Here’s looking at you, kid

Claude-Marie Dubufe featured regularly in the Paris Salon, often with excessive, mannered portraits favoured by those seeking pleasing likenesses of their ladies. This one ended up in an Italianate villa at the opposite end of the earth.

The daughter of a Scottish clergyman, Jessie Eyre Williams (née Gibbon) arrived in the unkempt settlement on Port Phillip Bay around a year after her 1841 marriage to lawyer Edward Eyre Williams. In 1847, he and Jessie took up residence in a mansion near the Yarra River. Named ‘Como’ after the Italian lake where the pair were engaged, and fashioned from local mudstone, the elegant house was the scene of ‘entertainments’ in keeping with the profile of its occupants, whose list of acquaintances included those who passed for ‘Society’ in muddy, pre-‘Marvellous’ Melbourne. Incongruously, an inventory of Como’s contents might have listed this portrait of Jessie painted in Paris in 1833. Captioned ‘Is he thinking of me?’ it shows her wistfully contemplating a small framed work, presumably a portrait of her suitor. Williams sold Como in 1852; the family moved to St. Kilda where they remained until returning to Britain in 1874.