Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Catalogue entry

N04231 A STUDIO IN MONTPARNASSE c. 1925

Inscr. ‘C. R. W. Nevinson’ b.l.
Canvas, 50×30 (127×76).
Presented by H. G. Wells 1927.
Exh: Leicester Galleries, March 1926 (55), as ‘Montparnasse’.
Lit: Nevinson, 1937, pp.177–8, repr. after p.216.

Based on a sketch made in the Paris studio of the author and journalist Sisley Huddleston, who, when the painting was first placed on view at the Tate Gallery, protested in a letter to the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, 24 February 1927 (reprinted in many English newspapers), that the artist had introduced a nude figure not in the original sketch. The nude, standing by the window, not reclining on the couch as asserted by Sisley Huddleston, was, however, already in the picture when it was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1926 (see reproduction in the Sketch, 3 March 1926). The artist did make certain alterations before the painting was presented to the Tate Gallery, but these consisted of the elimination of a bearded artist (quite unlike the Shakespeare-like appearance of Sisley Huddleston) at the easel, the looping up of the curtains which originally hung straight to show windows continuing on either side, and the addition of the book on the left-hand edge of the table.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II

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