A charcoal portrait of Mary Hutchinson, elegant in a designer blouse and leaning gracefully on one elbow, by Henri Matisse is expected to fetch up to £3m when it comes up for auction this month.
The 1936 drawing is rather different from a celebrated portrait of the same woman by her lover’s wife, the artist Vanessa Bell, now in the Tate collection.
Matisse wrote that he was pleased with his success capturing “a little of the subtleties of expression of the model” and that he would keep happy memories of the sitting.
Thomas Boyd-Bowman, a specialist at Sotheby’s, where the drawing will be auctioned on 19 June, said: “It’s one of the best Matisse drawings we’ve seen in many years. He has captured the essence of her in just a few lines.”
Hutchinson’s husband paid Matisse 8,000 francs for the drawing and kept it for the rest of his life. It is to be auctioned from the estate of their son, the late Jeremy Hutchinson QC, who was the defending barrister in some of the most famous trials of the 20th century including those involving Christine Keeler, Howard Marks and the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Hutchinson was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group in 1910 through her cousin, the writer and critic Lytton Strachey, and became entangled in their complicated web of affairs. Among her many liaisons, Hutchinson had a fling with Vita Sackville-West and a long-running affair with Clive Bell.
The latter’s wife, Vanessa Bell, painted a spectacularly unflattering portrait showing Hutchinson casting a baleful sidelong glance. Bell said of her work: “It’s perfectly hideous … and yet quite recognisable.” More surprisingly, Bell painted a headboard for the lovers’ bed, showing a naked Hutchinson crouched under some ominous giant poppies.
Hutchinson also had an affair with the author Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, and a complicated relationship with Vanessa Bell’s sister, Virginia Woolf, who admired her dress sense and her skill as a hostess and is said to have used her as the inspiration for characters including Jinny in The Waves. In one letter Woolf described Hutchinson wearing “lemon-coloured trousers with green ribbons”, and in another said “Mary is to me ravishing in chalk white with a yellow turban”.
Hutchinson’s elegance and fabulous wardrobe is evident in the images of her by the designer and photographer Cecil Beaton.
Matisse, born into a family of weavers, was very interested in costume and textiles, which he collected. Hutchinson’s deceptively simple blouse in the portrait was a creation by the British-born American couturier Charles James, described by Christian Dior as the “greatest talent of my generation”.
Hutchinson was introduced to Matisse in Paris by a mutual friend and the artist made two drawings, keeping the other simpler version in his studio.