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Описание: In Bury Art Museum. A short walk from the bus station and metrolink (tram). ________________ In the museum I didn't have enough time to ask about the Walker sisters. Painted around 1875 by James Sant. From a search online the Walker family seem to have lived in Chesham House, near Bury. Having been at some point mill owners and prominent in the local community. Colonel Oliver Ormerod Walker was for a while a Member of Parliament for Salford. (Source: Wikipedia) His portrait is also in Bury Art Museum. I located more information online about James Sant, the painter. This includes an obituary in The Times newspaper 13th July 1916; the day after his death at age 97. It seemed dismissive. The headline was: "DEATH OF MR SANT A VETERAN PAINTER". It continued: "The most remarkable fact about the art of Mr Sant was the length of his working career, and the vitality he showed in his pictures at an age when most men, if they happen to have survived at all, have long since laid aside the tools of their trade. If we disregard the traditional, and perhaps mythical precedent of Titian who is said to have been painting just before his death at the age of 99, Mr Sant came very close to establishing a record for long-lived activity amongst painters; indeed of English artists he was only rivalled by the late Sidney Cooper, the animal painter, who inscribed one of his pictures with the fact he painted it at 95. ... " The obituary included several more comments giving faint praise. Suggesting, for example some "sentimentality". "In years long gone by he had attained great popularity with two classes, neither of them it must be admitted very severe in the cannons of art. As Painter-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria, [...] he impressed that large public which in those days took their ideas of art from the court rather than from the critics; but before that time he had been favoured with commissions for portraits by a very large aristocratic circle led by Lady Waldegrave, whose gallery at Strawberry Hill was filled with his portraits of her friends. Among them were Duchesses and Countesses in abundance, for these great ladies and their husbands were pleased with Sant's somewhat flattering touch in the sense of the becoming dress. But he himself, and a world of admirers were better pleased with his idealised pictures of children and young women... " ( Source.)

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