Henry Havelock Ellis

Inscriptionback to top

Signed in black paint lower left: ‘H. BISHOP’.
On back of stretcher, lower member (but upside-down, so canvas originally intended to be used the other way up), oval metal plaque: ‘JAMES LANHAM / ARTISTS COLOURMAN / ST IVES / CORNWALL’.

This portraitback to top

This portrait depicts Havelock Ellis in his thirties, at St Ives, Cornwall, where he and his wife Edith spent much time during the 1890s, in cottages overlooking Carbis Bay. [1] According to Ellis, his daily routine was a fifteen-minute walk to a writing studio at Hawkes Point, in a ‘solitary and isolated spot from whence I could look down on the Lelant sands, in the distance see St Ives on its peninsula to the left, and to the right the more deserted dunes stretching towards Godrevy lighthouse’. [2] The studio was a stone-built former mining shed on the hillside, outside which ‘half a boat had been set on end, and there in this little ivy-covered shelter facing the sea, I could sit writing or reading whenever the weather allowed, which in the mild Cornish climate is sometimes more or less during the whole of the winter’. He kept the studio in ‘an almost bare condition’, carrying books and papers each day, and being ‘able to work in complete freedom and under conditions which suited me perfectly’. [3]

This would seem to accord with the sitter’s action and the simple surroundings depicted in the present portrait, which may indeed have been conceived at Hawkes Point. However, the background wall of grey-green horizontal planking is probably that of the artist’s studio in St Ives, probably one of the Piazza Studios on Porthmeor Beach. [4] These were built in late 1896, which may indicate that the portrait dates from 1897–8, although this coincided with a turbulent period in Ellis’s life surrounding the prosecution of Sexual Inversion. Ellis’s appearance accords closely with a photograph by Frederick Hollyer (see ‘All known portraits, Photographs, 1889–90’), and the presentation is naturalistic rather than formal, Ellis being shown seated in what is probably a deck-chair (such as he used at Hawkes Point), absorbed in a slim soft-bound book. The paint is thinly applied, on what appears to be a thin ground; brushstrokes are only visible on the book and, although lightly varnished, the surface has dulled over time. The colour palette is restricted to greys, browns and flesh tints. Within the low-key depiction, visual attention centres on the sitter’s forehead and downcast eyes.

The portraitist Henry Bishop (RA 1939) studied at the Slade and in Paris and Brussels. He was among a group from Paris who with some fellow-artists visited St Ives in 1890. Chiefly an outdoor and landscape artist, but occasionally producing portraits, he was thereafter a regular visitor to St Ives until he moved to Morocco in 1900, and in 1904 he briefly stayed in one of the Carbis Bay cottages which Edith Ellis rented to artists and writers. Said to have been gay, [5] Bishop was perhaps initially impressed by Ellis’s non-judgemental account of same-sex attraction in Sexual Inversion, the controversial study published in 1897, [6] and became a ‘lifelong friend’ [7] of Havelock and Edith Ellis; this painting was probably a gift from artist to sitter. In the winter of 1920–21 they shared lodgings at Cadgwith Bay, Cornwall, when the artist executed another portrait of Ellis.

The present work was bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery in 2002 by Professor François Lafitte, Havelock Ellis’s adopted son. His mother, the writer and translator Françoise Lafitte-Cyon, was Ellis’s partner from 1918 to 1939. In 1974 she bequeathed Bishop’s second portrait of Ellis to the Royal College of Physicians (see ‘All known portraits, Paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints, 1924–5’).

Dr Jan Marsh

Footnotesback to top

1) The Ellises’ main house was the home of the potter Bernard Leach from 1923.
2) Ellis 1939, p.321.
3) Ellis 1939, p.321. A contemporary photograph (see ‘All known portraits, Photographs, c.1897’) shows the stone building with one or two rooms, an iron roof and chimney. The half-boat shelter is just visible beyond.
4) Information from David Tovey, 21 Mar. 2014, according to whom the Hawkes Point walls were curtained; similar clapboard walls are visible in photographs of various Porthmeor studios in Tovey 2003, figs 2C-2, 2M-5, 3A-2, 3D-1.
5) François Lafitte, typescript memorandum dated Nov. 1987, copy in NPG RP 6626, which states: ‘Apparently homosexual (see his earlier letters in this packet) [Bishop] left England for some years, possibly in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trial.’
6) The first English-language version; it was originally published in German in 1896.
7) Ellis 1939, p.281. In 1909, Ellis was among the friends to whom Bishop appealed when offering works for sale (see BL, Add MS 70551). Edith Ellis died in 1916.

Physical descriptionback to top

Half-length, near-profile to right, dark hair and beard, wearing brown jacket, seated holding paper-bound book, grey-green clapboard wall in background.

Conservationback to top

Conserved, 2005.

Provenanceback to top

Possibly: sitter’s wife; sitter; sitter’s partner Françoise Lafitte-Cyon; her son François Lafitte, by whom bequeathed.

Exhibitionsback to top

The Institute of Sexology: Undress Your Mind, Wellcome Foundation, London, 2014–15 (no cat no.).

Reproductionsback to top

El-Feki et al. 2014, p.74.

View all known portraits for Henry Havelock Ellis