Lady Idina Wallace's portrait to take centre stage at Sotheby's in London

KOLKATA: Lady Idina Wallace – beautiful, wealthy, well-connected and sexually liberated – challenged the way women were represented. Her life has been documented in expressive detail and one of these documents, Sir William Orpen's stunning portrait of her, will take centre stage at Sotheby's in London on 19 November 2013 when it comes under the hammer in an auction of British & Irish Art.

Estimated at £800,000-1,200,000 (€940,000-1,410,000), the painting was commissioned not by Lady Idina's husband at the time, but Sir James Harriet Dunn, a married millionaire industrialist and financier who was smitten by Idina. He paid the then exorbitant sum of £750 for the flamboyant, charismatic and technically flawless Orpen to pick up his brushes to produce a work which ranks amongst the artist's finest achievements in portraiture.

The resulting picture demonstrates Orpen's virtuosity at the height of his career. Central to his oeuvre was Orpen's love of women and this portrait is a celebration of womanhood -- Idina's beauty, intelligence, spirit and individuality has been captured on canvas by an artist who resembled a modern-day Van Dyck.

Simon Toll, Sotheby’s British & Irish Art specialist, said: "Orpen’s painting of Lady Idina is the most important full-length portrait by the artist to come to auction in over ten years. Idina was a remarkable woman and Orpen was a gifted painter who managed to convey her beguiling spirit." The face that looks out from Orpen's portrait belonged to a woman who scandalised her generation.

Lady Idina’s third husband was Josselyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, and together they became part of the hedonistic elite of British East Africa, known as 'The Happy Valley Set'. Photographed for Vogue by Cecil Beaton and immortalised as "the Bolter" in two novels by Nancy Mitford, Lady Idina's irrepressible character and elegance was never in doubt, qualities that would have been appreciated by Orpen when he painted her in 1915.