格雷厄姆·貝爾認(rèn)領(lǐng)

Bell painted this picture on a trip to Dover in 1938 to fulfill a commission for the International Business Machines Corporation. The finely-observed detail of the hotel on the left, the chalk white cliffs and castle ramparts is typical of the realism of the Euston Road School, with which Bell was closely involved.Although the artist painted on the spot, he may have used the photograph shown to the left to work on the details in his studio.

The sitter, Anne Olivier Popham, was a student of art history at the Courtauld Institute. In 1952 she married Quentin Bell and later edited the diaries of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. This portrait was painted at the same period as Claude Rogers's of Mrs Chilver. Comparison reveals the greater stillness, gravity and austerity of Bell's image, qualities in common with the art of William Coldstream, with whom he shared a studio at this time.