Rupert Doone (1903–1966) was an actor and choreographer. He belonged to a class of attractive homosexual young men that floated between London and Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s, and his contemporaries included the painter Christopher Wood, the photographer Cecil Beaton and the choreographer Frederick Ashton. He travelled to Paris aged 19 and became intimate with the impresario Jean Cocteau. (They separated when Doone refused to smoke opium, to which Cocteau was addicted.) He joined the Ballet Suédois, a distinguished company based in Paris, and danced in solo roles with Lydia Lopokova, though he was dismissed before long owing to his uncontrollable temper. Doone returned to London in 1924 where he continued to dance. He became attached to the painter Robert Medley in 1926, with whom he spent the rest of his life. (Though Portrait of Rupert Doone remained in Morris’s possession for several decades, it was acquired by Medley a few years after Doone’s death in 1966.) After a period in and out of Paris, in June 1928 Diaghilev recruited Doone as a principal for the Ballet Russes’ Covent Garden show. However, Diaghilev’s unexpected death just two months later cut short his moment of glory. From 1930 he was associated with the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, and thereafter abandoned dancing in favour of stage acting. In 1932, Doone and Medley formed a left-leaning performance collective called Group Theatre which produced multimedia events encompassing theatre, music, poetry and visual art. Collaborators included W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Duncan Grant and Henry Moore among many others. As well as long periods directing and producing for Group Theatre between 1932 and ’39 and between 1946 and ’51, he also worked as a director at Morley College, London, until shortly before his death. * Portrait of Rupert Doone was most likely painted in 1925. It was at this time when Morris and his partner Lett Haines were well-acquainted with Doone and later his partner Medley. They frequented the same social circles in Paris and, when Doone and Medley were in Paris in 1926, their circle of friends frequented the Café Sélect. The milieu at that time included Morris and Lett Haines, with whom Doone and Medley occasionally went out drinking, and others like the author Mary Butts (also the subject of a portrait by Morris), the painters Nina Hamnett and Moise Kisling, and various friends of Cocteau. Hamnett described this time in Paris in her memoir The Laughing Torso. One day Rupert Doone, the ballet dancer, came to Paris. He was then just beginning to dance. He was very poor and had posed for Cedric Morris and [Frank] Dobson. He had a very fine head. He sat for the Academies to make a little money. I wanted to paint him. Though Doone first went to Paris as a young man in 1923, meaning that Morris may have painted him that year as Hamnett suggested, it remains likely that Portrait of Rupert Doone was executed a little later. It was first dated to 1925 (presumably by the artist himself) for Morris’s solo exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune in 1938. Several decades later it was less reliably dated to 1921. Compromising between these two dates – 1921 and 1925 – with arbitrary precision, in 1984 the Tate curator Richard Morphet dated the work at the exact midpoint between the two dates, circa 1923. The date of 1925 for Portrait of Rupert Doone is strongly supported by stylistic comparisons with other portraits by Morris from the mid-1920s like The Swiss Visitor (1925, Chelmsford Museum) (fig. 1). In both paintings, the sitters’ gaze is inexpressive but intense. Colourful buildings with a vernacular Mediterranean quality are organised as a background, constructed with formal intent in flat angular planes. In both cases, the figure dominates the picture plane even as the pastel pink and terracotta architecture provides a pleasant counterpoint. Most importantly, Morris’s slightly earlier paintings from 1922 and ’23 have an experimental quality, espousing a variety of ‘primitivist’ and second-hand Parisian modernisms. Works from that period were altogether different from the approach in Portrait of Rupert Doone, and Morris’s paintings of 1925 and ’26 are quietly assured by contrast with his earlier pieces. Founded on fastidious observation from life models, these mature works from 1925 onwards combine high colour and the unpedantic, full-brush application of paint – qualities which were to persist for the remaining fifty years of Morris’s career. This characteristic style was forged during a period of travel. From his arrival in Paris as a student in 1921 until his permanent return to England in 1927, Morris lived the peripatetic life of a bohemian. He and Lett Haines travelled together around Europe and North Africa, spending much time in Paris in between times. Many of Morris’s paintings from the time were inspired by simple delight in the places where he stayed – the olives trees of Greece and the palm trees of Tunisia appear from time to time. Though there is a dearth of documentation from this period, Portrait of Rupert Doone was evidently made in some southern clime – not in Paris as Hamnett suggested. There are two portrayals of Doone in public collections, one by Nina Hamnett (1922-23, Doncaster Museum & Art Gallery) (fig. 2) and another by Doone's partner Medley (c. 1930, Salford Museum & Art Gallery). Where Hamnett’s portrait is a vision of effete elegance, showing him with tight red lips and wearing a yellow waistcoat, Medley’s painting is a theatrical event with Doone seated on a chair, his head downcast and dressed as Pierrot the sad clown. Though Hamnett’s characterisation of Doone agrees in most respects with Morris’s – the small pink mouth, high forehead and hollow cheeks are the same – the work by Morris is less idealised: Doone’s eyes are ringed by tiredness, he appears a little older, and his hair has grown long and unkempt in the southern sun.