
Not on display
- Artist
- Dame Ethel Walker 1861–1951
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 610 × 508 mm
frame: 780 × 675 × 106 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1939
- Reference
- N05038
Display caption
Gallery label, August 2004
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Catalogue entry
N05038 VANESSA 1937
Not inscribed.
Canvas, 24×20 (61×50·5).
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1939.
Coll: Purchased by the C.A.S. from the artist through the Leicester Galleries 1937.
Exh: Summer Exhibition, Leicester Galleries, August 1937 (82); British Council, Contemporary British Art, New York World's Fair, 1939 (147 and repr.), Canadian tour, Boston and Chicago, 1939–40 (147), and Toledo, 1942 (111, repr. p.64); Ethel Walker, Frances Hodgkins, Gwen John, Tate Gallery, May–June 1952 (12).
Repr: Hesketh Hubbard, A Hundred Years of British Painting 1851–1951, 1951, pl.104; Sir John Rothenstein, British Art since 1900, 1962, pl.13.
The sitter is the artist Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), wife of Clive Bell. In a letter to Miss Grace English, dated 24 February 1937, the artist wrote; ‘I have finished without spoiling either by doing so, the two portraits of Margaret Wade [?] and of Vanessa.’ It was the practice of Ethel Walker to finish a portrait at one, often very long, sitting and she rarely worked upon a picture afterwards. A note in Miss English's MS. reads ‘Vanessa Bell 1935 after dinner’, but the significance or accuracy of this remark is difficult to ascertain. It could possible mean that the portrait was begun in 1935 and then reworked in 1937.
Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II
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