Note: The eldest daughter of genre, portrait and landscape painter James Hayllar (1829-1920) Jessica Hayllar, along with her younger sisters Edith, Mary and Kate, honed their considerable artistic talents under the watchful eye of their father. Jessica was the most talented of her artistic siblings, as well as the most prolific - She exhibited at the Royal Academy in London regularly between 1879 and 1915 and also had works shown at the Society of British Artists, the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours and at the Royal Manchester Institution. However following an accident around 1900, (family tradition has it that she was crippled after being knocked down by a carriage), she turned to flower pictures, especially the azaleas which feature in so much of her earlier work. She died unmarried in 1940, in Bournemouth, the resort to which she and her father had moved in 1899.
The Hayllar family homes, firstly in Wallingford and latterly in Bournemouth, were comfortable and fashionable, reflecting the late nineteenth century Aesthetic Movement taste for combining antique European furniture with Oriental porcelain and modern wallpapers and soft furnishings. The same blue and gilt Chinese jardiniere with blossoming branches and foliate roundels appears in 'A Sunny Corner' painted in 1909. Like her three sisters, Jessica liked to bring the beauty of the garden into her paintings, either with glimpses through the windows or vases displaying blooms such as the roses in the present picture.
