Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Guillaumin. This work will be included in the forthcoming Vol. II of the Armand Guillaumin catalogue raisonné, currently being prepared by Stéphanie Chardeau-Botteri, Dominique Fabiani and Jacques de la Béraudière.

Provenance
Galerie Kleinmann, Paris, no. 745.
Anon. sale, Sotheby & Co., London, 11 April 1962, lot 177.
Edward Sackville-West Collection, 5th Baron Sackville, UK, no. 503 (acquired at the above sale).
Eardley Knollys Collection, UK (by descent from the above in 1965).
Mattei Radev Collection, UK (by descent from the above in 1991).
Private collection, London (by descent from the above in 2009).


The present work previously formed part of the Radev Collection, a prolific UK collection of more than 800 works of Impressionist & Modern Art. The collection was fostered by individuals associated with the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of artists, writers and philosophers who from the beginning of the twentieth century generated progressive and influential discourse on aesthetics, criticism, politics and sexuality. An offshoot of London's intellectual aristocracy, the group's shared ideals were in opposition to the bourgeois habits of Victorian life. Artists such as Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell and writers such as Virginia Woolfe and E.M. Forster were among this cohort. A social group as well as a movement in thinking, the Bloomsbury Group's participants engaged in varied and complicated relationships which often transgressed British society's expectations of monogamy and heteronormativity.

The Radev Collection was begun by the novelist and music critic Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville, in the late 1930s. His friend and sometimes lover Eardley Knollys then inherited the collection upon Sackville-West's sudden death from an asthma attack in 1965. Knollys was an artist and art dealer who collected and traded in works by artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso and Chaïm Soutine, whilst promoting and supporting his fellow emerging Modern British artists. Knollys was also a lover of Mattei Radev, an émigré who had escaped communist Bulgaria in 1950 by swimming to Turkey and stowing away in a cargo ship travelling from Istanbul to Glasgow. Radev became a fixture of London's artistic milieu, setting up a fashionable picture framing workshop in Fitzrovia with a loan from Knollys and becoming a keen collector of European and British Modern Art. Radev inherited the wider collection upon Knollys' passing in 1991.