William Orpen RA RHA (1878 - 1931)
Anita Bartle, The Red Shawl
Oil on canvas, 94 x 72.5cm (37 x 28½")

Provenance: G.C. Beresford Collection; Private Collection Canada; Sale, Sotheby's London: May 22,...

William Orpen RA RHA (1878 - 1931)
Anita Bartle, The Red Shawl
Oil on canvas, 94 x 72.5cm (37 x 28½")

Provenance: G.C. Beresford Collection; Private Collection Canada; Sale, Sotheby's London: May 22, 2014, lot 290: Private Collection, Ireland

 

At the time of her marriage to the engineer and inventor, Aloysius Graham Brackenbury, in 1906, Anita Bartle received her portrait as a wedding gift from William Orpen. She had sat for the painter in the previous year for two portraits and the gift, now in the Tate Gallery, London, shows her looking to the left as though catching an off-stage fragment of conversation, her cheeks rouge, and lips reddened (fig 1). In the present more elaborate portrait, the sitter, having removed her coral beads, addresses us directly and an exchange is in progress. That neither picture is listed in the artist’s studio book, suggests that Miss Bartle was acting as a model, and that the two portraits were not commissioned, but the mere product of time spent visiting the Orpens. 

Bartle had known Orpen for at least three years, and probably since he had emerged as a star student from the Slade School of Fine Art. Recognizing his talent, she had been keen to purchase The Window Seat (Private Collection), shown at the winter exhibition of the New English Art Club in 1901. Subsequent correspondence between the two indicates that this early work costing £20, would be paid in 12 weekly instalments. The painter, recently married and keen to be independent, readily agreed.

Two years older than Orpen, Anita Jane Craven Bartle (1876-1962) was the daughter of George Henry Bartle and Rebecca Wood. Although born in England, at Brierley Hill near Stourbridge in the West Midlands, her early years were spent in Valencia where she acquired both modern and old forms of Spanish. By 1894 she was back in England, completing her education at Clifton in Bristol. Well-read in English literary classics she started a newspaper column entitled ‘This is my Birthday’ in 1900, in the left-leaning Daily Chronicle - each day of the year containing a short anthology of quotations. The Chronicle is likely to have brought her into contact with the poet and essayist, Alice Meynell, one half of an influential couple in the publishing world, whose son, Everard, was a Slade School friend of Orpen’s. She may well have joined Orpen, and fellow students, Augustus John, Charles Stabb and Hubert Wellington at the lively ‘Sunday Suppers’ at the Meynells.(1) Such was the popularity of her daily anthologies that they were collected and published as a book in 1902, with an introduction by the popular Jewish novelist, Israel Zangwill and a dedication to the young Meynell.(2) The publisher’s innovation was to insert a blank page at each date so that autographs and other quotations could be added by purchasers of the book. The author’s own copy contains self-portraits by both Meynell and Orpen on the appropriate pages (fig 2). 

In the present example, the depth of Orpen’s stylistic concerns reveals itself. As has been pointed out, he had visited Paris and Madrid with Hugh Lane in the autumn of 1904, spending extended periods in the Prado.(3) In Paris he is known to have toured dealers’ emporia, giving lessons in Impressionist painting to Lane and possibly receiving reciprocal instruction in front of Old Masters, before returning to London with a collection of photographs. Over the winter and throughout the following year, Orpen was working out these experiences in pictures of pauper saints and Old Testament prophets whose poses and gestures are drawn from myriad High Renaissance and Baroque sources.(4) It must have seemed to Orpen that there was a secret language of hand movements, derived from religious ritual and seen in popular reproductions of works like Leonardo’s St John the Baptist. The saint’s pose, the tilt of the head, is repeated in the present work, while, like the Baptist, Orpen’s St Patrick, 1905 (Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent) points heavenward. Gesture, in the pointing forefinger seen in Van Dyck’s celebrated Self-Portrait with Sunflower, c. 1632, had, by the seventeenth century, acquired secular significance and this, like the Leonardo, was a work Orpen could have seen in the real (figs 3&4).(5)

Anita’s delicate fingers are of course spread in the present work, as she draws her necklace through them – perhaps indicating ambivalence, or the complexity of the ‘new woman’, making her way in a world of shifting values. Around her shoulders is the scarlet shawl in which Grace Knewstub, Orpen’s wife, had posed in 1903 and which would reappear in Lottie of Paradise Walk, 1905. With all this, is her gaze quizzical, or merely impassive – is she making a point or seeking a reaction?

When the present picture passed to the artist’s friend, the Irish photographer, George Charles Beresford, Bartle produced a further anthology, The Madonna of the Poets, illustrated with popular pictures of the Madonna, and was received into the Catholic Church. Other works of a similar nature followed, along with three children, and in 1922, having honed her language skills in Greek and Russian, she published The Akathistos Hymn with the translator, Dr John Christopher. An autodidact of great scholarship, it seems appropriate that Bartle should be represented here by a painter, the depth of whose visual understanding, combined with infallible instinct, erudition and great natural ability leaves us with an engaging enigma. 

Prof. Kenneth McConkey, November 2021

 

 

(1) See Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell, A Memoir, 1929 (Jonathan Cape), pp. 212-221.

(2) In 1902, when Bartle’s ‘birthday book’ was published, Everard Meynell was posing for Orpen in pictures such as Interior, c. 1901 (Private Collection) and The Chess Players, c. 1902 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

(3) Bruce Arnold, Orpen, Mirror to an Age, 1981, (Jonathan Cape), pp. 143-5.

(4) Kenneth McConkey, ‘Dark Identities – Orpen’s Hispanic Repertory’, British Art Journal, vol VII, no 3, Winter, 2006-7, pp. 62-9.

(5) Leonardo da Vinci’s, St John the Baptist, was in the French royal collection until the Revolution of 1789. Van Dyck’s celebrated, Self-Portrait with Sunflower, was lent by the Duke of Westminster to the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of 1900. It will be noted that, like Anita Bartle, the painter fingers a gold chain as he points 

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