This dual portrait is a self-portrait of Sylvia Sleigh and her husband-to-be Lawrence Alloway. Sleigh wrote that this painting “commemorates the many times that I had to leave Lawrence and return to Pett. … I hated leaving Lawrence. Many times when he took me to the station we went to a café while waiting for my train.” When Sylvia Sleigh and Lawrence Alloway, a curator and art critic, first met in an art history class in London, Sleigh was 27 and married to Michael Greenwood, and Alloway was 17. For the next ten years their relationship grew and deepened, eventually becoming romantic. Daily letters between Sleigh and Alloway chronicle their passionate relationship for years, until 1954 when Sleigh divorced Greenwood and, within a matter of months, married Alloway. Sylvia and Lawrence moved to the United States in 1961. The following year, Alloway became a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Sleigh taught for some time at the State University of Stony Brook and at the New School for Social Research. Around 1970, from feminist principles, she painted a series of works reversing stereotypical artistic themes by featuring nude men in poses that were traditionally associated with women, like the reclining Venus or odalisque. Some directly alluded to existing works, such as her gender-reversed version of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's The Turkish Bath (1973), which depicts a group of art critics, including her husband. Philip Golub Reclining (1971) similarly appropriates the pose of the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez. This work also presents a reversal of the male-artist/female-muse pattern typical of the Western canon and is reflective of research into the position of women throughout the history of art as model, mistress, and muse, but rarely as artist−genius. For example, throughout her career, she painted over thirty works that feature her husband as her subject.
Estate of Sylvia S. Alloway; Gifted to: Parity Productions, New York