Walter Richard Sickert A.R.A. (British, 1860-1942)
Little Rachel
signed 'Sickert' (lower left)
pastel on card
66 x 50.8 cm. (26 x 20 in.)
Executed in 1907
Footnotes:
Provenance
Ewan Phillips
Sale; Christie's, London, 19 July 1968, lot 246 (as Portrait of a Girl with Auburn Hair), where acquired by
Richards
With Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London
Ray Gough, 1974
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 25 June 1980, lot 203 (as The Frame-Maker's Daughter)
With MacMillan & Perrin Gallery, Vancouver
Richard Aaron, U.S.A.

Exhibited
London, Browse and Darby, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, 13 April-13 May 1978, cat.no.35 (as The Frame-Maker's Daughter)

Literature
John Rothenstein, Sickert, Brook Newspapers, London, 1961 (ill.)
Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, London, 1973, p.347, cat.no.263
Wendy Baron, Sickert Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London, 2006, p.362-3, cat.no.341.1 (ill.b&w)

In the late spring of 1907 Sickert rented the first floor above his ground floor lodgings at 6 Mornington Crescent. He told his friend and Fitzroy Street Group colleague Nan Hudson that he would use the space as a studio, in which he could 'do the interiors I love'. A short time later he told her that he had 'got entangled in a batch of a dozen or so interiors on the first floor here. A typical lodgings first floor .... A little Jewish girl of 13 or so with red hair & a nude alternate days.' He delayed his usual summer departure for Dieppe until mid-August.

Five portraits in oil on canvas, the present portrait in pastel and many drawings, are known of 'Little Rachel.' Sickert's model was identified in the archives of Thomas Agnew & Sons as Rachel Siderman, who died in 1963. Over the years some portraits of her have been given the arbitrary title The Frame-maker's Daughter. However, on her marriage to Harry Goodman in August 1915 her deceased father was registered as having been a grocer. Sickert was captivated by the soft semitic features and contemplative dignity of his young model. He was moved to inscribe 'le petit Jesus' on one drawing (British Council Collection). Might she have reminded him of the red-haired Christ child wearing a smock in The Carpenter's Shop (Tate Britain) by J.E. Millais?

Two of the fullest interiors featuring 'Little Rachel', at a window (Tate Britain), and at a mirror (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), place Sickert's lodgings and studio in the Mornington Crescent of his time, before the Carreras cigarette factory (built 1926) obscured the view over the crescent gardens towards the steeple of Old St Pancras and St Matthew church in Oakley Square. Figure and setting are equally balanced. A third interior (Queensland Art Gallery, Qagoma, Brisbane) shows the chest of drawers, oval mirror and window (now with down-drawn Venetian blinds) behind the half-length of Rachel who dominates the foreground, her figure almost filling the picture surface. The focus, in the three remaining portraits, is ever more closely on 'Little Rachel' rather than her setting: a three-quarter length with her head turned to near profile (Private Collection); a lightly-sketched pure profile of her head with no background detail (City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth); and the present half-length portrait in pastel against a simple, non-specific background. Sickert's attention here has passed entirely from the interiors which he loved to the model, presented with almost quattrocento purity.

This portrait is one of Sickert's last works in pastel, a medium beloved by his friend and mentor Degas, and one which Sickert first took up when he moved back to London from France around 1905. Between 1905 and 1907, Sickert used pastel on paper as an alternative to oil, producing richly-coloured and densely-hatched pictures of nudes, clothed figures in his Fitzrovia studios, even music hall scenes, on a scale similar to, or even bigger than, his oil on canvas paintings.

The early history of this pastel portrait, in which Rachel abandons her white blouse for a dress with a sailor collar, is lost. However, it must have been in France before the first world war because a postcard exists, bearing a photograph by E. Druet (who produced postcards of diverse Sickert paintings at this period) under the title Portrait de Fillette.

We are grateful to Dr. Wendy Baron for compiling this catalogue entry.
This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: *
* VAT on imported items at a preferential rate of 5% on Hammer Price and the prevailing rate on Buyer's Premium.

Please note this work has been examined outside of its glazed frame.

The work has had four wooden battons glued to each edge recto as part of the framing process.

There is some surface dirt.

Taking the above into consideration the work appears to be in excellent condition.