I HAVE loved this painting since the first time I saw it. It’s by John Singer Sargent - the Sitwell family circa 1900. Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet stands with his eldest child, Edith. His young sons Sacheverell and Osbert play with a little dog, and the intended centrepiece of the painting is Lady Ida, Sir George’s wife, mother of their three children. Yet it is not the beautiful woman in the dazzling gown who draws my eye, but the adolescent girl in the scarlet dress. The intensity of her gaze demands attention, and when you discover a little more about her it’s apparent that she deserves it.
The Sitwells were an aristocratic family with a diverse ancestry that included Plantagenets, as well as an errand boy of humble origins who walked barefoot from Leeds to London in the 1740s to make his fortune as a banker. The family seat was Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, which dates back to the early 1620s. Married at seventeen, Lady Ida gave birth to Edith the following year. Neither parent displayed any enthusiasm for their first-born, who unsurprisingly exhibited behavioural distress as a result of the emotional neglect, and made her first attempt to run away from home at the age of five. Edith’s brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, born in 1892 and 1897 respectively, were rather better-treated, and enjoyed the doting affection of their mother. A tempestuous woman bored with her lot, Lady Ida accrued such huge debts that her husband obliged her to suffer the consequences by refusing to pay them. After years of being in the power of ruthless moneylenders and a blackmailer she went to prison, bringing further misery and disgrace upon her troubled family.
As a child Edith was cared for by servants, and described her father as having a “queer intellectuality and coldness”, her mother a “wildfire passion and impossible temper”. She had a close and affectionate relationship with her brothers - the three of them were later to form a cultural group that championed the avant-garde - but of their parents she remarked:
…my father’s principal worry was my mother, who had an objectionable habit of indulging in gaieties. When she died, dear old Henry Moat, my father’s valet, and my brothers’ and my life-long friend, said “Well, at least Sir George will know now where Her Ladyship spends her afternoons”.1
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