Portrait of Jenny

In 1982 Jenny would, once or twice a week, spend some hours sitting for the artist in a semi-basement room of her London home. A number of large, portrait drawings resulted. One day Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury visited Jenny when the artist happened to be present, and it was during this visit that Sir Robert and Lady Lisa decided to acquire this drawing for their collection.

The ‘Jenny’ referred to in the title is Jenny Stein, who directed Whitechapel Art Gallery for two years in the mid-nineteen-seventies, directed Riverside Studios in the early nineteen-eighties, and, in the intervening years, ran an art gallery which occupied the ground floor of her own North London house in Regents Park Road.

Ian Caughlin (b.1948), 2024