THE SITWELLS

Could chance have chosen a better family name than Sitwell for people who spent much of their life posing for portraits? Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell were aristocratic English aesthetes, people with money and leisure time during the halcyon days of modernism and its tailcoat movements. Edith, a poet and friend of Gertrude Stein's, also wrote a biography of Alexander Pope. Osbert, according to this account, did the literary equivalent of sitting for a portrait in that he provided some of the inspiration for D.H. Lawrence's character Sir Clifford Chatterly. Sacheverell was a poet. This book, the accompaniment to The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s at London's National Portrait Gallery, is filled with drawings, paintings, and photographs of the Sitwells and their shifting circles by artists of the period, including Cecil Beaton, Wyndham Lewis, and Max Beerbohm.