Clive Gardiner Art

Ernest LAURENT Gentilly 1859 - Bièvres 1929 Seated woman seen from behind, preparatory sketch Oil on cardboard Circa 1920 32 x 21.5 cm unframed Our oil o...

Conditions : Good overall Conditions. Provenance: Bonhams sale, MA. US Oil on canvas framed, signed René Lelong on the lower right part. FREE SHIPPING IN ALL CONTINENTAL USA. René L...

Oil on canvas by Charles PICART LE DOUX (1881-1959), France, 1939. The Beautiful Girl. With frame: 85.5x72.5 cm - 33.7x28.5 inches ; without frame: 73x60cm - 28.75x23.6 inches. 20F f...

Canvas measures 61x50 cm. Frameless He was born in 1951. Under the direction of the master Pedro Bermejo, he began his artistic career, quickly highlighting and observing in his works an unusual mastery of drawing. A very mature painter who has known how to stop time in all his works. His themes are preferably costumbristas although in his work the usual thing is to see eight century themes, with horse carriages, hats, umbrellas and still lifes. Observing his work reminds us, by the subject, of Maestro...

Suchitra Bhosle's "Wading Aquamarine" is an original, hand made oil painting that depicts a feminine model kneeling in a white dress at the water's edge. About the Artist: Suchitra...

This is not your typical child’s portrait. Young Ellen Warfield is steadily pouring tea or coffee in a proper manner that certainly conforms to societal expectations of the 1950’s. ...

Suchitra Bhosle's "A Beautiful and Brave Gaze" is an original, hand made oil painting that depicts an Indian woman with a lit flame creating a beautiful orange glow around her. Abo...

Ignacio Gil Sala, was a painter, bohemian character, adventurous and intrepid traveler who knew how to capture his eyes to that world with his painting. After starting his artistic ...

Josep María Morató Aragonés (1923-2006) - Portrait of a young woman - Oil on canvas Oil measurements 61x46 cm. Frameless. Morató Aragonés, Josep María. Reus (Tarragona), 21.V.1923 –...

Jadviga Žilvinska (1918-2010) was born in Tallinn. She grew up in Liepāja, where her great interest in art began and strengthened, which led the young artist to study at the Art Aca...

Suchitra Bhosle's "Dappled Light" is an original, hand made oil painting that depicts a man napping in the sun while leaning against a tree with sun stre...

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...