PORTRAIT OF MISS HETTY PETTIGREW, 1908
signed Theodore Roussel and inscribed lower left in pencil
engraving on paper
26.2 x 14.7cm; (55.9 x 45.9cm mounted)
unframed

Provenance
Studio of the artist
Thence by descent to the previous owner

Literature:
Margaret Dunwoody Hausberg, The Prints of Theodore Roussel, New York, 1991, no. 80, pp.106-8

Theodore Roussel was raised in France and served in the Franco-Prussian War, but it was in England that he made his name. Settling in London in 1878 James McNeil Whistler became his mentor and friend, and whose practice of free-etching infuenced Roussel's technique for years to come.

Notoriety was achieved for Roussel in 1887 at the New English Art Club with The Reading Girl, a life-size nude which The Spectator dismissed as realism of the worst kind, accusing the artist of seeing nothing in his model beyond her vulgar appearance. The scandal did his career no harm whatsoever, and Orpen would later call it the finest nude of the period. Roussel promptly took a house at Parsons Green and turned to the atmospheric Thames-side landscapes seen here upon which his considerable legacy is built.

Whistler's doctrine of 'free etching' shaped his practice: the plate carried out of doors and worked directly from the motif, pushed as far as possible on the spot so as to preserve lightness and spontaneity. The Chelsea plates Roussel produced are the perfect demonstration — shopfronts, doorways, figures on the pavement, caught with the freshness of a page torn from the day itself, yet composed with real decorative subtlety.

Where he departs from the older artist is in temperament. Whistler observed London street life with the distance of a spectator; Roussel lives in his pictures, and the plates carry a warmth and intimacy which the mentor often avoids.