Edward Wadsworth 1889-1949

Estate of the artist

Edward Wadsworth, Form, Feeling and Calculation, the Complete Paintings & Drawings , by Jonathan Black, published by Philip Wilson, London 2005. No.422, illustrated colour p.130

Tate Gallery, London, February – March 1951 (no.45)

This striking and yet subtly enigmatic composition, so redolent of the world of the
seaside; characterful briny ports, beaches and harbours, was actually painted many
miles from the sea – in Buxton in Derbyshire’s Peak District. 

Wadsworth had been compelled by the Army to leave his home at Dairy Farm, Maresfield, near Uckfield in East Sussex – which was within easy reach of the south coast – in May 1940 as it
lay within an area deemed to be threatened with the imminent German invasion. He at
least found it easier to locate eggs in Buxton; painting in egg tempera had become
decidedly problematic as eggs were strictly rationed, one a week, when he usually
required several for one painting. 

Wadsworth painted Quiet Outlook in his cramped top floor studio at Tolland House, Macclesfield Road, Buxton, during the summer of 1942 when he managed to find time from his duties as a sergeant in the local Home Guard. Wadsworth’s services were in particular demand at the time as his pre-war command of German was sufficiently fluent to enable him to qualify to interrogate shot down German pilots and aircrew. He found that painting a work such as Quiet Outlook, which
harked back to images of Norman French ports such as Honfleur, Harfleur and Le Havre
he had produced c.1938-39, had a ‘soothing effect on the mind.’ It is a testament to his
talent that, despite his demanding wartime duties and straitened working environment,
Wadsworth was still able to create a work imbued with all his trademark unsettling and
enigmatic stillness. 

Before the war he had often casually been labelled a Surrealist and, though he was never formally a member of the movement, his meticulously rendered compositions simultaneously beguile and unnerve as do the most effective examples of the Surrealist aesthetic by, for example, his pre-war friend Max Ernst. Quiet Outlook, combining stylised still life with a simplified rendition of a harbour jetty and lighthouse, is filled with a sense of glacial expectancy; a scrupulously clean stage
set awaiting the entrance of the players. Though the composition is empty of human
presence, this was 1942 and the height of the U-Boat onslaught on allied shipping in the
seas around the United Kingdom. Wadsworth, an officer with the Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserve in the First World War, followed the unfolding Battle of the Atlantic closely and
it is not too fanciful to imagine the carnage taking place beyond the deceptively calm
horizon depicted.

Quiet Outlook and its pendant works Silent Shore [1943, Private Collection] and
Anticyclone [1943, Newport Gallery of Art] were greatly admired by the war artist
Graham Sutherland when he saw them in May 1943 while passing through Buxton en
route to paint lime quarries in the vicinity for the Ministry of Information. Sutherland
was particularly impressed with how Wadsworth had succeeded in imbuing prosaic
strips of seaweed and otherwise unexceptional everyday objects, such as the dangling
rake, with such sinister and disturbing power.1

For his part, Wadsworth expressed himself pleased with how Quiet Outlook
demonstrated his continuing efforts to develop the tempera medium in order to
communicate the bewitching ‘magic of colour’ he had long sought as well as create
harmonious compositions that were imbued with what he referred to as ‘Real mystery’;
not the blatant and overtly contrived mystery so often associated with Surrealism but
the much more elusive mystery of the apparently unimportant and easily overlooked.2

1.  Edward Wadsworth to Richard Eurich,7 May 1943, Wadsworth Papers, TateGallery Archive, London.

2.  Edward Wadsworth to MaxwellArmfield, 5 August 1942, WadsworthPapers, Tate Gallery, Archive, London.

Dr. Jonathan Black FRSA

The Estate of the Artist

The Graphic Work of Edward Wadsworth, Jeremy Greenwood with an introduction by Richard Cork, The Woodlea Press, Woodbridge, England, 2002, Greenwood W/D 8/3, p.28/29

Private Collection
Lord Timothy Willoughby of Eresby (grandson of Nancy Astor)

Colnaghi catalogue 130

The SS Jerseymoor is an exquisite woodcut of 1918, a classic image for a Vorticist artist like Wadsworth who helped in the design of ‘ dazzle camouflage’ during WW1

In 1917 Edward Wadsworth was hired to oversee the application of ‘dazzle’ patterning to ships in the Liverpool and Bristol dockyards. Dazzle camouflage was devised as a means of frustrating the attempts of German U-boat commanders to calculate the exact course and speed of an allied merchantman. By breaking up the outline of the hull with irregular patterns painted in stark colours, a ship became more difficult to target accurately, reducing its chances of a direct and fatal hit by torpedo. During 1918 nearly 2500 ships were being painted at any one time and the results of this dazzle camouflage were successful to the war effort and something to which Wadsworth was very proud.
For a Vorticist artist these ‘dazzle’ ships with their cubist informed patterning were an obvious subject matter. In ‘S.S. Jerseymoor’ Wadsworth created a pictorial equivalent of the ‘dazzle’, conflating the diverging diagonals of the barrels in the foreground with the striped ship, rigging, warehouses and cranes in the middle-distance. The result is dynamic and visually disorientating, perhaps not too dissimilar in effect to the view of a dazzled ship glimpsed from a U-boat periscope.

The estate of the artist
Private Collection, USA

One of three known impressions

Generous margins watermarked MBM (FRANCE) INGRES D’ARCHES