William ORPEN

The younger sister of Alice Knewstub, the wife of the painter William Rothenstein, Grace Knewstub (1877-1948) first met William Orpen in the summer of 1899, when she, Orpen, Augustus John and Charles Conder joined the newly married Rothensteins on holiday in Normandy. Both Orpen and John fell in love with Grace, and she maintained a correspondence with the former throughout the winter of 1899-1900. She first posed for Orpen in 1900, and the two were married in August 1901, with Grace becoming one of his most faithful models.

The present sheet is a preparatory study for Orpen’s three-quarter length double portrait of himself and Grace painted in 1901, the year of their wedding, and shown at the Society of Portrait Painters exhibition at the New Gallery in London that year. (The present whereabouts of the painting are unknown.) As Orpen’s biographer Bruce Arnold noted of the artist, ‘He painted a large canvas of himself and Grace, side by side. A study for this double portrait was included subsequently in the Carfax exhibition as No.7, ‘Two Portraits’ priced at £6, while the painting was sent in to the Society of Portrait Painters, Orpen’s first work to be exhibited with that group. It is remarkable. Orpen, even then, was a creator of fact, not of myth. It cannot be described as a happy honeymoon painting. But it is a truthful examination of himself and his wife, raw and uncompromising. The artist’s own expression is serious and intense. There is no attempt at self-caricature. Grace is painted in a stiff and slightly gauche pose, taller than he - as she was - leaning back, and with a hint of suspicion or doubt in her eyes. Her auburn hair is plainly done in a hank at the nape of her neck, and there is a reddish flush to her cheek, not altogether attractive and hinting at her rather poor health. Nevertheless, the painting’s simplicity and directness of statement are compelling, as is the richness of tone, and the firm handling of light.’

The pendant to the present sheet, a self-portrait of the artist - of identical medium, technique, dimensions and provenance, also a study for the now-lost double portrait - was recently sold at auction. It is possible that both portrait drawings once made up a single sheet, and if so may perhaps be identified with the drawing mentioned by Arnold as exhibited at the Carfax Gallery in 1901.

The present sheet belonged to the engraver and noted art collector J. P. Heseltine (1843-1929), whose collector’s mark is stamped on the verso. Over a period of fifty years, Heseltine assembled a superb collection of paintings, prints and, especially, Old Master drawings, including nine sheets by Raphael, more than seventy drawings by Rembrandt and forty by Claude. Some six hundred drawings from the Heseltine collection were acquired en bloc in October 1912, for a sum said to be £150,000, by the London art dealers P. & D. Colnaghi & Obach. The stamp found on the verso of the present sheet, however, was applied by Heseltine to those drawings which he retained, and which were not part of the 1912 sale.

This drawing is likely to have later entered the collection of the Yorkshire collector Wyndham T. Vint, who assembled a large and varied group of paintings and drawings by British artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.