Wyndham LEWIS

In the first major monograph on the artist, published in 1951, Charles Handley-Read described Wyndham Lewis’s technical approach to drawing: ‘It is perfectly obvious that with pen in hand, and with a clean sheet of paper before him, Wyndham Lewis can settle down to enjoy himself. Neither invention nor technique ever seem to fail…it is possible to imagine the artist’s procedure at the drawing-desk. There are no sketches: if a drawing goes wrong it will be done again, or the faulty area will be cut out, the paper replaced, and the passage re-drawn…Watching the artist, we see him draw, first of all, the important horizontal and vertical lines which give a firm basis to the structure of the design…We notice that the artist’s whole arm is a perfectly trained instrument, the weight of the arm resting on the last joint of the little finger. The finger acts as a kind of ball-bearing runner when the long straight lines are being drawn, and as a pivot or compass-point for the curves…suddenly we realize that with the addition of the heavier shading the essentials of the drawing are there before us...In Wyndham Lewis’s drawings the characteristics proper to pen, ink and paper are not lost but exploited. His shapely lines and calligraphic marquetry are the work of a virtuoso in this medium.’

The present sheet is one of a distinctive group of portrait line drawings in pencil or black chalk executed in the early 1920s. This drawing was once identified as a portrait of the poet and critic Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), the eldest of the three equally brilliant and intriguing Sitwell siblings, alongside her younger brothers Osbert and Sacheverell. Wyndham Lewis produced several drawings of all three Sitwells, as well as a painted portrait of Edith, begun in 1923 but not completed until 1935. 

As Handley-Read has noted, ‘perhaps the most distinctive feature of Wyndham Lewis’s portraits is [a] startlingly vivid, alive, actual quality – a feature quite unrelated, of course, to the matter of likeness. The intensity he bestows seems to transform a portrait into a presence…And yet, paradoxically it might seem, the presence or personality of these portraits is distant and remote…The portraits have…a classical, or a neo-classical air – like the work of Ingres – where the subject, having gained attention, remains entirely self-sufficient, as it were entirely indifferent to the advances of a spectator.’  

Among closely comparable pencil drawings by Lewis of the same date is a study of a seated woman – quite possibly the same sitter as seen in the present sheet - which appeared at auction in London in 1988. Another drawing of the same approximate date, and perhaps of the same model, is known from an old black and white photograph inscribed by the artist simply as ‘Seated Figure’.