Walter Richard Sickert A.R.A. (British, 1860-1942)Portrait of Mrs Barrett signed 'Sickert.' (lower left)oil on canvas50.8 x 40.3 cm. (20 x 15 7/8 in.)Painted in 1906Footnotes:ProvenanceThe Artist, 3 January 1907, from whom purchased byBernheim-Jeune, ParisRt Hon Frederick Leverton Harris, thence by descent toMrs Gertrude HarrisSale; Sotheby's, London, 19 June 1974, lot 66aJ. Moore PollockSir Denis Rickett, thence by family descentPrivate Collection, U.K.ExhibitedParis, Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition Sickert, 10-19 January 1907, cat.no.30 (as Le Canapé rayé)London, Stafford Gallery, 27 June-July 1911, An Exhibition of Pictures by Walter Sickert, cat.no.30 (as The Striped Sofa)LiteratureJames Bolivar Manson, 'Walter Richard Sickert A.R.A.', Drawing and Design, July 1927, p.5 (ill.) (as Portrait)Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, London, 1973, cat.no.228Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings & Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, p.320, cat.no.266.1 (ill.b&w) In April 1906 Sickert sent his intimate friend, the society beauty and talented amateur singer Elsie Swinton (Mrs George Swinton), a series of 14 postcards, each containing a cameo sketch in pen and ink, illustrating the paintings on which he had been working in his studio at 8 Fitzroy Street between Good Friday (13 April) and the following Thursday. All were figure subjects set within a room which featured a striped green sofa, a bentwood chair, and a few heavily-framed pictures on the walls. He inscribed each card, some with the timing of his sittings, some with the identities of his four models and several with both. His models were the Belgian Daurment sisters, Hélène and Jeanne, whom he had recently met in Soho; Agnes Beerbohm – elder sister of Max, a talented dress designer, and some ten years earlier one of Sickert's lovers; and a woman identified in three sketches as 'new model'. The new model sat for two head and shoulders strict profile portraits, one on Saturday morning and one on Sunday (New Head of New Model); on Thursday afternoon she sat for a near frontal head wearing a shy smile and a large straw hat which shadowed her eyes. At no other time in Sickert's long career has his precise production over a one week period been so accurately disclosed.The paintings of Aggie Beerbohm in fancy dress and of the racy Daurment sisters are all in character. Not so the three portraits of the 'new model'. Her face and personality seem to have offered Sickert a blank canvas on which he could experiment with old master prototypes. The Thursday afternoon painting (Private Collection) is a free reworking of Rubens's Chapeau de Paille (London, National Gallery); the two profile portraits adapt the well-known Renaissance formula which Sickert regularly returned to from the 1890s to the 1930s. One of the profile heads is on offer here. The other was bequeathed by Roger Fry to the Courtauld Institute of Art. Fry probably bought it from the Savile Gallery where it had been exhibited in February 1928 (31) under the title Portrait of Mrs Barrett. But who was Mrs Barrett? Lillian Browse, in her monograph on Sickert published in 1960 (p.21) had defined her as 'charwoman', a statement which prompted Mrs Barrett's daughter-in-law to inform Miss Browse that her mother-in-law had been a dressmaker, not a charwoman', and that she had died in 1925. This raises the intriguing possibility that Agnes Beerbohm, the dress designer, may have introduced the dressmaker to Sickert. The portrait on offer here is certainly the profile begun on Sunday. The sitter's jacket or blouse on the Sunday sketch is repeatedly annotated 'RED' denoting vertical stripes, consistent with the colour used in this painting, whereas in the Fry version Mrs Barrett wears an olive green blouse, similar in tone and colour to the background wallpaper. The Sunday version is also much enlivened by the introduction of the striped sofa, the title under which it was exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in January 1907 and at the Stafford Gallery, London in 1911. The red and pink striped jacket worn by Mrs Barrett reappears (together with a pearl necklace) in two more, near full-face, head and shoulders portraits: The Red Blouse (The Carrick Hill Trust, Adelaide) and Le Collier de Perles (Private Collection), the latter identified in the archives of Bernheim-Jeune as La Belle Sicilienne or La Siciliana.Sickert's model, wearing different clothes, also seems to feature in two interiors executed in pastel: Blackmail: Mrs Barrett (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa); and Mrs Barrett (Tate). Confusion struck when the Ottawa pastel was taken from its frame. Old backing labels and inscriptions were discovered which revealed it had been exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 under the title Popolana Veneziana. How can a 'new model' of Easter 1906 have sat for a picture exhibited in autumn 1905? Did Sickert deliberately mislead Mrs Swinton? And why? I have no answers. The confusing plethora of titles is typical of Sickert. He used invented titles to manipulate the characterisation of his Camden Town period models. In the case of the portraits discussed here, fashion may have misled future scholars and collectors. Heavy, upswept, rolled wings of hair are common to Mrs Barrett at Easter 1906, to an extant photograph of Mrs Barrett given by her daughter-in-law to Miss Browse, and to Sickert's 1905 model – whether Sicilian, Venetian or possibly neither. However, it is indisputable that the models for all these pictures are strikingly alike. We are grateful to Dr. Wendy Baron for compiling this catalogue entry.For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com
