Lost Charles Dickens portrait going on display in London after successful fundraising campaign
A long-lost portrait of Charles Dickens is going on show in his London home after a successful six-figure fundraising campaign to buy it.
The watercolour miniature, painted in 1843 when the author was 31 and at the height of his fame, was found two years ago covered in mould inside a box of trinkets at a South African auction.
It was brought back to London to the gallery of Fake Or Fortune presenter and art dealer Philip Mould where it was cleaned and its authenticity confirmed. It will go on display later this year after the Charles Dickens Museum in Holborn raised the £180,000 needed to buy it, with donations from fans of the novelist as well as substantial sums from the Art Fund and Arts Council England.
Cindy Sughrue, director of the museum at Dickens’s former family home in Doughty Street, recalled the moment Mould first showed her an image of the portrait: “It was a memorable, heart-in-mouth moment, to say the least.”
The portrait, painted by Margaret Gillies, was exhibited at the 1844 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, but had disappeared by 1886 and remained lost until 2017.
