R.B. Kitaj’s early work tended to use found imagery and cerebral, intellectual subject matter. In the 1970s, however, as he became increasingly interested in identity politics and his own ‘Jewishness’, he began to introduce autobiographical subjects into his paintings and drawings. Dominie (Ninth Street) is a life drawing of the artist’s daughter, made in Kitaj’s Ninth Street apartment in New York. She is depicted at a three-quarter-length angle, her gaze averted from the artist as he worked. Much of the surface of the drawing is obscured by a thick coating of charcoal – an inventive formal device. A small area around the sitter’s profile is modulated to allow through the grain of the paper, giving a suggestion of the circumambient atmosphere. This also produces a subtle effect of spatial depth, and the figure appears to jump forwards against the black screen to the right. The area behind her is less defined. Two bands of pale blue pastel above and behind her head may suggest a window or a blind, though the sitter’s face is illuminated by a direct source of light and the pastel bands may simply be decorative.

The sitter’s thick, heavy curls of black hair are rendered with sensitivity and acute accuracy. The charcoal medium creates an intelligent tension between the undefined area of black to the right and Dominie’s densely worked head of hair on the left, at once locking together the two elements in an artful, uniform surface while emphasising their distinct qualities – one a flat, lifeless surface and the other possessed of human vitality.

Kitaj once described his daughter Dominie as ‘my very own Indian princess’. She was adopted by Kitaj and his first wife, Elsi, who committed suicide at their home in Oxford in 1970. Her despair was partly inspired by Kitaj’s many sexual affairs, which continued for the rest of his life. As he later wrote in his autobiography, the year of Elsi’s death was ‘the worst year of my life’; ‘she was a good, quiet, innocent, very pretty young American girl-next-door who never grew old in exile.’ Dominie’s relationship with her father grew closer after her adopted mother’s death, though her upbringing was a troubled one. In the late 1970s, she was ‘down the road [from Kitaj] at a private school at Williamstown, and her awful “teen age” had begun in a spiral of boys, drink, drugs, and rebellion’. It was at this time in Dominie’s life that Kitaj started drawing her. In 1978 and 1979, he made three portrait drawings of her in different locations: Dominie (Ninth Street); Dominie at San Felíu (1978, Private Collection); and Dominie (Dartmouth) (1978, Private Collection).

The titular reference to Ninth Street in Dominie (Ninth Street) refers to the place where Kitaj was living at the time. As he explained in his autobiography:

The New York year [1978/79] was mainly Greenwich Village, drawing, and my strange Jewish excitement. […] We took a swell empty apartment in a Federal house on West 9th Street, between 5th and 6th, threw a mattress on the polished floors and never really furnished it (a quirk of mine).

While living in Greenwich Village, Kitaj concentrated solely upon life drawing to the exclusion of oil painting. His activities at the time were restricted to making pastel and charcoal drawings on paper. By concentrating solely on his drawings, the Kitaj specialist Marco Livingstone has explained, ‘Kitaj was able to give these pictures the range and density of paintings.’ Livingstone went on: ‘It is as if the decision to concentrate more or less exclusively on one medium made it necessary for him subconsciously to find the means of making that medium do the job of both painting and drawing.’

At this time, drawing was central to Kitaj’s practice as an artist and he regarded his drawings as some of his finest work. With a characteristic streak of self-assurance, he wrote in his autobiography:

In the late seventies in Time magazine, Robert Hughes wrote: “Kitaj draws better than almost anyone else alive.” I believe Hockney is the best natural draftsman alive, but my females are better.

In a conversation with the artist Timothy Hyman in 1980, Kitaj elaborated on his enthusiasm for good drawing:

For two years now I’ve only been drawing, with mixed results, most often the single face or body on sheets of paper. When you get it right, as a handful of men have, you get the whole world in, like Degas, Dürer, and Hokusai did. Then you can do anything.

Dominie (Ninth Street) is executed on Hand size paper, measuring sixteen by twenty-two inches or so, with a distinctive buff colour. Kitaj referred to this as ‘porridge paper’. In his autobiography he told the following story about how he discovered it:

One day, in the seventies, Hockney and I were walking down a street in London and went into an art supply shop. A pile of sort of tan paper attracted us, and we bought it and split it. I became addicted to these rough-tooth sheets, called porridge paper, very quickly, and I do most of my drawings on them still, in the 21st century. I bought out Hockney’s share a long time ago, and when the mill, Barcham Green, went out of business, I bought what I could find, even inferior, second-quality sheets.

Like his friend Frank Auerbach, who from the 1970s adopted his own type of off-white, cold-pressed and highly resilient paper, Kitaj valued porridge paper because it was ‘very flexible, hard-working, irregular paper’. Most artists with a vision will find the materials they need to realise it. In Dominie (Ninth Street), the buff hue of the paper evokes the warmth of human skin. Kitaj also noted the paper’s ‘very intelligent tooth which grips and guides my charcoal and pastel’, the paper apparently facilitating the artist’s fluency and tactile engagement. This particular drawing shows a masterful surety and an exacting ability to realise highly specific effects of light, modelling and physicality.