Sir George Sitwell
(father with the famous writer Dame Edith Sitwell) would be a very bizarre man in many ways. He was obviously a keen gardener (he actually studied garden design) and, annoyed by the wasps in the garden, he invented a pistol for shooting them. After he moved to Italy to prevent taxes in great britan, he refused to cover his new wife’s debts which resulted in her spending three months in prison. He was this avid reader and collector of books he had seven libraries as part of his home. Other eccentricities included paying his son an allowance in line with the amount paid by among his forebears to his son through the Black Death, and trying to pay for his son’s Eton school fees with produce from his garden. But perhaps most bizarrely, Sir George had the cows on his estate stenciled in the blue and white Chinese willow pattern to make them look better. This is actually the realize that Sir George hung around the gate of his manor in Derbyshire, England: “I must ask anyone entering the home to never contradict me or differ from me in any way, because it inhibits the functioning of my gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.”
Lady Ida Sitwell
Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison,
Mother For the “Sitwell Trio!”
According to Sacheverell Sitwell, ”his mother had only met his father twice at luncheon before their marriage; in just a couple of days from the wedding she ran home to her parents, but was firmly repaid to her husband. This was perhaps not surprising; sex failed to rank high about the large list of Sir George’s interests. Based on family tradition, Edith, Osbert and Sachie were conceived using a ritual deliberation. Sir George would prepare himself for his act of dynastic responsibility by immersing himself in suitable books and works of art, including different art painting techniques. He'd then announce, ‘Ida, I am ready!’ as well as the procreation of another Sitwell genius would occur.”
Sir George Sitwell married the Honorable Ida Emily Augusta Denison, daughter into the future Earl of Londesborough, on November 26, 1886. To Sir George, it wasn't her beauty that was the greatest attraction or asset. Indeed, it was the”blue blood” that ran through her veins and her direct descent from your former ruling house of Plantagenet, that made her his ideal range of bride.
As Osbert relates in Left Hand, Right Hand!, the occasion of marriage generally seems to to have precipitated Sir George right into a flurry of artistic patronage.
After having a wedding present of your conventional outdoor portrait of Lady Ida in a chaise by Heywood Hardy, he commissioned a number of drawings step by step of himself and the wife from Lillie Langtry’s favorite artist, Frank Miles.
By September of the following year, he was considering approaching two of the leading painters of the classical revival, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and William Blake Richmond, for a larger painting which would do justice to his young wife’s Grecian features.
In 1888, he wrote home to his agent Peveril Turnbull: “(Richmond) wishes to paint her within an amber dress of your loose and rather aesthetic character and totally unlike in every particular to the style and a feeling of those she wears.” And 3 weeks later: “Richmond quit of his or her own accord his dress after it had been made and looked hideous. Now he's got begun a portrait of Ida in a single of his lolling back positions. We have told him, I dislike it, I wonder if he'll kick?”
Osbert observes; “ the eventual portrait - not using among his lolling back positions, but uncomfortably upright, dressed in a turquoise blue coat and playing a zither, an instrument she had not witnessed in her life until she had sat to Richmond - is very hideous and insignificant, although a pretty likeness. My dad, on receiving it had been anxious to reduce the head, frames it as a little oval picture and burn the others!”
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