portrait Cicely is shown looking to her left with her hair hanging down over her shoulders. The features of her hair and gown are recorded in red chalk while her face and the contours of her garment are accented in white chalk. Two years later, in the spring of 1895, Burne-Jones completed an oil portrait of Cicely. As Burne-Jones noted at the time, Frances visited him in London with Cicely, in order to have the portrait painted as a present to her from her husband.4 The portrait, in which she is depicted in a white shift, appears to have remained unfinished.5 In June 1899 John Singer Sargent visited Mells and painted two portraits of Cicely, ‘not very successful ones’, as Frances Horner recalled.6According to Frances Horner, Cicely’s dream was to marry an actor-manager.7 In the event, in 1908, she was wedded to the Honourable George Lambton, fifth son of George Lambton, 2nd Earl of Durham, and a leading racehorse trainer for the Earl of Derby. On their marriage the couple set up home at Mesnil Warren, Newmarket, which was extended for them in 1925 by Sir Edwin Lutyens, a family friend of the Horners, who was also at that time employed at Mells Manor. Cicely had four children, including Anne (‘Nancy’) Lambton, a distinguished scholar of medieval and Persian history. Cicely, who survived her husband by some twenty-seven years, died at her home in Newmarket, Cambridgeshire, in 1972. 1. Philip Burne-Jones to Frances Horner, 22 June 1894, quoted in Frances Horner, Time Remembered, London: William Heinemann, 1933, p. 93. 2. Ibid., p. 81. 3. Ibid., p. 81. 4. Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography, London: Michael Joseph, 1975, p. 261. 5. It passed from the ownership of Sir John Horner to Cicely and remained in the possession of her family until 1975, when it was sold at Sotheby’s, Belgravia, 1 July 1975 (37). It was sold once more at Christie’s, London, 9 June 1995 (346). 6. Horner, 1933, p. 97. For the portraits see Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent. The Complete Paintings: Portraits of the 1890s, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, nos 371, 372, pp. 161–3. 7. Horner, 1933, p. 103.