CLARE SHERIDAN (BRITISH 1885-1970)

Bust of Lenin, 1922
bronze with brown patina
29 x 21 cm (11 3/8 x 8 1/4 in.)
signed lower right; signed, dated, stamped with copyright symbol and dedicated on verso: Contributed to / Friends of Soviet Russia / For Famine Relief

RELATED LITERATURE
For this model, see Russian portraits by Clare Sheridan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1921), as Lenin (bust) p. (114) 119 (illustrated)

LOT NOTES
Clare Sheridan Sheridan was a prominent sculptor, journalist and writer, best known for creating busts for notable sitters and as a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill. In 1910 she married Wilfred (William) Frederick Sheridan, with whom she had two daughters. When her daughter Elizabeth died in 1914, Sheridan was moved to commemorate her grave with a small weeping angel sculpture, and so, history has it, begun her sculpting career. Sheridan then moved from London to France to study under John Tweed (1869-1933) and Professor Edouard Lanteri (1848-1917). She was commercially successful, earning commissions like a portrait bust of H.H. Asquith for the Oxford Union.

In the summer of 1920 Sheridan was invited by the first Soviet Russian trade delegation to travel to Russia to make busts of revolutionaries. Once in Russia, she stayed in the Kremlin for two months, sculpting Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky and Lev Kamenev. (Her affairs with some sitters further amplified her notoriety).

Back in London, Churchill and the London Society shunned her, leading to her move to America in 1921 (where she again made headlines for her relationship with Charlie Chaplin). On her second trip to Russia in 1923, she was declared 'persona non grata'. She returned to London in 1924 by a cross-continental journey, recording her travels in her 1925 memoirs, Across Europe with Santaella.

Under suspicion by MI5 (whose file noted that she conducted herself in an anti-English and disloyal manner in various foreign countries), she moved to Algeria, where she lived for the next decade. She continued working and writing through the end of her life.

CONDITION
The sculpture appears in good original condition. Overall surface dust visible to the naked eye. Minor patina to the inscription on verso. No significant issues to report otherwise.

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