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Provenance: with Leicester Galleries, London, where purchased by Lady Herbert, and by descent to the present owner.
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Literature: A. Bowness and L. Lambertini, Victor Pasmore with a catalogue raisonné of the paintings, constructions and graphics 1926-1979, London, 1980, no. 31, illustrated.
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Notes: The long blonde hair of the girl seated at the dressing table in the present work identifies her as Wendy Blood, a fellow artist who Pasmore later married in June 1940. Wendy is the subject of a number of works from this period, which are notable in their 'soft and delicate colour, these pictures have a quietness, an inner stillness that contrasts most strongly with the events of the outside world' (see A. Bowness and L. Lambertini, op. cit., p. 10).
The turbulent war years that Pasmore would later experience as a conscientious objector, forcibly enlisted and imprisoned, are contrasted with the happier period in which the present work was painted. Kenneth Clark's patronage of Pasmore in 1938 enabled him to resign from his job in local government to become a teacher at Euston Road and to embrace the world of the professional artist. No longer was he the 'weekend painter', and with his friends and contemporaries, William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, a school of drawing was created that would focus on 'a dialectic of pure painting based on the old visual model and a new social consciousness of art as a whole' ( ibid.).
