Alan Reynolds 1926 - 2014

Redfern Gallery Ltd, London
Captain D. de Pass (purchased from the above 25 February 1953)
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London (no. 29595)
Private Collection, UK

Likely exhibited at: London, Redfern Gallery Ltd, Alan Reynolds, 1953, no.2

Alan Reynolds grew up in Suffolk, with its tradition of Gainsborough and Constable, and was drawn early to the landscape and to botany. Post-war he studied at Woolwich Polytechnic, then gained a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, but stayed only a year. He was already exhibiting at the Redfern, and his paintings – imbued with the spirit of Klee – were garnering acclaim. Such landscapes had as their basis a clear-eyed knowledge. Reynolds drew and painted assiduously from nature: grasses, seeds, dandelion clocks, growing tendrils and leaves. His studies, monochrome or coloured with gouache or watercolour, were annotated with neat ink observations about plant growth, crowded in margins or tentatively crossing the image. When Reynolds married Vona Darby, in 1957, his gift to her was an album filled with drawings, pressed flowers and seed pods. Yet such source material was neither collected nor plundered unthinkingly. Reynolds described his quest for structure as a process whereby a ‘subject or motif must be transformed and become an organic whole’.1 Reynolds’ stated aim can be linked to his passion for music, in particular fugues or contrapuntal textures. It is therefore not surprising that he was attuned also to the rhythm of nature, which follows a parallel cycle of statement, development, recapitulation and cadence. In the mid-1950s Reynolds painted a quartet of paintings based on the seasons, which extended to a satellite series of around ninety drawings, watercolours and preliminary studies in oils, exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in 1950’s. By coincidence, after Reynolds had begun this series the Contemporary Art Society invited some sixty British painters and sculptors to create a work based on ‘The Seasons’. The resulting exhibition was held at the Tate from March to April 1956, running concurrently with Reynolds’ solo exhibition at the Redfern. 

The Tate purchased in the same year, Alan Reynold’s Summer: Young September’s Cornfield.

Approaching Harvest dates from this important period in Reynolds career, the organic forms a still life within the reduced but richly painted landscape. The rhythms of elements weave around the structure, requiring the viewer’s gaze to nimbly move across the patterned surface.

1.Reynolds, in Alan Reynolds, (London: Redfern Gallery, 1953

Redfern Gallery, London
Dr Lederman, 1953 (purchased from the above)
Piccadilly Gallery, London
HJE Haggard, 1961 (purchased from the above)
Private Collection, UK

Alan Reynolds, Redfern Gallery, London, 1953

Moth Barn in the Fenlands of East Anglia is a subject Reynolds often returned to. There are several recorded versions of the same view including a watercolour in the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge. One of the three finished oil paintings is in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Alan Reynolds’ solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, in February 1953, consolidated an impressive early reputation, featuring landscapes of abstracted trees and foliage: compositions formalised into ‘silhouettes of almost Chinese assurance and decisiveness’.¹ Even before the exhibition opened, Sir Kenneth Clark had reserved the large-scale painting, Moth Barn II, September Morning (1952), for the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Reynolds made numerous paintings on the theme of ‘moth barn’, in addition to a lithograph dating from 1956. Moth Barn Interior 3 (1952) is a diminutive variation, beautifully composed from a mirroring of spiked and curved foliage, whose palette suggests winter: chalk whites and greys, with a leavening of green. Here, landscape is reduced to its bare bones, stripped of unnecessary or lush detail. Yet it is also eloquent, built upon a series of curves derived from a seed pod, expectant in the foreground. First bought in 1953 by Dr Manuel Lederman, a pioneer in the field of radiology, the painting was later acquired by the geologist H. J. E. Haggard.

¹ M.H. Middleton, ‘Alan Reynolds (Redfern)’, The Spectator (13 March 1953).

London, Redfern Gallery, early 1950s

The Fine Art Society, London

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

Thence by descent

New York, Durlacher Brothers, Alan Reynolds, 6 April – 1 May 1954, cat. no. 25

In April 1954, Village, October (1953) was shown in a solo exhibition of Reynolds’ work at the New York branch of Durlacher Brothers. It was an impressive achievement for an artist still in his twenties. Reynolds had left the Royal College of Art only a year earlier, without completing his studies, following criticism from his tutors for exhibiting with commercial galleries while studying. A New York Times review described the paintings as the type of ‘severe, sullen romanticism’ in which Durlacher Brothers excelled. Based on hop fields, ‘spongy trees’ and moody skies around Shoreham in Kent, they recalled the mystically charged landscapes of Samuel Palmer, while using ‘a method of semi-abstraction that schematizes shapes’, fitting them into intricately structured compositions. The review concluded, ‘This is grave and impressive work, painted with admirable dexterity of hand.’1

Village, October (1953) depicts a landscape in tones of muted green, grey, brown and white. Its trees  include the fir, a favourite of Reynolds, characteristically reduced to a stack of curved branches. Architecture is less visible, although its presence is indicated by the gable and round window of the central building. It is a complex scene, nonetheless. The imagery is dense and claustrophobic, conveying a potent sense of the year – and the day’s light – nearing its close.

Originally owned by Frances and Nicolas McDowall, Village, October took its place alongside paintings, prints and book illustrations by John Piper, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, Ceri Richards, Paul Nash, John Minton and Graham Sutherland, within a collection that traced neo-romantic art from its roots in the work of Palmer and Blake to artists working in the 1990s. Nicolas McDowall credited the awakening of his interest specifically to Reynolds, however, whose work he had first seen, aged fifteen, at the Redfern Gallery.  

