Portraits Of Women

Many of the nudes and other female subjects have bare necks with black lines around them, as if to suggest a cut throat or decapitation. Some dark areas around a figure's throat are intended to be shadows and shading, but the dark, solid, black lines I refer to are puzzling. They are not jewelry, so if Sickert drew and painted what he saw, what are these lines? The mystery grows with a picture titled Patrol, dated 1921 - a painting of a policewoman with bulging eyes and an open-neck tunic that reveals a solid, black line around her throat. What is known about Patrol is vague. Sickert most likely painted it from a photograph of a policewoman, possibly Dorothy Peto of the Birmingham police. Apparently, she acquired the painting and moved to London, where she signed on with the Metropolitan Police, to which she eventually donated the life-size Sickert portrait of herself. The intimation of at least one Metropolitan Police archivist is that the painting may be Taluable, but it is disliked, especially by women. When I saw Patrol, it was hanging behind a locked door and chained to a wall ...»