This is a finely detailed portrait drawing of Ida Nettleship by her future husband, Augustus John, whom she married in 1901. The draughtsmanship is at once stylishly refined and fastidiously naturalistic: short precise lines are used to describe localised detail, such as the crisp curls of the sitter’s hair; the soft, fulsome facial features—the nose, cheeks and chin—are modelled with delicate, very lightly applied crosshatching; and areas of shadow around the head—beside the ears and below the chin—are indicated by areas of uniform diagonal hatching.

Ida Nettleship was the daughter of the artist John Nettleship and his wife Ada, a successful society dressmaker. Ida was a talented, ambitious artist, and in 1895 she was awarded one of the two annual Slade scholarships. As she told her friend and fellow student Edna Waugh later that same year, ‘I desire a studio and ability to paint for myself, and I want to paint people—portraits. Oh I want real things—I know I can get them and I will.’ The ability and ambition of the students was one of the Slade’s great strengths. As one former student observed in 1907, ‘[g]ood pupils in a school come by batches; contagion and emulation spur the leader on and pull others in his train’. After marrying John in 1901, Ida bore him five sons—David, Casper, Robin, Edwin and Henry—before her premature death from puerperal fever in 1907.