The occasion for this week’s choice of picture is an outstanding exhibition of roughly a hundred works by the turbulent and mercurial painter and writer, Percy Wyndham Lewis, which forms one of the highlights of this year’s Fine Art, Design and Antiques Fair at Olympia. The picture in question is one of the most arresting works in the display: a rare early self-portrait by the artist, recently rediscovered and purchased at a small country auction by a private collector and Lewis afficionado, who wishes to remain anonymous. Readers who wish to see it will have to hurry, because today is the last day of the week-long fair.
The self-portrait was almost certainly painted in about 1906-07, when Lewis was living the life of a bohemian, if not quite a down-and-out, in Paris and London. Clearly executed in some haste, it is not entirely finished, quite possibly because Lewis could not afford the necessary painting materials to complete it. He was short of money throughout his early years, and in letters written to his mother at the time his want of cash is a constant theme. Lewis, who was a serial philanderer in his youth, and much prone to brusque misogynistic utterances, had recently taken up with a young German girl called Ida Vendel. He had done so largely, it seems, because she was prepared to model for him for nothing, rather than because of any deep affection that he felt for her (“farewell stinking german bitch” was his less than charming envoi to her, in a letter to a friend, written shortly after their eventual break-up). Perhaps he painted his own self-portrait because, among other things, the subject provided him with another model whom he did not have to pay.
The portrait captures the truculent self-preoccupation...
