SIMON ALBERT BUSSY | PORTRAIT OF JANE BUSSY, DAUGHTER OF THE ARTIST

Sotheby's, London, 1965, where acquired by Barbara Bagenal and thence by family descent to Michael Bagenal, then Alison Bagenal

Tony Bradshaw

Pascal Zuber, France, 2015

We are grateful to Philippe Loisel for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work and for the below note. 

Simon Bussy, rightly renowned for his works depicting animals, was also a great portrait painter. His wife Doroyhy, André Gide, Lytton Strachey, Roger Martin du Gard, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Paul Valery, to name a few, posed for him.

He also made several portraits of his daughter, Jane-Simone, more often called “Janie”, most in pastel, like those included in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (gifted by Ecila Rendel), and the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Besançon, the Musee departemental de l’Oise in Beauvais (gifted by Angelica Garnett).

The portrait presented here (formerly in the Barbara Bagenal collection) is exceptional in the work of Bussy, first by the material used, oil on canvas, and then by the composition, characteristic of his art: the search for simplicity; the symmetry in the attitude of the model, the hands, in the hairstyle; the monochrome plain background; colors reduced to a shades of green complementary to a few touches of red; and the absence of nuances in the face.

The style of the painting and the age of the model, born in 1906, gives a date circa 1925-1930.

Janie, the only daughter of Simon and Dorothy Bussy, had inherited her parent’s talents. She exhibited paintings of still lifes, flowers and landscapes at The Leicester Galleries in the 1930s. She also knew how to write with elegance and wit, as evidenced by her text on Matisse, written for the Memoir Club of Bloomsbury, in 1947. She is the author of the French translation of David Garnett’s book Lady into Fox.