Signed in pen and ink and inscribed Venezia (lower left).
Literature: Related to Baron 2006, 225.1, possibly the same sitter of the drawing published in Walter Sickert, ‘The New English Art Club’, New Age, 4 June 1912, p.115, in Anna Gruetzner Robins (ed.), Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, Oxford 2000, pp. 374–5. Wendy Baron says that Superb Stupidity "portrays the head and the shoulders of a Venetian man wearing the wide-brimmed hat sported by Venetian boatmen, a superb moustache and a self-satisfied expression".
Provenance: Purchased at the 1942 exhibition by F.C. Bagnall CBE;
Christie’s Sale, 20th Century British Art, 23 September 2009, London, lot. 117 (as A Gondolier (Front View)).
Exhibitions: London, Leicester Galleries, Retrospective Collection of Drawings and Recent Paintings by Walter Richard Sickert, 1942, no. 87.
It is very likely that this vivid drawing was executed in Venice around 1903, as it represents from the front the same man with long moustache and hat portrayed in a dated drawing which appeared recently on the art market [1].
The sitter appears to be Signor de Rossi, the owner of Sickert's favourite trattoria in Venice, the Giorgione di San Silvestro (Baron 2006, n. 184.1). The artist portrayed Signor de Rossi in an oil painting a couple of years earlier, featuring shorter moustaches (now in Hastings in the city's Museum and Art Gallery, inv. HASMG:949.8.1). In 1903, Sickert made several dated portrait drawings of Venetian characters (Baron 2006, nn. 225-226), and it was at the trattoria of Signor de Rossi that Sickert found some of his best models [2].
Sold
[1] Woolley & Wallis Sale, Modern British & 20th Century Art, Salisbury, 29 November 2017, lot. 18. In the online cataloguing, the drawing seems to be erroneously dated 1905.
[2] Sale Catalogue, The Fine Art Society, Sickert From Life, London, 2013, n. 28, L'ingegnere alla Trattoria, 1903.