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Siegfried Sassoon (British, 1886-1967)

The Mermaid and the Crown

Pencil, watercolour, gouache and collage

11.1/2 x 8.1/2 in. (29 x 21.5 cm.)

Provenance: Siegfried Sassoon and thence by descent

Long regarded as one of Britain’s best loved war poets, this caricature gives a private insight into Sassoon's mind and his relationship to Edith Sitwell.

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military psychiatric hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy".

Sassoon first made contact with the Sitwells in 1917, when Edith Sitwell wrote admiringly to him of his protest against the war. But over the following years, "he became irritated by their petty quarrels, their publicity seeking - which he thought copied from Whistler and Wilde - and their literary self-indulgence'.

This drawing and others in our collection poke fun at the Sitwells ridiculing them in awkward and out of place scenarios.