Annie and Ernest were married in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition in London.  In his book, Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World, Jeremy Maas writes that Annie Baines was ‘the girl of his choice, … a pretty brown-haired child with blue eyes’.  She was only sixteen, less than half of Gambart’s age.  He continues:

‘Annie and her husband were to be happy for many years together.  …  Annie was very dear to her husband, and he decked her out in the prettiest clothes and lavished on her presents of fashionable jewellery as the years passed by, regardless of their expense.’ (p. 54)

Ernest Gambart was highly influential in the art world and he conducted business with style.  He and Annie were part of the Victorian social scene and famous for their lavish parties.  Maas writes: ‘Annie, always expensively dressed, behaved with the irrepressible waywardness of a spoilt child, and her gay ringing laughter was like the sparkle of champagne.  At their parties all the best-known artists of the day were to be seen – the Friths, the Wards, the Goodalls, George du Maurier, Millais, Rossetti, Hunt …’, together with personalities from the world of literature, music and theatre. (p. 72).

The Gambarts lived at ‘Rosenstead’, 62 Avenue Road, near Regent’s Park, a large London villa, magnificently decorated and furnished.  Here they entertained their guests with grand parties and balls.  However, a devastating gas explosion occurred after a fancy-dress ball on the evening of Derby Day in May 1866, after which ‘nothing was ever quite the same again’ (Maas, p. 189).  The Alma-Tademas, who were staying, awoke to the smell of gas and sensibly opened their window; while others hid under the bedclothes; but the resulting explosion left almost the entire back of the house in ruins.  Annie was in such a state of anxiety that Ernest despatched her to friends nearby.  Indeed such was the devastation that ‘… a six-foot [picture by] David Roberts was projected over several gardens; and lodged in an apple tree, its branches stuck through the canvas; and two paintings by Creswick were found impaled on a neighbour’s iron railings.’ (p. 195).

It was in the following year, 1867, that Annie and Ernest Gambart separated.  He allegedly had ‘… various little girls in different lodgings about’  (p. 206).  Although they never legally divorced, Annie moved to Bayswater, where she remained until her untimely death just three years later in 1870, at the age of thirty-five.  Cause of death was diagnosed as disease of the liver, the same as Gambart’s second wife, Mary Matilda ((c.1821-1848).  This portrait of Annie is known to have hung at Gambart’s home ‘Les Palmiers’ in Nice.  This may account for the French name plaque.  It is included in the inventory made after his death in 1902.  Annie was also painted by the French portrait painter Édouard Dubufe (1820-1883).