Augustus Edwin John, O.M. R.A.

Lefevre Gallery, London
Private Collection
Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London

Original canvas, there is a faint stretcher bar mark along the top edge with a corresponding line of fine craquelure. Pin holes are visible in all four corners. There is an area of craquelure just below the sitter's right eye. Ultraviolet light reveals areas of flourescence and probable retouchings to the centre right of the composition, just below the hat; to the top centre rim of the hat and just below the right eye, as well as further scattered flecks elsewhere to the composition. Housed in a thick blue/grey varnished wooden frame.
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Miss Alexandra (Alick) Schepeler was, together with Dorelia, John's chief model in the years 1906-8, inspiring numerous paintings and drawings considered to be amongst the artist's finest creations.  This is the only surviving painting of the sitter, after La Séraphita, which both John and his biographer Michael Holroyd acknowledge as one of the artist's masterpieces, was burnt in one of the painter's infamous 'cigarette fires' during the 1930s.

Artist and model first met in London, where the Russian-born Schepeler was working as Secretary to the Illustrated London News.  The attraction was instant, John regarding Schepeler as a kindred (and wild) spirit, and quickly elevating her to the status of a muse.  In his verbal and pictorial re-imaginings of her, Schepeler assumed different identities; as Undine the water-sprite, or Séraphita, the eponymous character of Balzac's novel.  The artist delighted in Schepeler's reputed 'Slavonic' origins (she was actually of German and Irish parentage, although raised in Poland), which set her apart and seemed to heighten her striking appearance.

But there was also a more contemporary side to Schepeler, who shared John's penchant for clothes and costume.  The present portrait, centred on the sitter's luminous face framed by a broad-brimmed hat, recalls the fashionable female portraits of the Low Countries in the 17th Century, and in particular Rubens's Portrait of Susanna Lunden, in the National Gallery since 1871, which may have inspired its dramatic backdrop.  This comparison, however, only emphasises the stark simplicity of the present sitter's dress, which may be interpreted as a token of her 'Bohemian' character.