Sir Osbert Sitwell (also Francis Osbert Sacheverell)

Best known as a writer, Osbert Sitwell also became a patron of the arts and a collector after the First World War along with his siblings Edith and Sacheverell. He established himself as a nonconformist intellectual and champion of modernism in literature, the visual arts, and music.

The child of Sir George Sitwell, an eccentric baronet, and Lady Ida Emily Augusta Sitwell, he grew up at the family ancestral house in Renishaw, Derbyshire and from 1909 at the Montegufoni Castle in Tuscany. Sitwell studied at Eton and, eager to escape his conservative upbringing, started circulating in London society before World War I. While in London, he began attending Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. During the war, he was mobilized and sent to the front in France. In 1916, back in London, Sitwell moved into a townhouse in Chelsea with his father’s financial support; his brother eventually moved in. Following extended travels in Europe, the brothers organized the important Exhibition of French Art, 1914–17 in 1919 at the Mansard Gallery, London, which presented to the British public for the first time the work of such artists as André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.

Osbert and Sacheverell started to build an impressive collection of modern art through purchases from dealers in France and England as well as London-based artists. After Sacheverell moved into 2 Carlyle Square in November 1919, the brothers installed their collection in the rooms of their townhouse, including paintings and drawings by the Vorticists Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts, work by Ethel Sands and other artists of the Camden Town Group, and artworks that they had acquired in Paris either from the dealers Léopold Zborowsky and Léonce Rosenberg or directly from artists. These included works by Modigliani, Picasso, and Gino Severini as well as Juan Gris’s The Musician’s Table (1914; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection). In 1921 they commissioned Severini to decorate a room in the family’s castle at Montegufoni with frescoes on the theme of the Commedia dell’Arte. The Sitwell brothers also supported the painter Nina Hamnett and the young composer Constant Lambert.

During 1921–22, Osbert collaborated with his siblings and the composer Sir William Walton on the experimental performance piece Facade, which premiered at the Aeolian Hall, London, in June 1923. Conceived and organized jointly by the three siblings, Facade featured poems by Edith recited over instrumental accompaniment by Walton. Despite the derisive and indignant response of the audience and critics, the popular press confirmed the Sitwells’ reputations as cultural instigators.

After Sacheverell married in 1925, Osbert stayed often at the Sitwell family country house, Renishaw Hall, where he was eventually joined by his sister Edith and his partner David Horner. From then on, though he was still active as a writer—composing a five-volume autobiography from 1945 to 1950—Sitwell reduced his collecting activities and retreated from Britain's broader artistic community. In 1963, he and Horner found a new London home at York House in Kensington. Photos of its interior show that Sitwell still possessed a considerable portion of his art collection previously installed at Carlyle Square, including Christopher Nevinson’s From an Office Window and Dan Maloney’s The Sitwells. Research indicates that some works from Osbert's collection are now held by his heirs.