Portrait of a lady in widow’s weeds, seated in an architectural setting

Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA (1861-1951) Young Man in a Red Tie Oil on canvas 51 x 40.6 cm.; (within frame) 70 x 59.7 cm. Provenance: The Lefevre Gallery, London, stock number X890; Christie’s, London, Modern British Pictures, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture, 12 September 1996, lot 58; Bonhams, London, Modern British and Irish Art, 23 November 2022, lot 177; Private Collection, United Kingdom. This focussed composition is dominated by a handsome young man in profile, frowning with a concentrated glare. His slender cheeks meet a jaw brushed with a masculine grey, complimented by the blue of a flower or pocket square, and the shadow of a loose strand of oiled hair that rests across his forehead. The stylistic sophistication shows Walker at her best, ambitiously combining measured figuration with expressive abstraction, as delicious dashes of pigment appear still wet, and dissonant swipes energetically mark the surface of the canvas. With an elegance that borders on the effete, the sitter’s urbane style includes a spearpoint collar, framed by the wide lapels of his suit jacket. Most significantly, the young man’s dandyish fashion is augmented by the conspicuous titular red tie which he wears – an established expression of queerness in the 20th century. Painted by the lesbian artist Dame Ethel Walker, it is likely that the portrait is that of a gay man belonging to London’s queer artistic circles. Indeed, Walker’s male sitters (who constitute but a fraction of her output) are typically conceived as modish, and often wear striking colourful ties. Walker was one of the earliest lesbian artists to overtly explore her sexuality in her works, and an aesthetic fascination with the female form culminated with her glorious large-scale ‘decorations’, exemplified by Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa (Tate, N03885). Red neckties had been established in the 20th century as a coded (though appropriately colourful) expression of queerness, not dissimilar to the green carnation of the Wildean aesthetes. The gay writer and musician Mikhail Kuzmin was painted in 1909 in a stark red tie. Two decades later, the Anglo-French physician Havelock Ellis described the red necktie as an emblem amongst queer New Yorkers: ‘[…] there has been a fashion for a red tie to be adopted by inverts [homosexuals] as their badge’ (Ellis, p. 299). The motif permeated fiction, and in Thomas Mann’s 1912 novel Death In Venice, the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach begins to wear a red necktie after he develops an infatuation with a beautiful young boy staying at his hotel. William Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury includes an unnamed male character identified throughout by his distinctive red necktie, which is the subject of veiled insinuations against his masculinity. Walker must surely have been familiar with this symbolic importance when she executed the present portrait. Her few portraits of male sitters include colourful neckties almost exclusively, and include numerous examples of red neckties. Indeed, the artist herself preferred to wear a red tie, a declaration which so impressed itself on Virginia Woolf that she noted it in a diary entry after tea with Walker (Bell, p. 282). Walker, who painted Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, had once offered to paint Woolf in the nude, as Lilith. Around the same time, Augustus John painted the gay peer Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar, in a loose red necktie or neck scarf. The portrait passed through the Lefevre Gallery, which also represented Walker, and which inventoried the present work. While the sartorial choice may have been incidental, a colourful accessory chosen to enliven the portrait, its prominent inclusion would suggest a personal significance to Walker, the recognition of a shared experience between artist and subject. Dame Ethel Walker was hailed as a leading female artist of her generation, and as late as 2010 was one of only four women artists to have been honoured as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Walker was born in Edinburgh in 1861 to the botanist Arthur Abney Walker, a descendent of the Walker family of iron industrialists, whose estates included Clifton House (Rotherham) and Blythe Hall (Nottinghamshire). She attended school in London after the family moved to Wimbledon, and in 1880 met the fellow artist Clara Christian, with whom she would form an important personal and professional bond. The women’s relationship was later allegorised by the writer George Moore as that of Stella (Christian) and Florence (Walker) in his fictionalised three-volume memoir Hail and Farewell. Walker went on to Putney School of Art and Westminster School of Art, and studied under Frederick Brown, who became a lifelong mentor. Around 1893 Walker took further study at the Slade School of Art, partly under Walter Sickert, and returned in 1912, 1916, and 1921. Although Walker enjoyed painting floral still lifes and seascapes, her best work was portraiture. She worked from her studio at 38 Cheyne Walk for most of her career, and enjoyed a prominent role in London’s artistic milieu. Her sitters included the artists Lucien Pissarro, Orovida Camille Pissarro, Vanessa Bell, and Barbara Hepworth; she painted Nancy Astor, the Countess of Strathcona, the editor Joan Werner Laurie, and author Leo Walmsley. The actors Flora Robson and Elsa Lanchester sat for Walker, as did the young Christopher Robin Milne. Walker herself was photographed by the bisexual photographer and painter Humphrey Spender...

French Academic School, 18th century A tête d’expression study of a gentleman, c. 1780-90 Oil on canvas 46.1 x 35 cm.; (within frame) 57.5 x 46.6. cm. Provenance: Private Collectio...

Flemish or South German, c. 1700-1720 Hunting trophy with a deer and game, adorned with the accoutrements of the chase Oil on canvas In a period style moulded pine and ebony veneer...

