Portrait of a young boy

Following her early studentship in Adelaide under Margaret Preston (then known as Margaret Rose MacPherson) Stella Bowen travelled to London as a 21-year-old to further her studies and establish her career as a painter. She remained in England and France for the rest of her life. However, she maintained a connection with her homeland and in 1943 was appointed an official war artist by the Australian War Memorial.

Bowen found London life exhilarating. She gravitated toward the world of modernist writers and in 1919 married the renowned English writer Ford Madox Ford. She began neglecting her own work in order to support his creative life. When Ford left her and their young daughter in 1928 Bowen turned to commission work, mainly portraiture, to earn an income. Bowen sought commissions in the United States and France before returning to England where she supplemented her income from painting by writing reviews. In the course of her career her clientele for portraits included the writers Aldous Huxley, TS Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein.

In around 1937 Bowen received commissions from her friend the writer Katherine Chorley (Lady Chorley) to paint individual portraits of her three children as well as of the family group. This work, known as 'Portrait of a young boy' is most probably her youngest son, Geoffrey. It is a fine example of what Bowen describes in her memoir as the ‘small, tight and formal painting on panel which was my natural bent’. The painting’s flatness and simplicity gestures to the work of early Italian painters like Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Botticelli, which had so inspired her on her 1923 visit. While indicative of Bowen’s connection to the world of English writers, the work is a greater statement of her powers as a portrait painter. There is a solidity to her realism and a stillness that inscribes a sense of strangeness to the work. The decorative device of hanging ivy enlivens the sombre backdrop and adds a sense of timelessness to the picture of youth. ‘Portrait of a young boy’ reveals a quality of Bowen’s portraits at their most inspired: a lurking sense of unknowing that distances her style of realism from the certainty of the everyday.