Algernon Graves

Inscriptionback to top

Incised along front edge at right: ‘A Zeitlin / 1901’.
Paper label lost from rear of base.

This portraitback to top

This bust was executed when the sitter was in his fifties and established both as a high-art print publisher and a historian of British art and artists. The inscribed date is normally read as 1901, the year that Graves completed his History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA, but 1904 is an alternative reading; this is the year Graves finished his monumental Dictionary of Contributors to the Royal Academy. The bust was exhibited at the New Gallery in summer 1905, which perhaps points to the later date.[1]

Nothing is currently known of the circumstances that led to the portrait’s creation. Sculptor Alexander Zeitlin was born in Tibilisi (then Tiflis, in Russia) and studied in Vienna and Paris. In 1923 he moved to New York. He exhibited several times at the New Gallery in London in the early 1900s but he is not listed as living in England in the censuses of 1891 or 1901 and his relationship with Graves is as yet undiscovered. Graves retained the work, and his will offered the NPG a choice from three portraits in his possession.[2]

To indicate fabric texture, comb-like lines of varying lengths cover much of the surface, including the undersides. Records show that the work was sent to the Victoria and Albert Museum ‘for colouring’ in July 1922.[3]

Dr Jan Marsh

Footnotesback to top

1) ‘Algernon Graves Esq.’, New Gallery summer show 1905 (507) is listed on p.94 of the catalogue as being exhibited in the ‘Central Hall, Sculpture Section’. The sculptor seems to have been barely known: an unsigned and undated note in the NPG Portrait Index, written at some date between 1916 and 1921, lists the portraits by Corder and Wolmark (see ‘All known portraits, 1878’ and ‘1910’) and adds, ‘Also a bust exhibited / at New Gallery in plaster / by an anonymous Pole’. Zeitlin was not Polish but Russian.
2) See correspondence in April 1922 between Joseph Bailey, one of Graves’s executors, the NPG and the Master of the Cutlers’ Company (to whom Graves bequeathed the oil by Wolmark, see ‘All known portraits, 1910’), NPG RP 1937. The third portrait is not identified, but was probably that by Rosa Corder (see ‘All known portraits, 1878’).
3) NPG RP 1937.

Physical descriptionback to top

Life-size bust, with deep-set eyes, moustache and receding hair, wearing cravat with tie-ring over stiff collar (left tip broken off), patterned waistcoat and jacket.

Conservationback to top

Conserved, 1994.

Provenanceback to top

Sitter, by whom bequeathed 1922.

Exhibitionsback to top

New Gallery, London, Summer exh., 1905 (507).

View all known portraits for Algernon Graves