This striking portrait depicts Walter Sickert’s friend, the artist Cicely Hey. A woman with extraordinary features, Sickert’s treatment of her face emphasises its bizarre and striking qualities. Bright side-lighting from the right gives a highlight along her protuberant nose while a deep shadow is cast across the left-hand side of her face and beneath the child-like mouth. Her eyes, wide like saucers and sunk deep in their sockets, are humane. She wears an open expression, difficult to interpret but surely guileless and innocent. Sickert painted several portraits of Cicely Hey, all of them executed in 1923, and they present a complex history. Writing in 1960, Lillian Browse was aware of only five. More recently in 2006, ‘the doyenne of Sickert scholars’ Wendy Baron catalogued eight paintings. (In a letter to Baron in 1979, Cicely Hey herself claimed that there were seven in total.) Baron described the circumstances for their meeting and the subsequent sittings. 'They met on 17 January 1923, when she was taking money at the door for tickets to a lecture by Roger Fry. He asked her to sit for him, she agreed, and the first sitting was arranged for the following day, 18 January, at his Fitzroy Street studio. Their friendship blossomed, and sittings for portraits continued for some months.' Sickert had an eccentric penchant for inviting new acquaintances to sit for him. Aside from Cicely Hey, he also propositioned Quentin Bell (the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell), who acquiesced, and the Manchester-based art collector Lucy Carrington Wertheim, who did not. While he regarded Wertheim as the archetypal ‘Renoir lady’, it is unclear how Sickert considered Cicely Hey. An artist in her own right, she enjoyed modest success in the course of her career. The high point was a solo exhibition of ‘celebrity portraits’ held by Alex. Reid & Lefevre in 1933, which included portrait drawings of Sickert and his wife Thérèse Lessore. (Four of these works are now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.) Hey and Sickert were good friends in the 1920s, following his return to England following a period of living in France after the death of his second wife Christine. In certain drawings which he gifted her in 1923, he addressed Hey as ‘my mascot’ and referred to himself as her ‘grateful colleague’. Sickert’s working habit was to have several paintings in process at one time, often showing the same subject or sitter. This allowed him to work continuously without being interrupted by drying time: as soon as one picture had been worked over, it would be put to one side while it dried in readiness for another session, and another work would be taken up. Working on the same subject in multiple paintings served several purposes: it allowed Sickert to indulge his obsession for the subject; he could maintain an intensity of focus; and it facilitated experiments in paint, allowing him to explore different means of realising the same subject. (Though he made multiple versions of certain subjects, Sickert almost never replicated his means of painting a sitter and each work was a substantively individualised painting.) This version, along with the British Council picture (fig. 1), was made in Sickert’s studio at 15 Fitzroy Street. (The room is clearly identifiable in the British Council version by its embossed gold wallpaper.) Piano Nobile’s painting of Cicely Hey measures 24 x 18 inches and is somewhat larger than most other versions as such. The British Council’s Cicely Hey (fig. 1) is the largest, measuring 25 x 30 inches. In each case, Hey appears larger than life, her spindly figure and extraordinary visage given a looming physical presence. The British Council version also includes interior features which help to identify the otherwise obscure surroundings in Piano Nobile’s Portrait of Cicely Hey. The gleaming area of grey-green paint over her right shoulder is evidently a picture on the wall behind her – an oval image in a black mount and a gilded frame, which is fully visible in the British Council work. (Throughout his career, Sickert routinely cropped or distorted subsidiary compositional elements, eliminating a sense of depth and positioning them at the front of the picture plane in line with the main subject.) Up until the later 1920s, Sickert’s working practice was to make preparatory studies from life. He then used these to work up paintings in the studio. A group of eleven preparatory studies of Cicely Hey survive, which relate to three separate but related paintings of her: the British Council work; an oil painting in the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; and Piano Nobile’s painting, which exists in four other versions. Sickert gave all eleven of these drawings to Cicely Hey, who bequeathed them to the Whitworth Art Gallery upon her death in 1980. One of these sheets shows Sickert working through a variety of different poses and angles (fig. 2). It is likely that Piano Nobile’s painting of Hey was not based on any single drawing, squared-up and transferred to canvas; rather, it was most likely executed as a variation from these collected impressions, while the presence of the sitter and her appearance were still fresh in his mind.