1.    S.P., ‘Reynolds Pastorals at Durlachers’, New York Times (6 April 1954), p. 33.

Redfern Gallery, London
Mrs Digby Morton (purchased from the above)
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London.
Christie’s, London, 1993

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above)

A gift from the artist to Robert and Lillian Melville.
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London 
Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above in July 1987)

London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Modern British Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints from 1800 to the Present Day, March – April 1986, no. 84, as ‘Group of Compositions’.
Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Alan Reynolds, August – September 2003, no. 14, as ‘Group of Compositions’.

The Redfern Gallery, London
The Earl Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, 5th Earl Amherst
Private  Collector, USA (gift from the above, 1985)

Osborne Samuel, London

Reynolds’ intense study of nature led him to create sketchbooks filled with botanical studies, pressed leaves, grasses, seedpods and feathers – forms upon which he based abstract landscapes during the first, figurative stage of his career. Among the most significant sequence of paintings derived from these studies was ‘The Four Seasons’, showing landscape transformed across the cycle of the year.

Legend in December (1955) relates to this series, showing a winter landscape in which the moon hangs low over the horizon. Bushes cast pallid shadows, and whitened seed heads appear like fireworks against the sky. On the roof of a chapel, haloed, is a cross mirrored in a reflection below. This detail, coupled with the title Legend in December, suggests a memory of Christmas.

Robert Melville, writing in October 1955 about Reynolds’ forthcoming exhibition ‘The Four Seasons’ at the Redfern Gallery, acknowledged the artist’s debt to Samuel Palmer, but denied that he shared Palmer’s Christian outlook. Melville instead drew attention to a reading of landscape by the writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies, who described that being ‘aware of the sun overhead and the blue heaven, I feel that there is nothing between me and space. This is the verge of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes straight unchecked into the unknown. It is the edge of the abyss as much if the earth were cut away in a sheer fall of eight thousand miles to the sky beneath’.¹

This same sense of space permeates Legend in December, which places the horizon low within the composition to emphasise an immense sky.

¹ Richard Jefferies (1848–87), quoted in Robert Melville, ‘Alan Reynolds’, Apollo, Vl. 62 No. 368, (October 1955), p. 100–101.

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

Redfern Gallery, London
Richard Attenborough
Galerie Haas, Berlin
Nick Holmes Fine Art, London
Robert Devereux Collection, London

Alan Reynolds, by JP Hodin, published by the Redfern Artists Series, London 1962, illustrated in colour on the cover of the book & p,45
Michael Harrison “Alan Reynolds; The Making of a Concretist Artist” p. 61 Lund Humphries 2011

This medium sized work belonged to a transitional series produced between 1962 and 1965 where Alan Reynolds borrowed from Braque, Picasso, and Mondrian the formal compositional device of the oval, employed as Michael Harrison states, as “a means of encapsulating and concentrating the image…of the integration of space and solid, and of not allowing it to dissipate towards the corners” 1. This was achieved by positing counter-poised horizontal and vertical yellow and blue ‘ bars’ against an infatic near-black oval ground which, in turn, was truncated by the four near square edges of the hardboard support. This obliquely reveals cream surrounds and, with it, spatial and planar layering.

The gently rounded circumference of this oval, blurred and softly painted, contrasts with the clinical symmetry of Mondrian-esque coloured planes and razor-like lines. The effect indeed recalls Mondrian’ s Pier and Ocean and later neo-plastic compositions, though the English palette still holds haunting residues of the nature-derived romanticism of the Suffolk-born artist’ s early work.

While extending across finished oils and preparatory works on paper alike, the ovoid format was subject to considerable variation during these years, the length or thickness of the lines and bars setting up shifting configurations in spatial intervals. Notwithstanding their position on the fully concretist brink, these abstract ovoid compositions retained autographic and ‘ organic’ paint handling and suggested reflection as if in still water, the soft colour bars above the horizontal medial line repeated in reverse formation below.

Immediately recognisable as the cover image of J P Hodin’ s 1962 book on Reynolds, Form on an Ovoid Ground is highly representative of a phase of work described recently by the artist as, “perhaps the best paintings I made” .2

1. Michael Harrison « Alan Reynolds; The Making of a Concretist Artist» p. 61 Lund Humphries 2011

2. Reynolds in conversation with Peter Davies 3/4/11

Redfern Gallery, London
James Huntington Whiteley Fine Art, London
Private collection, UK

The episodic and dialectical nature of Reynolds’s ‘oeuvre’ reflects the workings of inner necessity, an aesthetic integrity and a creative imperative opposed to the superficialities of fashion. As a result Reynolds’s work has always been well received by an admiring and well-informed group of connoisseur , rather than simply investment, collectors. This small oil on paper is a late variation on the Ovoid theme that pre-occupied him during the first half of the 1960s. The paint handling offers the personal touch within an ordered and symmetrical composition that, with hindsight, is a sure step towards later concretist ends.

Both in terms of its nuanced paint handling, colour and poised compositional elements – reduced to the horizontal, the vertical or the diagonal – ‘Small Structure recalls the intimate bottle subjects of the reclusive Bologna-based Italian still life painter Morandi. The bottles are ciphers of contemplation and, shorn of any allusion to such familiar everyday objects, Reynolds’s thick ‘bars’ and thinner ‘sticks’ of white, black, caramel or siena paint similarly seduce the viewer ; Michael Harrison explains the oval format as an effective means of concentrating our attention on the formal facts while allowing the artist a method of “exploring a more cosmic,gravity-free space.” 1

1.’Alan Reynolds:The Making of a Concretist Artist’ Michael Harrison p.61, Lund Humphries 2011.

Provenance: Provenance: The McDowall Collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery