Blank greetings card with envelope featuring:

Mary Frances Crane (née Andrews) as Laura; Walter Crane as Cimabue NPG x19680

© National Portrait Gallery, London

by Sir Emery Walker

The actor, Henry Irving, commissioned Crane to capture the effect of his tableau vivant, which he based on Sir Frederick Leighton's famous painting Cimabue's Madonna carried through Florence (1853-5). Crane recalled he had played the thirteenth-century Florentine painter Cimabue 'in the white costume in which Leighton painted him'. The resulting watercolour, The Apotheosis of Italian Art (1885) reprised the tableau, featuring Crane's wife as Laura, the poet Petrarch's beloved, and their son Lionel as the painter Giotto. These nostalgic photographs, taken in a private setting... more

Card size: 125mm x 175mm

Images are printed in their original proportions, within a white border.