James Sant was primarily a painter of portraits, and from 1872 was officially portrait painter to Queen Victoria. He had many other patrons amongst the aristocratic families of Britain, hence he must have been a painter entrepreneur. Sant's portraits of noble ladies were flattering, something they, and their husbands unsurprisingly liked. He also painted allegorical and genre pictures. Rather surprisingly Sant was known to be very straightforward with sitters who applied what he considered to be too much make-up. He started exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1840, and showed his last picture in 1915.
