Dominie at San Felíu is a portrait drawing of Kitaj’s adopted daughter Dominie Kitaj. She is arranged in a frontal pose and her adolescent gaze meets Kitaj’s with tenderness and trust. Set against a scrubbed-on background of charcoal, the modelling of face, hair and neck are exquisitely graded. Subtle degrees of light and shade around her nose, mouth and eyes are achieved by delicate smudges with the artist’s fingers. The heavy black curls of hair, neatly divided in a central parting, are given an accurate sense of shape and weight by rhythmic scrapes of the charcoal. A strong sense of human presence is achieved in this work, with Kitaj achieving his goal of verisimilitude thanks to an authoritative, highly skilled handling of materials. The paper’s uneven shape creates an intelligent tension with the vivid likeness of the drawing it holds, a well-judged balance between the open-grained texture of materials and support weighed against the refined artistry they provide ingredients for.

Kitaj’s early work tended to use found imagery and cerebral, intellectual subject matter, but in the seventies he became increasingly interested in identity politics and his own ‘Jewishness’. He began to introduce autobiographical subjects into his paintings and drawings. 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’, he reflected.

Dominie’s relationship with her father grew closer after her adopted mother’s death, though her upbringing was a troubled one. In the late seventies, 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 at San Felíu was made at Kitaj’s holiday home in San Felíu, Catalonia, which he owned from the sixties until 1982. Kitaj referred to the property as ‘the old Guimerà house’, and when he sold it he thought it was ‘the end of a dream of the South’. During the same family holiday in 1978, Kitaj also made a portrait drawing of his son Lem.

In the late seventies, draughtsmanship became central to Kitaj’s artistic practice. He came to regard his drawings as some of his finest work, writing with a characteristic streak of self-assurance:

"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 at San Felíu uses heavily textured paper with a distinctive buff colour. Kitaj referred to this as ‘porridge paper’, which he first discovered in the seventies:

"One day, […] 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 adopted his own type of pliable art 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 at San Felíu, 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 specific effects of light, modelling and physicality.