Art: The Girl in Cherry Ripe

Though she was but four years old when she showed up at a fancy-dress ball in London in 1879, blue-eyed Edie Ramage melted the hearts of her beholders. Reason: she wore a frilled white mobcap and dress, pink sash and shoes similar to those made famous by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his portrait Simplicity. So charmed was her uncle, Graphic Founder and Editor William Luson Thomas, that he commissioned Painter John Everett Millais to do a portrait of Edie in that same costume. Thomas paid a fancy $5,000, but used the finished canvas in the Graphic, made 600,000 color reproductions and sold them profitably across the Empire. A print of the portrait, known as Cherry Ripe because Edie was perched atop two sacks of cherries, became a sentimental adornment in every Victorian and Edwardian nursery.

In the decades that passed, the whereabouts of Model Edie turned into a mystery. One day a fortnight ago, a young man visited London’s Royal Academy of Arts, noticed Millais’ Cherry Ripe on exhibition in the collection of the late South African mine owner, Sir Joseph B. Robinson. Thomas sold the portrait to Robinson 60 years ago, and it had been stored with the collection since 1910. The visitor strolled up to a gallery assistant, remarked that the model was his grandmother, and that she would soon come in to see the painting.

Unwilling to wait, Academy President Charles Wheeler hastily inserted a “personal” in the famed front-page classified advertising section of the London Times

(“The Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, wish to contact the lady who sat . . .”). With Academy Secretary Humphrey Brooke, Wheeler spent long hours sifting scores of replies from families who claimed that the real model was one of their kin. “Signora Ossorio herself did not answer the advertisement,” said Brooke, “but I received an anonymous phone call giving me her phone number in London.” Wheeler and Brooke tracked down the new lead, found an Edie Ossorio “still fascinating, vivacious, certainly not looking her 84 years.”

“She remembers quite a lot of sittings at Millais’ studio,” said Wheeler. “She recalls being given chocolates as a reward for sitting still, recollects playing around a fountain in Millais’ garden with his children. But she threw up her hands in horror when we suggested she be photographed with Cherry Ripe. She was admirably adamant.”

As far as the academy is concerned, “the records are now complete.” But one mystery remained unsolved. Edie Ossorio does not have a grandson. Who was the young man who sparked the search? Guessed Brooke: “A relative of one of the false claimants.”