PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE PETER ADAM (LOTS 28-36)
WYNDHAM LEWIS (BRITISH, 1882-1957)
Portrait of a Lady with a French Poodle
signed 'Wyndham Lewis' (lower centre-right)
watercolour and pencil
36 x 23 cm. (14 x 9 in.)

Provenance
The artist, by whom gifted to
Eileen Gray, thence by family descent to
Prunella Clough, by whom gifted to
Peter Adam (1929-2019), thence by family descent

Exhibited
Paris, Centre Pompidou, Eileen Gray, 20 Feburary-20 May 2013, this exhibition toured to Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 12 October 2013-26 January 2014
London, Osborne Samuel, Eileen Gray: The Private Painter, 14 October-17 November 2015

We are grateful to Professor Paul Edwards and Cloe Pitiot for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.

This picture is perhaps the most fitting in giving us an insight into the importance of the collection of Peter Adam.

Wyndham Lewis’s Lady with a French Poodle, holds much prominence in tying together the relationship between the late Peter Adam and multiple prominent British artists. The work, originally belonged to Eileen Gray, the Irish architect and designer, and since has featured in multiple exhibitions of her collection around the world, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Irish Museum of Art in Dublin.

Lewis’s watercolour is one of a limited number of artworks which was in Eileen Gray’s personal collection. This collection was passed down to her niece, the artist Prunella Clough, who was a close friend to Peter Adam and gifted him the present work.

The sitter within Lewis’s portrait of a Lady with a French poodle, is not definitively Gray, however there is some possibility that it could have been, although there is no documentation of this in the letter and notes of either artists.

Eileen Gray was officially a Lady by title, much like the title of the present work and her and Wyndham Lewis did meet whilst studying at Slade Art School in 1901, and would remain friends.

We know Gray, although she did not have a dog, was fond of animals and Lewis’s relationship with his own dog, by the name of Mr Tutt, is well known. It is somewhat of a mystery who the sitter is in this work but what is evident is that for Adam, as Gray’s biographer and close friend of Clough, the work was incredibly important and it was kept in the bedroom of his Paris apartment.

Stylistically, the work echoes that of a post-cubist idiom, and departs from the Vorticist style that Lewis had been so universally instrumental in founding. The soft tones of the watercolor are largely contrasted to the bold use of line, colour and form in his earlier works that pre-date the war.

Lady with a French Poodle nods to Lewis style during the 1930s, and has been given the date of 1936, reflective of his time in Paris.