Gertler first met fellow art student Dora de Houghton Carrington (1893-1932) in 1911 on a staircase at the Slade. After noting her long pigtails and turned-in toes, he turned away, yet even at this first chance encounter something made him look back. When, a short time later, Nevinson brought her to his Elder Street studio in 1912, she was transformed: modern clothes (she favoured breeches) replaced traditional Edwardian dress and her hair was cropped into a distinctive bob (earning her the name ‘crophead’ from Virgina Woolf and ‘herla’ – literally ‘hairless one’ – from Golda). In keeping with Slade tradition she had abandoned her first name and for the rest of her life would be known simply as ‘Carrington’. Gertler fell instantly and irrevocably in love; only weeks later Carrington had become ‘the only thing outside painting worth living for’, yet he was never truly to possess her. Carrington only reluctantly agreed to become Gertler’s lover briefly in 1916 and he described their tortuous relationship as having ‘neither beginning nor end’. He twice contemplated suicide over their affair: in 1917, when Carrington revealed that she was in love with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey with whom she afterwards set up home, and in 1921, when, to keep together their ménage a trois, she married Ralph Partridge. Yet Carrington remained Gertler’s confidante and muse for much of this decade. They were united at least in part by their shared bond over painting and Carrington’s brother Noel was also sure that ‘there was in their relationship something which for her reached far deeper . . . [a] communion of spirit’.

Photographs (in which she is invariably looking down or away) fail to convey Carrington’s irresistible allure, but Leonard Woolf’s description of her as ‘one of those mysterious, flamboyant feminine characters’ with ‘the most beautifully round, smoothest, pinkest velvet cheeks and huge blue eyes the colour of Chinese porcelain’ 18 captures something of her charm. Yet although none of the complexities of their relationship, or indeed of Carrington’s own complex character, troubles the surface of Gertler’s serene portrait of her wearing a blue jersey, he nevertheless catches her youthful freshness and delicate complexion. The work is, at least, in part also a portrait of the ‘New Woman’, (literally) shorn of the trappings of elaborate Edwardian coiffure and dress. In Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Blue Jersey, the flat modelling and immobility of Carrington’s features, as well as the way her shoulders slope simply away from her neckline, are reminiscent of early Italian portraiture and illustrate Gertler’s Neo-Primitive technique. His own enthusiasm for tempera was part of a general revival of interest in the medium in the early twentieth-century. In September, having picked up some ‘very useful tips’ (including his own recipe) from Augustus John in the summer, Gertler also began to work in what he referred to as ‘that finest of mediums’. Gertler’s interest in tempera continued until at least the following spring when he even bought a special palette for authenticity. It was a frustrating medium however since it did not allow for any alterations and he chided Carrington that she ‘shouldn’t jump about so much when I’m struggling with tempera’. The sittings were often interrupted by their quarrels and in mid-November Gertler called their friendship off, but asked that for the ‘sake of old kindnesses’ Carrington continue to sit until the picture was finished. Perhaps owing to these interruptions, it was finally completed in the more fluid medium of gouache in December 1912.