This portrait is adorable, even if you not a giant modernism enthusiast and you gonna find some outlandish, non-canonical color realization – you just can’t disagree – great piece of art.

by Gerald Festus Kelly (1879 - 1972)

He attended Cambridge, where he met Aleister Crowley. Together they planned to publish a magazine, but they never did. Instead they build a close friendship, with Crowley joining Kelly in his Montparnasse studio. They met again in Scotland, where Crowley met Kelly’s sister Rose. He and Rose soon ran off together to Egypt. Kelly went on to become President of the Royal Academy of Art. A passage about him in Crowley’s Confessions is interesting:

“During the May term of 1898 I met another man who, in his own way, was interested in many of the same things as I was myself. His name was Gerald Festus Kelly. He is described in the telephone book as an artist; and the statement might have passed unchallenged indefinitely had not the Royal Academy recently elected him as an associate. He is hardly to be blamed for this disgrace. He struggled manfully. Even at the last moment, when he felt the thunderclouds about to break over his head, he made a last desperate coup to persuade the world that he was an artist by marrying a model. But the device deceived nobody. The evidence of his pictures was too glaring. The effort, moreover, completely exhausted his power of resistance; and he received the blow with Christian resignation. It saddens me more than I can say to think of that young life which opened with such brilliant promise, gradually sinking into the slough of respectability. Of course it is not as if he had been able to paint; but to me the calamity is almost as distressing as if that possibility had ever existed. For he completely hypnotized me into thinking that he had something in him. I took his determination to become an artist as evidence of some trace of capacity and I still hope that his years of unremitting devotion to a hopeless ambition will earn him the right to reincarnate with some sort of soul. ”

Crowley – South East Asia connection – will be a separate topic issue. Wait and see.

Ok, vanished for forum construction.