Walter Sickert

In February 1905, Sickert visited London to attend the International Society’s Whistler memorial exhibition. But he quickly became ensconced in London society, attending lunch and dinner parties, and making new friends who included most notably Elsie Swinton. Sickert had planned to return to France after the Whistler exhibition, but as Matthew Sturgis suggests, ‘the onset of his new infatuation seems to have made him reconsider.’ Denys Sutton described her as ‘a brilliant and enchanting person’, who ‘differed from other grandes dames of her period because of her gifts as a singer’. An acquaintance remembered that ‘[s]he seemed always to be laughing, lovely, full-throated laughter’. Mrs Swinton gave Robert Emmons an account of her friendship with Sickert:

He asked her to sit for him, and painted a number of portraits, some of which were sent over to Paris. She used to go to a studio at the top of 8 Fitzroy Street. […] He kept several canvases going at the same time, working at each in turn according to the light, the mood, or the frock she was wearing. He was never in a hurry to start. First they had tea and talk. She recalls that beneath this leisurely appearance, he seemed to be gradually “boiling up inside”: then suddenly he would pull out the desired canvas and begin to work.

Mrs Swinton told Wendy Baron ‘she believed […] that she modelled for this painting’—‘but after a lapse of some sixty years could not be absolutely certain’. There is little reason to doubt Mrs Swinton’s recollection, and the woman depicted in the painting is in keeping with her physical characteristics, especially her ‘thick dark hair’. Le Journal was one such painting of Mrs Swinton ‘sent over to Paris’ and, as the title suggests, it was first marketed and sold to a private collector in France. A touch of dull yellow on the fourth finger of her left hand depicts a gold wedding band—a salient detail in light of Sickert’s ‘infatuation’.

Le Journal belongs to a sequence of head-and-shoulder paintings that Sickert painted from life at 8 Fitzroy Street in 1905 and 1906. The interior is identifiable by the dark green back wall and the striped sofa, which appeared in contemporaneous pictures of Mrs Barrett, Agnes Beerbohm and the Daurmont sisters. In Easter week of 1906, Sickert sent Mrs Swinton a series of sketches that documented day-by-day the pictures he was painting. The compositions of these pictures are closely related to Le Journal. A recurrent motif was the use of flat, jaunty shapes—in this case the raised newspaper—in contrast to the nuances of a profile or a frontal view of the face. In this painting, the reclining posture produces a steeply foreshortened view of the face, which attitude Sickert used again in a painting known as Red Patterned Blouse [Baron 2006, no. 343.2], which was owned by Mrs Swinton and may even be a portrayal of her.

The coarsely woven canvas measures twenty by sixteen inches, and Sickert consistently used these standard dimensions in the series of paintings he made over the Easter of 1906. Applying lessons about drying and layering that he learned in Venice, the first applications of paint mapped the general tones of the subject in a low, narrow range of blue-grey. These grin through to the surface in places such as the face and the sitter’s blouse. (The same colour of tonal underpainting is also visible in Red Patterned Blouse.) Once the underpainting was dry, the picture was brought to a rapid conclusion in subsequent sittings, with detail and colour evoked in a final skin of thin, freely worked paint.