Sylvia Sumira
Oil on canvas, 43.2 x 32.4 cm, 1987
NPG (95)

536 x 400 pixels, 26 Kb
818 x 610 pixels, 55 Kb
1032 x 770 pixels, 81 Kb
1341 x 1000 pixels, 89 Kb

Sylvia Sumira
Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 35.6 cm, 1988
NPG (98)

514 x 400 pixels, 26 Kb
784 x 610 pixels, 57 Kb
989 x 770 pixels, 83 Kb
1285 x 1000 pixels, 128 Kb

Sylvia Sumira
Watercolour, 26.2 x 19 cm, 1989
NPG (99)

546 x 400 pixels, 28 Kb
833 x 610 pixels, 57 Kb
1052 x 770 pixels, 83 Kb
1366 x 1000 pixels, 93 Kb

Sylvia is the world's sole specialist conservator of globes and together we have made the three Humument Globes, the first of which is now in the Sackner Collection (the other two making a pair of Terrestrial and Celestial globes shown in the RA Summer Exhibition 1989). I first drew her in 1984.

The two portraits both refer to her unusual sphere of activity. The first shows her against an improvised start chart featuring Pisces her birth sign and other allusions to her name and mine. The second, painted two years later in 1988, has a background in the form of a set of blank gores (the segments of paper used for covering globes), their characteristic shapes copied from a template which Sylvia provided. The real-life globe in the foreground is a celestial globe made for my fiftieth birthday.

The Portrait Works (1989),  p. 68-69.

tomphillips.co.uk  > >  Portraits