Lot 344: William Acton (1906-1945)

Portrait of Georgia Sitwell
oil on canvas
52 1/4 x 44 5/8 in. (132.7 x 113.3 cm.)

This important portrait is the result not only of a complex series of friendships, but is also a remarkable manifestation of the early 20th century revival of interest in the Baroque, imbued with a twist of the surreal.

The sitter Georgia Doble was a Canadian beauty who in 1925 married Sacheverell Sitwell, a poet, and the youngest member of an infamous trio of siblings. Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell found notoriety as leaders of the avant-garde when Edith's Façade was recited through a megaphone, to the accompaniment of a score by William Walton, to a bemused audience in 1922. In 1924 Sacheverell published Southern Baroque Art: a Study of Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the 17th and 18th Centuries, a ground breaking work that encouraged his contemporaries to reappraise splendours that had been disregarded for generations. Along with Gerald Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) he founded the Magnasco Society, which aimed to deepen appreciation of the arts of the period.

Georgia was starstruck, and thought she had married a genius. Immersion into the intellectual life of the Sitwells was not easy though; when Ada Leverson arrived to stay, Georgia is said to have whispered to her: 'I want to ask you four questions - quickly now. What is the difference between Romanticism and Classicism? Who is Henry Melville? What is behaviourism and is Julie Thompson received?' She quickly found solace in London society, however, and appears in several photographs by Cecil Beaton of the group characterised by Evelyn Waugh as the 'Bright Young Things'.

William Acton was the short lived younger brother of Sir Harold Acton, art historian and aesthete, who had admired the Sitwells since his schooldays at Eton. The Actons had been raised by their parents at La Pietra, a villa outside Florence, where they were neighbours of the Sitwells' father, Sir George, who had bought the sprawling Baroque palace of Montegufoni for Osbert in 1905. Another neighbour and Italophile was Gerald, Lord Berners, with whom the Sitwells lived for a while owing to the need to retrench. Berners was a friend of Salvador Dali, and with the Sitwells shared a taste for the surreal.

It was from this nexus of influences that the present picture was born. Mrs Sitwell is presented bust length, on a socle, against a dramatic arabesque of moonlit cloud. The picture is preserved in its original, carved mannerist frame, and is a rare fusion of the surreal and the baroque.

Few other portraits by the artist are widely known. A series of pencil drawings of the Mitford sisters has been extensively published, but his work rarely appears at auction.

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