Edith Sitwell

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: The Tate Modern Gallery, London (the UK).

Poetess Edith Sitwell, like her brothers, was part of the cultural elite of London. Lewis was close to their circle in the early 1920s and began to paint a portrait of the lady, but the sessions with the artist were very long, and his behaviour during work was “disturbing”. Later, Lewis quarrelled with the society, including the model, and the extremely stylized portrait turned into an image of a beautiful soulless doll sitting on the background of the “heavy” attributes of classical education. The artist considered them the embodiment of vulgarity and cultural stagnation. To top it off, Lewis deprived Edith of her thin hands she was proud of hiding them under her clothes. In pencil drawings, partly stored in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the woman is depicted with great warmth.