WORK OF THE WEEK: Sir William Rothenstein, Parting at Morning,1891,Tate Britain

A partially dressed woman looks out at the viewer in this life-size chalk drawing. The verse inscribed at the bottom right is a quotation from a poem by Robert Browning with the same title as the picture. The morning after a brief sexual encounter:
And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me.
The Tate’s display states: ‘Where the poem takes the woman’s point of view, the painting provides the perspective of the man’ … but does it? This is a work filled with ambivalence. The expression of the woman, with decidedly masculine features, is a mixture of defiance, exhaustion, anger and loss. What kind of sexual encounter has taken place- there is no hint of romance or passion, but rather something altogether more sinister and loveless.William Rothenstein was a 19-year-old student in Paris when he painted it.

Rothenstein was one of the principal artistic links between the younger, avant garde artists in London and Paris in the 1890s, and this is his most important surviving work from that period. He was a member of a circle which included the British artists Charles Conder and Arthur Studd, and the French artists Toulouse-Lautrec and Lucien Pissarro. In 1892, Toulouse-Lautrec persuaded the dealer Père Thomas, who specialised in Impressionist paintings, to put on a show of works by Rothenstein and Conder in Paris.. This work was included in the exhibition, it received some good reviews and apparently was much admired by Whistler and Degas.

I find the painting both compelling and troubling. Rothenstein apparently claimed that the model reminded him of a phrase by the writer Henry James – ‘the wanton was not without a certain cadaverous beauty’. What does he mean? That the woman possesses a beauty in spite of herself? The use of the word wanton with its hint of promiscuity undermines her identity. There is something so uncomfortable-unacceptable- about what clearly is an underlying masculine judgment about not only her ‘beauty’ but her morality.

Rothenstein's figure is literally uncovered, made vulnerable before the sight of the artist and of the onlooker and yet - her gaze is defiant, penetrating and strong.

Sexual desire, a hint of sexual violence perhaps, beauty, vulnerability and unhappiness fuse together in this enigmatic work, creating an unsettled and unresolved atmosphere. It is a work which draws you deep into her gaze-it is virtually impossible to look away.