GINGKO PRESS | 20TH CENTURY ART BOOK
click image to close window
Wyndham Lewis Portraits
left: Edith Sitwell 1921, Pencil on paper 295 x 390 mm (11 1/4'' x 15 1/2''), National Portrait Gallery (NPG 4464) right: Edith Siwell 1923-35, Oil on canvas 1118 x 864 mm (40'' x 34''), Tate, presented by Sir Edwards Beddington-Behrens, 1943
Edith Sitwell claimed that she sat for Lewis every day except Sundays for ten months for the oil portrait he painted of her. Sitting began in the late 1921. The painting was still unfinished in October 1922, when the debt-burdened Lewis did a moonlight flit from his studio in Kensington’s Adam and Eve Mews. The head was complete and the chair, coat and legs were more or less finished — the background was completed in 1935. The portrait thus spans Lewis’s friendship and subsequent enmity with Edith. In other portraits up to this time the backgrounds were plain, in order to concentrate on the head. Here the head is silhouetted against the darkest panel in the painting. There is a great deal of visual activity in the lower half of the painting, but the beautifully modelled head has no visual competition in the upper part, and the viewer’s gaze continually returns to it. This, along with the eyes almost closed, increases the sense the sitter is isolated from the room that apparently defines her by its symbols of culture.