5855

Captain Arthur Craven Jowett 1919
Standing half-length, full face to the viewer, wearing the service dress of the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force Wings^[1]
Oil on canvas, 86.5 x 61.1 cm (34 x 24 in.)
Inscribed lower right: de László / Oct 1919 London

Private Collection

In 1915 de László painted the sitter's future wife, Miss Evelyn Frances Hill [5644].  She was the artist's niece, being the daughter of his wife Lucy Guinness's eldest sister Ethel. De László gave that portrait to Evelyn as a wedding gift, while the present portrait was commissioned four years later by the sitter's father, Edmund Jowett. According to the sitter’s son, de László’s fee for this portrait was £300.

Arthur Craven Jowett was born on 10 June 1889, the son of Edmund Jowett, a Captain in the British Army and a wool valuer for Australian Mercantile Land and Finance Co. Ltd., and his wife Annette McCallum. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar School, Melbourne University, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Both the sitter and his younger brother Eric were in England when the First World War broke out, and they felt it was their duty to join up. Arthur first joined the Northumberland Fusiliers, and later the Royal Flying Corps. On 8 July1916 Eric Jowett was shot down over Germany, and died of his burns in a German hospital the following day.

Arthur Jowett married Miss Evelyn Frances Hill on 10 April 1915. At the end of the war he was offered a job with British engineering firm Vickers Ltd. Oliver Vickers [1968], son of the owner, had also served with the Royal Flying Corps and was painted by de László in his uniform in 1917. It is not impossible that they knew each other. Vickers’ took over the civil aviation branch of the company and may have wanted the sitter’s flying expertise to contribute to the early experiments in transatlantic flight, first achieved in 1919.

Jowett decided to return to Melbourne to help his father run his sheep properties in New South Wales and Queensland. He was devoted to his native country, and only returned twice to visit Britain, in 1948-9 and in 1966, for the wedding of his granddaughter Zoë. He was a keen tennis player and a member of a genealogy club in Melbourne. He died in Toorak, Melbourne, in 1974.

PROVENANCE:

Commissioned by Edmund Jowett, father of the sitter

Pd'O  2013