While Raymond McIntyre often mentioned Eve Balfour in his 1911–1914 letters home from London to his family, he made no reference to her as a model, though two—perhaps more—of his portraits of her are known. Furthermore, she is not an elusive figure but was a very famous woman.
At times in the first decade of the twentieth century the Christchurch Artists’ Sketch Club held studio meetings every week and among its members were Sydney Lough Thompson, Edwin Bartley, Leonard H Booth, William Menzies Gibb, Charles N Worsley, Alfred Walsh, Andrew Kennaway Henderson, Charles Bickerton, Robert A Gill, James Lawson Balfour and Raymond McIntyre.[1]
Balfour and his wife Eve (Hulston) Balfour had been fellow members, with McIntyre, of the Canterbury Society of Arts before they left for England in 1908. McIntyre followed a year later and his letters record their resumed contact.
Eve Balfour was being lionised in London for her stage work and was active in the women’s suffrage movement. In May 1911 Lawson Balfour returned alone to Christchurch. McIntyre wrote to his niece Daphne in June,
My cat doesn’t care much for women. Any lady visitors I have try to pet it up but it isn’t keen on them. The other day Eve Balfour, who was here, stroked it, and it half sat up and wished she would hurry up and get it over and be done with it, as it wanted to turn over on its side and go to sleep.[2]
To his father in October 1911 (Eve’s use of the nickname “Mac” revealing an easy familiarity between the McIntyres and the Hulstons),
I went to Lyon’s Picadilly Restaurant for lunch…. I sat down to a table by myself—and just as I was settling, who should come along, but Eve Balfour and her father! They asked if they could sit down along o’ me, and I said they could. Mr Hulston talks like a Yank, doesn’t he? He told me that you were looking so very well. “What do you think of Mac Londonized?” said Eve to her father.[3]
On 2 October 1912 he told his father he had seen Eve and Stanley Howlett (who would become her second husband) together in Oxford St.[4] A week later,
Last Sunday afternoon, Stanley Howlett and Eve Balfour paid me a visit. Stanley has a part in “Drake” in His Majesty’s in the Haymarket. I told him I was going to see it on Saturday—and said I would look out for him. He says he is almost naked in it—wearing a skin of sorts—and his arms and exposed parts of his anatomy “browned” up with paint. Seems a pity he should have a part like this—for he is a very aquiline type of young actor Adonis. Eve Balfour told me all her news.[5] They liked the sketches I did in Brittany very much. I had to hurry them away, as I had a meeting to go to.[6]
His studio at Cheyne Walk Chelsea was near Eve Balfour’s flat. Stanley Howlett and he were close friends.
McIntyre exhibited a painting of Eve in 1918 at the Autumn Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, at the Grosvenor Gallery, London. Wellington’s Evening Post proudly repeated a critic’s comments,
At the Grosvenor Gallery, where the International Society is holding an exhibition, Mr McIntyre has a portrait of Miss Eve Balfour, formerly of Christchurch, who is now a well-known film actress. Mr. Rutter says that the artist has painted her “with the clean precision and simplicity of one of the younger Frenchmen who has approached Cezanne through Marchand and Guerin.”[7]
It was hanging on the wall of Eve’s Chelsea flat in 1919 and was published in black and white in the 8 February 1919 issue of Pictures and the Picturegoer (p161). It was said, in the accompanying article, to be life-sized. Its date and whereabouts are not known (it is not in the possession of her family).
A second painting of Eve was published in black and white in the October 1918 issue of Colour—for sale at 25 guineas. Its date and whereabouts are also unknown. Its style is reminiscent of that of the Japanese painter Take Sato, also living in London, whose portrait McIntyre painted.
The model for a brush sketch (“Woman in a broad-brimmed hat”) is said to have been Phyllis Constance Cavendish but the image looks nothing like his other portraits of her though strikingly like Eve. I have no doubt it is Eve. When McIntyre wrote (of Miss Cavendish), “Though all the things I do are like her—yet it is the particular points about her which interest me I accentuate—and bring out—and I leave the parts that do not help,” he was saying that he was painting portraits and they were likenesses. “From Bassano’s photographic portraits of Phyllis Cavendish, it is clear that her head’s bone structure, long neck, full lips, dark eyebrows, wavy hair, and small defined nose are all conveyed in Raymond McIntyre’s portraits.”[8] I would add long face, high cheek bones, hooded eyes—his portraits of her are identifiable from her features. But not in “Woman in a broad-brimmed hat”.
A third McIntyre oil, from about 1915, of Eve Balfour has recently been “rediscovered”.
And this? He called it “Suzette” and it has been suggested the sitter was Miss Cavendish, but it is rather like Eve’s photograph by Angus Basil Brown, 1916.
“It is people of the theatrical profession that I am always coming into close contact with,” wrote McIntyre to his father and Eve Balfour was another.
She would take major roles on the London stage and would go on to star in at least fifteen silent movies (1914–1920), was touted as the most beautiful woman in Britain and became the model for poets (Ezra Pound), photographers, painters (Augustus John and many others) and sculptors: Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge’s 1919 bronze sculpture of Eve was recently acquired for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In its time it was “the most talked of piece of statuary in England”.[9]
Miss Eve Balfour, a “Venus” of New Zealand, has been portrayed in a statuette, and those who have seen it speak of its beauty, strangely inspiring and elusive.[10]
She was the first woman film producer in England, her company, “Eve Balfour Films” producing the silent film Love in 1915 and Eve’s daughter in 1916. She joined the Fox company in the United States, was celebrated as “The woman in black” in the Fox serial Fantomas and in the late 1920splayed on the stage in New York, eventually returning to Stratford-on-Avon with her husband Stanley Howlett.
She died there in 1955.
Miss Eve Balfour, by Raymond McIntyre.
Published in Pictures and the Picturegoer magazine 8 February 1919.
This painting was “life-size” when hanging on the wall of Eve’s Chelsea flat in 1919 (see Appendix) but its present whereabouts is unknown.
Eve, by Raymond McIntyre.
Published in Colour magazine (in black and white), October 1918.
Girl in a broad-brimmed hat, brush drawing by Raymond McIntyre, date unknown.
Original at Auckland City Art Gallery.
This is said to be of McIntyre’s frequent model, Phyllis Constance Cavendish—wrongly I think, for the resemblance to Eve Balfour is striking.
Eve Balfour, photographed by Angus Basil Brown, from the Tatler 15 September 1915.
[1] http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/Publications/Art/
CanterburySocietyofArts/pdfs/Catalogue-1905.pdf.
[2] Raymond McIntyre to Daphne 12 June 1911. ATL MS-Papers-8612-150–1.
[3] Raymond McIntyre to his father 4 October 1911. ATL MS-Papers-8612-150–1.
[4] Raymond McIntyre to his father 2 October 1912. ATL MS-Papers-8612-150–1.
[5] She was pregnant. In October she would play Louise in The Experimentalists and in November would be given the lead in Hedda Gabler. She would read Ezra Pound poems at the Cabaret Theatre Club (the Cave of the Calf) in November.
[6] Raymond McIntyre to his father 9 October 1912. ATL MS-Papers-8612-150–1.
[7] Evening Post 1 January 1919, quoting Frank Rutter in The Sunday Times (London) 6 October 1918.
[8] Brounson R. Raymond McIntyre and Phyllis Constance Cavendish.
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/article/raymond-mcintyre-and-phyllis-constance-cavendish.
[9] Evening World 10 December 1919.
[10] Register (Adelaide) 19 January 1922.