JOHN SINGER SARGENT (1856 1925) Portrait of Gladys de Portal

Sale 2678 - Lot 27

Price Realized: $ 37,500

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000

JOHN SINGER SARGENT (1856-1925)
Portrait of Gladys de Portal Kingsmill (Mrs. Redmond McGrath, née Gladys Frances Johnson).

Charcoal on Michallet laid paper, 1919. 600x465 mm; 23⅝x18¼ inches. Signed lower left, and dated lower right.

Provenance
The sitter.
Thence by descent to Commander Redmund McGrath, Halnaker Park, 1940.
Colonel William Henry Kingsmill, the sitter's son, 1960.
Sotheby's, London, November 2, 1983, lot 23.
(with) Colnaghi and The Claredon Gallery, London, 1985, as Mrs. Redmond McGrath.
Schutz & Company, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut, by 1986.
Purchased from the above by Everett Raymond Kinstler, New York, July 28, 1986.
Estate of Everett Raymond Kinstler.

Exhibited
"Society Portraits, 1850-1939," Colnaghi and The Claredon Gallery, London, October 30- December 14, 1985, number 44 (as Mrs. Redmond McGrath, illustrated).

Literature
D. McKibbin, Sargent's Boston, with an Essay & a Biographical Summary & a complete Check List of Sargent's portraits, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1956, page 107 (under McGrath).

Note
This portrait will be included in the forthcoming 'Catalogue of Sargent's Charcoal Portraits' by Richard Ormond, to be published by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London, 2025.

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Additional Details

After a 2020 exhibition devoted to John Singer Sargent's charcoal portraits organized by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, there has been a renewed interest in these drawings.

By the turn of the century, John Singer Sargent was a highly sought-after portrait painter. However, his interest in painting oil portraits waned, and he closed his studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of London in 1907. He devoted most of his time to landscapes and murals, but to satisfy demand, he continued to take portrait commissions, though no longer in oil. Sargent favored drawing his new portraits in charcoal, which took only hours to complete, and showed more spontaneity and gestural qualities.

Gladys ("Joy") Frances Johnson was born in London in 1880. In 1904, she married Colonel Andrew de Portal Kingsmill of Sydmonton Court, in London, with whom she had five children. In the same year as her divorce to Kingsmill in 1920, Johnson married army Commander Redmond W. McGrath (a co-respondent in her divorce case). The present portrait of Johnson was done in a period of personal transition for the sitter; her expression is deeply searching. Her new husband, Commander McGrath was a very successful businessman and one of the founding directors of The Slough Trading Company in 1920. Commander and Mrs. McGrath lived a comfortable and active life, the two were fixtures in the society pages, most notably for hosting and participating in tennis tournaments. They likely commissioned a pair of portraits from Sargent; David McKibbin, in his 1956 checklist of Sargent's portraits, includes a 1919 portrait of Commander McGrath (number 405). Aside from the present portrait, Mrs. McGrath was also immortalized by Ambrose McEvoy in his 1920-27 full-length society portrait in the collection of Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, United Kingdom. Mrs. McGrath's life was tragically cut short as a result of the London Blitz, a World War II German bombing campaign, in 1940.