Oil on canvas

A new model, Benedikte Esbenson, brought back powerful early memories of her ‘double’, Lenkiewicz’s first adolescent love at the Hotel Shemtov, the Hampstead home for Jewish émigrés run by his parents. Research in his library into the fictional and folkloric tradition of the ‘Doppelgänger’ or ‘double’ convinced the artist that he had hit upon a powerful new theme. Lenkiewicz relished the painterly opportunities of using the traditional formula of an uncanny double of oneself glimpsed in such a way that it could not be a mirror reflection.

Lenkiewicz laboured on Project 17 – Observations on Local Education for five years, producing 150 finished paintings of more than twice as many sitters, including pedagogic radicals, teaching professionals, educational bureaucrats, school governors, and schoolchildren. The accompanying 2-volume publication contained 400 pages of ‘observations’ written by these sitters.

This painting was destroyed in June 2012 in a fire at the property of the collector who owned it.