This drawing is a faithful, insightfully characterised life study of the novelist E. M. Forster. Forster’s appearance was remarkable for its heavy eyelids, wispy moustache and staring eyes, all of which are vividly registered in Rothenstein’s drawing. Contemporary photographs show that he held his head with a slight stoop, bowed forward or to one side, and this is sensitively registered in Rothenstein’s placement of the head on the page. Forster was one of the pre-eminent writers of his generation, especially noted for his novels A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India, and aside from Rothenstein he was also portrayed by his artist friends Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Jessica Dismorr.

Letters from Forster to Rothenstein provide an insight into the nature of their relationship. They had a friendly acquaintance over a thirty-year period, encouraged by mutual friends such as the society host and amateur scientist Sylvester Herringham, at whose gathering they apparently met for the first time in 1912. Both men knew the Indian city of Benares, and Rothenstein was able to introduce Forster to a fakir who lived there. It seems that it was Rothenstein who suggested to Forster the idea of a portrait drawing. In 1922, Forster replied: ‘I should much like to be drawn by you, also to see you again.’ On this occasion, however, complications arose and sittings were delayed – primarily owing to the unavailability of Forster, who lived in Surrey and spent relatively little time in London. He wrote again the following summer to encourage Rothenstein: ‘Can I draw you to draw me this Friday? Any place, any time. It would be such a pleasure to me to come.’ It was probably on that occasion in July 1923 that this drawing of Forster was made. It seems that Rothenstein asked about making a further portrait drawing of him the following year, but Forster replied: ‘I wish I could again come and sit to you, since you suggest it, but fear that as things are now it wouldn't be possible.’

As the inscription at the lower right-hand edge indicates, this drawing was the preliminary ‘1st sketch’ that preceded a larger, half-length presentation drawing. That drawing now hangs in the hall of King’s College, Cambridge. Forster read classics as an undergraduate there between 1897 and 1901 and later, from 1953 until his death, held an honorary fellowship at the College. The King’s College drawing is widely known: it was published in the Illustrated London News on 11 October and The Graphic on 8 November and 1924, it was reproduced as an editioned lithograph, and was subsequently used on the cover of Forster’s selected letters. By contrast, this sanguine drawing of Forster’s head has never been exhibited or illustrated and remained in the artist’s possession until his death.

In 1937, Rothenstein gave two reasons for depicting his peers: ‘the first, an unabating urge to draw, the second an impulse to make some record of contemporaries whose work has stirred my admiration.’ Writing in the second volume of his memoirs in 1932, he remembered the early twenties as an especially prolific moment in his career with regard to portrait drawings:

"After eight years largely devoted to landscape painting, I was grateful for the stream of sitters who consented to be drawn or painted. For Winchester College I drew H. A. L. Fisher and Lord Grey, drawings of Dean Inge and E. M. Forster were acquired for King’s College, Cambridge, while Siegfried Sassoon, Aldous Huxley, Arnold Bennett, Walter de la Mare, Ralph Hodgson, Sir Frank Dyson, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir J. J. Thomson, Sir Ernest Rutherford and Sir William Bragg and numerous others allowed me the freedom of their features."

Rothenstein was one of the most prominent and esteemed portrait draughtsmen of his generation. His sitters included artistic and literary types and public figures. At an early stage of his career in 1897 and 1898, a set of twelve drawings by Rothenstein called ‘English Portraits’ was published as lithographs. Notable subjects included artists, writers and musicians, among them Charles Stanford and George Bernard Shaw. In 1906, he visited the famous sculptor Rodin at Meudon and drew his portrait, which was subsequently donated to the Tate Gallery by Rothenstein’s friend Bernard Shaw. In 1926, his son John Rothenstein published a study of William’s portrait drawings. It included a catalogue listing 751 drawings and 135 lithographs. This was followed in 1937 by Faber & Faber’s volume illustrating Rothenstein’s drawings, Contemporaries: Portrait Drawings. Although some of Rothenstein’s drawings share the vivid exaggerations found in the caricatures of his close friend Max Beerbohm, his best portraits capture an acute sense of the individual’s personality with an elegant, unlaboured graphic style.

This drawing of E. M. Forster accords with Rothenstein’s usual practices. It was made using the same materials – red chalk on grey paper – as Rothenstein’s study for a portrait of the artist Barnett Freedman, for example. Although he sometimes used pastel, he justified his normal choice of media: ‘I prefer the more direct touch of sanguine or chalk to pastel, apt to be, in my case, too much of a compromise.’ It was also Rothenstein’s regular practice to make an initial study, as he described in 1937: ‘I must usually make two, sometimes more, attempts, often starting afresh from a tracing from a first drawing, having thus the structure lightly indicated – I do not remember whether I acquired this method from Degas; it was one he often used for his studies.’