This drawing was produced by Lewis for his ‘Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait’ series, which he published with Desmond Harmsworth as a portfolio in 1932. Between June and July of that year Lewis spent an intensive period of six weeks drawing the thirty portraits with the sitters posing for him at his Percy Street studio. One described the process: “The studio… was just a room (no skylight). For portraiture he had all the shutters closed except one small square of light which shone painfully on the sitter facing it, Lewis having his back to the light.”

Figures from the world of art, literature and publishing comprised the majority of sitters, including Noel Coward, G. K. Chesterton, Augustus John and J.B. Priestly. The sitter of the present sheet was unusual within the portfolio in that he was a figure from the world of medicine. Ivor Back was a General Surgeon who had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War and went on to spend much of his career practising at St George’s Hospital. Back was a connoisseur of the arts and moved in artistic and literary circles in London. William Orpen painted his portrait in 1926, interestingly also wearing a surgical gown and rubber gloves as in the Lewis drawing.

Lewis clearly worked with great concentration and conviction on his drawing of Back (which was not the case with all the works in the portfolio) and the result is a portrait of considerable presence and dignity, one of the very best he produced at this time. It demonstrates Lewis’s exceptional talents as a draughtsman. The combination of different areas of watercolour tone and graphite shading is highly effective in focusing attention upon Back’s facial features and his hands – the ‘tools of his trade’. The use of the same flesh tone for both his face and his rubber gloved hands is faintly uncanny and in turn draws attention – appropriately enough in this surgical context - to the properties of skin itself.

Ivor Back; by descent to Patrick Back Q.C (son of Ivor Back); gift of the Estate of Patrick Back QC, 2013

Inscription: Signed and dated by artist in pen and brown ink : lower left & recto : Wyndham Lewis, 1932