Portrait of a Woman Seated

The portraits that Dismorr painted are widely acknowledged to be amongst her finest works. Throughout her career she made pencil, pen and ink, and watercolour drawings of her relatives and friends, and the present work is now known to be a portrait of Jessica's sister Margaret Dismorr, later Thompson, who in 1919 had recently returned from serving with the American Red Cross in France and with a repatriation programme in what was becoming Czechoslovakia. It is known from a written account by Margaret Dismorr that Jessica and Wyndham Lewis both made portraits of her, their easels side by side, although unfortunately the drawing that Lewis did on that occasion does not seem to have survived.

In 1919 Lewis and others who had been in the Vorticist group were working out how to develop their practice after their traumatic war experiences. Dismorr's portrait is pivotal in that context, and must have been one of the most striking works in the Group X exhibition at the Mansard Gallery of 1920. It could be argued that in its 'marriage' of portraiture with the hard surfaces of Vorticism, it paved the way for Lewis's Praxitella (Leeds Art Gallery) and his other portraits of the early 1920s.

The stretcher is inscribed with the name of her friend Helen Saunders, and in the 1974 Mercury Gallery exhibition, it was considered likely that the sitter for the present work was Helen Saunders (see Q. Stevenson, exhibition catalogue, Jessica Dismorr, London, Mercury Gallery, 1974, n.p.). However, more recent research and the cooperation of Jessica's niece, Janet Keep, confirms the identification as Dismorr's sister, Margaret.

We are very grateful to Quentin Stevenson and Brigid Peppin for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.