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Lot Essay
Portrait of Froanna portrays Lewis's wife in a moment of intimacy, tenderness and vulnerability. Lewis's drawings of Froanna were completed in the 1930s and '40s when she became a much-used model and a recurrent presence in the drawings.
'Her frequent appearance in the drawings belies the covert manner in which Lewis lived his life with her, omitting to introduce her to long-standing friends for example so that John Rothenstein, an acquaintance since the early 1920s, on visiting Lewis at his Kensington Gardens studio in the late 1930s, would later recall how 'suddenly I knew that Mrs. Lewis - of whose existence I had vaguely heard - was somewhat present, concealed somewhere in the tiny studio flat (see exhibition catalogue, The Bone Beneath the Pulp Drawings by Wyndham Lewis, London, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 27-29).
'Lewis met Gladys Anne Hoskins (1900-79) in 1918 and the two lived together from 1921, only marrying on 9 October 1930. Gladys became known as 'Froanna', a humourous corruption of 'Frau Anna', an address which had been used by a German friend' (ibid. p. 74).
'Her frequent appearance in the drawings belies the covert manner in which Lewis lived his life with her, omitting to introduce her to long-standing friends for example so that John Rothenstein, an acquaintance since the early 1920s, on visiting Lewis at his Kensington Gardens studio in the late 1930s, would later recall how 'suddenly I knew that Mrs. Lewis - of whose existence I had vaguely heard - was somewhat present, concealed somewhere in the tiny studio flat (see exhibition catalogue, The Bone Beneath the Pulp Drawings by Wyndham Lewis, London, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, 2004, pp. 27-29).
'Lewis met Gladys Anne Hoskins (1900-79) in 1918 and the two lived together from 1921, only marrying on 9 October 1930. Gladys became known as 'Froanna', a humourous corruption of 'Frau Anna', an address which had been used by a German friend' (ibid. p. 74).