Additional Images

Provenance:

Collection of the sitter, Bilo Keir;
Dr. James Keir, Malpeque, Prince Edward Island, said to have been the husband of Bilo Keir, formerly married to the artist, George W. Chambers;
By descent to their granddaughter, Mary Margaret Elizabeth Auld, Malpeque, PEI;
By descent to the present owner’s mother’s brother, Malpeque, PEI;
By descent to the present owner’s parents who recovered the two paintings from the house where they had been held in Malpeque, PEI;
By descent to the present, Private Collection, Orillia

Note:

Bilo Keir, from Louisiana, was born in 1873. George Chambers married Bilo, his second wife, in 1893, the year this work was painted. Bilo was 20 years old at the time. Chambers died in 1895, two years later.

Bilo later married Dr. James Keir, a medical doctor who practiced from the family home in Malpeque from 1904-1944. The doctor was the present owner’s mother’s grandfather. Bilo Keir was a maternal relative of the present owner, and it is believed she was a great aunt of their mother. In her elderly years, Bilo lived at the family’s large country house established by Dr. John Keir, then Dr. James Keir, in Malpeque, Prince Edward Island where this portrait and Chambers portrait, “Mistress Cornelia” (the previous lot, lot 6), hung for many years.

The present owner remembers his mother and her sister often talking about “Aunt Anne” and Bilo in PEI. The two women remember how Aunt Anne and Bilo never got along and their was always tension between them.

For a discussion of the historic Keir House where this work and lot 6 hung since their execution see: http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=18765