Pilade Bertieri

Sale: Sotheby's, London, June 19, 2002, lot 124, illustrated

This stylish and graceful portrait of Maude Baillie, the daughter of Mr. Baillie of Dochfour and Baroness Burton, was painted by Bertieri in 1912.  Bertieri studied at The Royal Academies of Art at Turin and Bergamo and became a highly successful Italian society portrait painter.  He had a London address in 1908 and exhibited five pictures at the Royal Academy between 1908 and 1918.  Among his sitters were the Duke of Newcastle and the Countess of Bradford.  There is no doubt that Bertieri must have seen and been influenced by the work of John Singer Sargent, Sir John Lavery, Sir James Jebusa Shannon, Charles Wellington Furse and Sir William Orpen.  Although painted ten years later, Maude Baillie offers an interesting comparison to Sargent’s The Misses Hunter (Trustees of the Tate gallery London) and The Wyndham Sisters (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Catherine Wolfe Fund).

 

This particular era of portrait painting is described by Kenneth McConkey in his book Edwardian Portraits – Images of an Age of Opulence, as follows, "What was clear as the new century opened was that ‘a speaking likeness’, such as a photograph might supply, was not what was sought.  The painter must do more than simply present a faithful record of appearances.  Naturalism was only the starting point.  Style, format, props all conveyed an identity which expressed social standing, but at the same time hoped to transcend it.  The most successful portraitists of the era, Sargent, Lavery, Shannon, Furse and Orpen, were involved in creating a mystique around their sitter’s identity.  This discreet falsification of appearances was the essence of the portrait painter’s art.  Capturing the spirit of a personality was as important as exemplifying social roles.  The cleric was not just a particular archbishop, he was to be seen as the embodiment of the faith.  The Peer was not just the owner of the mansion and acres, he was the embodiment of race and breeding.  The ability to expose these abstract qualities called for erudition and knowledge of precedent which gave unseen layers of complexity to the painted portrait, and as these were successively added, naturalism was mediated."