A COLOURFUL example of British avant-garde clothing – a silk dressing gown – is to go on sale in Oxford.
Made on the eve of the Great War, the embroidered, block-printed robe is among a small group of daring textiles designed between 1912 and 1914 by the artist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957).
Mallams Auctioneers head of design, Philip Smith, described it as 'a museum piece' and expected it to bring in offers of more than £2,500 at the auction house in St Michael's Street on Thursday, December 7 or Friday, December 8.
The full-length gown combines bold colours with bands of stylised foxes, swans, fish and kneeling figures.
It was made during a period of extraordinary creativity for Wyndham Lewis – years when he developed the style of geometric abstraction, a blend of Cubism and Futurism, which his friend, the poet Ezra Pound, dubbed Vorticism.
Mr Smith said: "It is possible this robe was among the influential textiles produced by the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops.
"However, a similar robe and a printed panel of this design have been attributed to the Rebel Art Centre – the short-lived workshop set up in 1914 after Lewis and several Omega artists had quarrelled with the Bloomsbury set.
"This item is incredibly rare because of its background, I only know of one other like it.
"A lot of these robes will not have survived because of the fine quality of the materials.
"It's a work of art in its own right, so it is likely to be displayed by a collector rather than worn."
The Vorticist movement broke up the following year, largely as a result of the war.
Wyndham Lewis himself was posted to the Western Front, serving as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, and became an official war artist after the Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, in 1917.
A second, and more unsettling, tale of Bohemian life in Edwardian Britain is told by a small 30 x 21cm head and shoulders portrait of a young women with auburn hair.
It too dates from 1914.
The artist is the Scottish painter William Strang (1859-1921), whose well-known portrait of the Bloomsbury writer and gardener, Vita Sackville-West, hangs in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.
The sitter is believed to be Eileen ‘Dolly’ Henry, a professional model who became embroiled in an affair with the Staffordshire artist John Currie.
The tempestuous relationship came to a shocking end on October 8, 1914 when Currie shot her dead in a Chelsea apartment.
He then turned the gun on himself, and died in hospital the following day.
It is known that Ms Henry had been sitting for a portrait by Strang in the period before her death.
The work, in a private collection since 1981, is estimated to fetch between £3,000 and £5,000.
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