Footnotes

Based in London for most of his working life, Flint was attracted by the bleaching light of southern Europe and began travelling there on painting trips even before the first World War. In the years that followed, his trips to France, Spain and Italy became an annual pilgrimage and it was not only the southern landscapes, but the dark-haired girls who captured his imagination. Sketches were made during the summer that were then worked up into full watercolours in his Campden Hill studio at Peel Cottage during the winter months in London.

In 1933, the year he was elected a Royal Academician, he visited Spain, writing, 'Do you wonder that artists paint gipsies? They have been, still are...one of the world's stock subjects'. Certainly they are a subject that is synonymous with Flint and they feature in many of his best known watercolours. On a trip to Granada in 1931 with his wife Sybille they asked to meet a troupe of gitana dancers; he wrote, 'We found the women and girls (but not their menfolk) friendly and childishly vain. One or two had a Scottish look. It was so strong that we wondered if it had any connection with Wellington's Highlanders in the Peninsular War'.

Their dark beauty clearly appealed to him as he was to include these girls in his paintings for decades to come. When, in the mid-1950s, he met Cecilia Green (1931-2003), who was to become his renowned model, she encapsulated everything that drew him to the gitanas of Spain.

He later wrote that a bystander said to Cecilia,
'You, obviously, are Russell Flint's model, but how comes it that he was painting you long before you could have been born?'.
'I suppose I'm his type. I know I'm the type he has always painted.'
'I had in fact adapted faces to make them like hers years and years before I met her.'
(Royal Academy of Arts, Exhibition of works by Sir William Russell Flint RA, PPRWS, London, 1962, p.90)