Petra Schott (German, b. 1953) Pleasant Thoughts, 2021 Mixed media on canvas Signed lower right 100 x 80 cm.; (within frame) 110 x 90 cm. Born in Hanover in 1953, Petra Schott studi...

Painter active in Rome in the early 17th century Susanna and the Old Men Oil on canvas 76 x 62 cm. with frame 92 x 78 cm. This valuable painting illustrates the piquant episode, ta...

Provenance: Bradley Collection. Private Collection, Upperville, Virginia. Literature: Katlijne van der Stighelen and Hans Vlieghe, Rubens: Portraits of Unidentified and Newly Identified Sitters painted in Antwerp, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, vol. 19, pt. 3, London and Turnhout, 2021, under cat. no. 189, p. 161, and fig. 75. This painting had previously been considered to be by an anonymous Tuscan painter of the sixteenth century in the orbit of Agnolo Bronzino. While the painting does in fact demonstrate a striking formal and compositional similarity to Bronzino’s portraits—compare the nearly identical pose of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 1)—its style is completely foreign to Italian works of the period. That it is painted on an oak panel is further indication of its non-Italian origin. This portrait can in fact be confidently attributed to the Antwerp artist Huybrecht Beuckelaer. Huybrecht, the brother of Joachim Beuckelaer, has only recently been identified as the author of a distinct body of work formerly grouped under the name of the “Monogrammist HB.” In recent studies by Kreidl, Wolters, and Bruyn his remarkable career has been delineated: from its beginnings with Joachim in the workshop of Pieter Aertsen; to his evident travels to Italy where, it has been suggested, he came into contact with Bronzino’s paintings; to his return to Antwerp, where he seems to have assisted Anthonis Mor in painting costume in portraits; to his independent work in Antwerp (where he entered the Guild of Saint Luke in 1579); and, later to his career in England where, known as “Master Hubberd,” he was patronized by the Earl of Leicester. Our painting was recently published by Dr. Katlijne van der Stighelen and Dr. Hans Vlieghe in a volume of the Corpus Rubenianum, in which they write that the painting “has a very Italian air about it and fits convincingly within [Beuckelaer’s] oeuvre.” Stighelen and Vlieghe compare the painting with Peter Paul Ruben’s early Portrait of a Man, Possibly an Architect or Geographer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which the sitter holds a compass and wears a similarly styled doublet (Fig. 2). Huybrecht both outlived and travelled further afield than his brother Joachim, who made his career primarily in Antwerp. Whereas Joachim was the main artistic inheritor of their uncle and teacher, Pieter Aertson, working in similar style and format as a specialist in large-scale genre and still-life paintings, Huybrecht clearly specialized as a painter of portraits and was greatly influenced by the foreign artists and works he encountered on his travels. His peripatetic life and his distinctly individual hand undoubtedly contributed to the fact his career and artistic output have only recently been rediscovered and reconstructed. His periods abroad seem to have overlapped with the mature phase of his brother Joachim’s career, who enrolled in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke much earlier than his brother, establishing himself as an independent painter in 1560. Joachim’s activity was confined to the following decade and half, and his latest work dates from the last year of his life, 1574. Our portrait was likely produced in the late 1560s, a dating supported by the dendrochronological investigation performed by Dr. Peter Klein, which established that it is painted on an oak panel with an earliest felling date of 1558 and with a fabrication date of ca. 1566. This painting presents a portrait of an artist, almost certainly Huybrecht’s self-portrait. The young sitter is confidently posed in a striking patterned white doublet with a wide collar and an abundance of buttons. He stands with his right arm akimbo, his exaggerated hands both a trademark of Huybrecht and his brother Joachim’s art, as well as a possible reference to the “hand of the artist.” The figure peers out of the painting, interacting intimately and directly with the viewer, as we witness him posed in an interior, the tools and results of his craft visible nearby. He holds a square or ruler in his left hand, while a drawing compass...

Circle of Jacques-Louis David (French, 18th Century) Provenance: Private Collection, Buenos Aires Exhibited: “Art of Collecting,” Flint Institute of Art, Flint, Michigan, 23 November 2018 – 6 January 2019. This vibrant portrait of young man was traditionally considered a work by Jacques-Louis David, whose style it recalls, but to whom it cannot be convincingly attributed. Rather, it would appear to be by a painter in his immediate following—an artist likely working in France in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Several names have been proposed as the portrait’s author: François Gérard, Louis Hersent, Anne-Louis Girodet (Fig. 1), Theodore Gericault, and Jean-Baptiste Wicar, among others. Some have thought the artist Italian, and have proposed Andrea Appiani, Gaspare Landi...

Provenance: with Leo Blumenreich and Julius Böhler, Munich, 1924 Dr. Frederic Goldstein Oppenheimer (1881-1963), San Antonio, Texas; by whom given to: Abraham M. Adler, New York, until 1985; thence by descent to the present owners While old inscriptions on the verso of this panel propose its author to be Hans Holbein and the sitter Sir John More—a lawyer, judge, and the father of Sir Thomas More—this fine portrait has long been recognized to be by a Flemish hand. Max Friedländer gave the painting to Bernard van Orley (1487/1491 – 1541) in 1924, but did not include it in the volume dedicated to the artist in his Early Netherlandish Paintings...