Caprice. Henrietta Emma Ratcliffe Rae was a prominent English painter of the later Victorian era.
Rae was born in Hammersmith, London, the youngest of seven children of a civil servant. Her mother was a musically talented student of Felix Mendelssohn.
Her uncle, Charles Rae, was an artist and a student of George Cruikshank. Rae began studying art at the age of thirteen.
She was educated at the Queen Square School of Art, Heatherley's School of Art, and the British Museum. She reportedly applied to the Royal Academy schools at least five times before eventually gaining a seven-year scholarship.
Her teachers there included Frank Bernard Dicksee, William Powell Frith, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema; the last of these had the strongest influence on Rae's later work. She became a frequent exhibitor at the annual Royal Academy shows, beginning in 1881. Rae gained recognition and success early in her career, specializing in classical, allegorical, and literary subjects, often treated in a grand style and scale. Her Psyche at the Throne of Venus measured 12 feet by 7 feet and contained 13 figures. Other paintings in the same classical vein include her Ariadne, Eurydice, Zephyrus and Flora, Apollo and Daphne, Diana and Calisto, and Hylas and the Water Nymphs among many more. Eurydice won medals at exhibitions in Paris and at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Elaine Guarding the Shield o