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Dimensions: 35.5 by 26.5 cm.; 14 by 10 ½ in.
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Provenance: London, Redfern Gallery, where bought by Sir David Scott, 11 August 1949 for 16 guineas
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Literature: Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis - Paintings and Drawings, 1971, p. 374, no. 428;
Sotheby's, Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott, 2008, pp. 184-185.
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Notes: 'Wyndham Lewis, who was an author as well as a painter, founded a movement in painting which he called Vorticism in painting. You will notice that the eyes in this drawing are left practically blank and sad to say, Lewis went blind not long before his death. I like the uncompromising robustness of this drawing. There are not many lines in it but every line tells'
Sir David Scott Considered by many of his generation to be a multi-faceted genius - T.S. Eliot memorably dubbed him '...the most fascinating personality of our time' (The Egoist, September 1918) - Lewis, Anglo-American by birth, was a major figure in the artistic life of Britain in the years before and after WWI. He was the leading figure in the Vorticist movement in the period before the war and he saw active service as an observer for the artillery on the Western Front and was later commissioned as an official war artist. Like many of his contemporaries his experiences during the conflict lead him to a major reassessment of his work. For Lewis this took the form of a return to figurative drawing. Between 1918 and 1922 he developed a more distinctive manner that he applied to a remarkable series of portrait and figure studies. Often drawing his friends, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Edward Wadsworth as sitters, his spare but acutely expressive manner was also turned on himself. Perhaps indicative of the uncertainties of his career at that time, Lewis turned to intense self examination as the means by which he could realign his artistic precepts. Indeed when William Rothenstein asked Lewis to sit for a portrait, Lewis replied that 'I am sitting for myself at present - in fact it is a permanent job, and I never sit for anybody else!' (W.Rothenstein, Men & Memories 1900-22, 1932, p.378). Whilst there are also painted self-portraits in this period, such as the well-known Portrait of the Painter (Manchester City Art Gallery), these drawn self-portraits often display a minimal and fleeting quality that demonstrate both Lewis's clear virtuosity and his unique approach to his subject. As here, many of his portrait images of this period take steps to reduce the subject to essentials, leaving perhaps one area of almost abstract detail, such as the intensely angular bow-tie. It is also not uncommon for the eyes, often considered to be at the heart of a portrait image, to be played down. In the present work, they become merely shaded spaces, and this is a feature especially common to the portrait images of the 1921 period including a portrait of Froanna (Fig 1), who the artist later married.
