The portrait depicts the young boy dressed in a white open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, cream trousers and white plimsolls. He is sitting on a wall at the bottom of a flight of steps leading from the house in the background to the garden. Sir Alec Martin recalled that, unlike the portraits of himself and his wife, the portrait of his son was started in the garden of the Martins’ house, Marandellas, at Kingsgate.
2 Most of the painting, however, was completed in Sickert’s studio, and the work is inscribed with the name of Sickert’s house in St Peter’s-in-Thanet, Hauteville. Lady Martin recalled that photographs were taken of her son for use in undertaking the commission and, indeed, the portrait has the feel of an informal snapshot.
3 Richard Morphet has described
Claude Phillip Martin as ‘at once banal and archetypal, lifelike and abstract, particular and almost banner-like, casual and timeless’ and has compared Sickert’s use of photographic material with Andy Warhol’s practice of selecting and enhancing photo-based images in his work.
4 The sitter is holding a cricket bat across his lap as though he has just been called away from playing in the garden. His gaze is open and relaxed and he grins directly at the viewer, squinting slightly as though looking into the sun. Sickert’s treatment of the figure makes a feature of the harsh shadows in the creases of Claude Phillip’s trousers and the lack of detail in his face as though aestheticising and replicating the effect of halation, the blurring of an object in the glare of bright daylight.
