Please accept my apologies for the poor quality of the illustration. The photograph on which it is based, printed on cardboard, is over 100 years old, and has been exposed to much deterioration. However, you can view the original oil painting at Newstead House, Brisbane. The volunteers there will be able to tell you the name of the artist, and the subject, but probably not much about who she was, or how it managed to arrive there.It was painted in 1901 by the Swedish-born Oscar Friström, the most celebrated portraitist in Queensland at the time, and it represents my aunt, Ruby Isobel Claris Smith (later Boyle) at the age of five.
She was born at St Lucia, Brisbane on 3 August 1896. As I shall describe in the following post, my grandfather, Harry Frederick Smith was a wealthy jeweller, whose shop was a well-known landmark in the Brisbane CBD. By 1901 he had already established two new branches in Ipswich and Toowoomba. He had "arrived", and apparently decided to celebrate by commissioning portraits of his three daughters (at the time): Millicent (9), Ruby (5), and Dorothy (3).
