In August 1881 Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo of seeing watercolours by the English painter Clara Montalba for the first time at the Dutch Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, stating ‘that’s a very special talent’. Montalba had, by this date, established a significant reputation for herself as a landscape and marine painter – her evocations of Venice, where she spent much time, were widely praised for her handling of light and water, and in 1874, the Art Journal declared that her works in the Society of Watercolour Painters exhibition ‘fully justified her [recent] election’ as an associate of that institution. Two years later, in her important compendium of biographies of English female artists, Ellen Clayton’s entry on Montalba began emphatically: ‘One of our most brilliant and distinguished landscape painters’.

References to the ‘Misses Montalba’ are a prominent feature of contemporary exhibition reviews; Clara’s three sisters were also all practising artists, which was clearly an appealing novelty to the press. Henrietta Montalba was a talented sculptor who studied alongside Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s daughter, at the National Art Training School in the late 1860s. The sisters maintained a friendship with the princess and visited her in Canada in 1879, where Hilda Montalba made these vibrant figure studies (shown here) which Louise mounted in one of her albums.