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A Letter from the Front/Girl on a Couch (1915). Agnes Noyes Goodsir (1864–1939) was an Australian portrait painter who moved within lesbian circles in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Goodsir’s work is strongly composed and drawn. Although she produced many watercolors of Paris streetscapes, she was mainly interested in oil paintings. While she also painted still lifes and interiors, her strength lay in portraiture. Among her important sitters was Sir Bertrand Russell.
Goodsir admired the art of many modernists and she was surrounded by the innovations of the avant-garde. But her work, although influenced by contemporary English and French painting, is quite conservative.
Goodsir’s figure studies and portraits of women have an erotic and radical edge. Her studies of these beautifully dressed and sophisticated women often stress their androgynous qualities.
