William Anstey Dolland was a watercolourist and draughtsman active mainly between 1879 and 1911, strongly associated with the British Neoclassical and Pre-Raphaelite movements. Although his early work showed a marked tendency towards the genres of landscape and the pastoral, Dolland’s move to London in the early 1880s effected a wholesale change in his subject matter and technique. Studying portraiture and figurative painting at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, Chelsea, he found inspiration in the work of his contemporaries Norman Prescott-Davies, John William Godward and Henry Ryland. Bound by a common interest in the themes and forms of classical antiquity, their compositions were characterised by the placement of women – often contemplative in behaviour and dressed in the Graeco-Roman style – within tranquil marble interiors. Dolland’s work soon became reflective of this fashionable trend towards antiquity. His work remains popular today.