This is last and unfinished portrait by Walter Richard Sickert, commissioned in 1941 by the sitter's husband, the artist Charles Neil Knight, (1867-1947), who was a governor of Bath Academy of Art and honorary secretary of Bath Society of Artists. Sickert's usual habit of painting from drawings and photographs was abandoned for a series of studies from life at the home of Mrs Anna Newton Knight.
A cupboard with glass doors and vase of flowers stand behind the lady who is seated on a sofa in the foreground, her long black dress mingling into the mauve and deep blue tones of the carpet. Framed by a white pie-frill collar, the features of her face have been lightly sketched in, partly in charcoal or black oil crayon. A pale pink and light blue camaieu preparation is still visible across areas of the canvas, where dull beige tones have been used to articulate the interior ceiling and background walls. Sickert eventually became too ill to continue work on the portrait and died soon after in January 1942. It gifted by the sitter to the Contemporary Art Society in 1949 and presented to Tate in 1953.
