The Beloved (1932) | Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn | Painting Art Print | Wall Frame

The unidentified sitter, relaxed and elegant, holds the viewer with a direct, unwavering gaze. Her trustful expression, kindly hazel eyes and the informality of her pose - half-turned from the dressing-table -, suggest that she was comfortable in the artist’s company; indeed, she has a bohemian element, and one can easily imagine her frequenting the Chelsea Arts Club and moving in de Glehn's artistic circle.

The wedding-ring finger of her left hand is obscured but her poise, the dressing-room setting and the title, The Beloved, may be further intimations of a shared social milieu. The title is enhanced, playfully perhaps, by the portrait being ‘rose-tinted’; the dominant palette of soft, dusky pinks and warm creams is balanced compositionally by the single red roses to her left and right, while the sitter’s jacket accentuates the colour of her lips. A porcelain figurine, possibly of Cupid, is glimpsed behind her right shoulder. Over her right arm appears to be draped a shawl which may have belonged to the artist’s close friend John Singer Sargent, whose studio de Glehn helped clear after his death in 1925.

The mirror, which brings light, depth and additional blues to this composition, was a device used elsewhere by de Glehn and many others, but in contrast to the activity and detail contained in such reflections as that, for instance, of the barmaid in Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’, the reflection here offers no obvious clues to the sitter’s history. The work may have been painted in de Glehn’s home on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, whose destruction during an air raid in World War II forced the artist and his wife to move permanently to Wiltshire.

Charming but enigmatic, the portrait evokes the sitter’s self-contained grace, touched possibly with melancholy, and communicates a moment of genuine candour between artist and sitter, intriguing viewers now with questions concerning the backstory which may have prompted the affectionate title.