In January 1956, the year River Boat Blues was painted, London witnessed one of its most significant exhibitions of the decade at the Tate Gallery: Modern Art in the United States. The show introduced to a new audience, including domestic artists, a host of recent American painters, of which only Jackson Pollock had been exhibited in Britain before. Large canvases by Rothko, Clyfford Still, de Kooning and Mark Tobey, among others, hung in the final room titled Contemporary Abstract Art. Of these, Wynter’s paintings have most often been compared to the work of Mark Tobey, whom Wynter had met in St Ives the year before. The Tate Gallery exhibition exerted a profound influence on Wynter. ‘Bryan Wynter completely changed style in January 1956, working non-figuratively and on a larger scale, seeking to express a more elemental vision of the natural world’ (David Lewis, St Ives, 1939-64, Twenty-five years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1985, p. 199)

As well as Wynter’s acquaintance with the American abstract expressionists at the Tate Gallery, the year 1956 saw the artist’s personal circumstances change following an inheritance. This allowed him to stop teaching and buy The Carn, a granite-built miner’s cottage on Zennor Moor, Cornwall which he rented from 1945, thus injecting his work with a new sense of freedom. Chris Stephens describes Wynter’s oil paintings from this seminal period:

‘The works are made up of a matrix of interlocking and overlapping brushmarks, some short or calligraphically curled, others long and gestural. In a range of colours and tones, or sometimes monochrome, these coalesce into overlaid patterns to form a varying surface while also creating an illusion of depth. The pictures are in a constant state of assertion and denial: pictorial space is made and then blocked off; one’s eye moves across the surface only to be drawn into the picture, it has nowhere to rest.’ (Chris Stephens, Bryan Wynter, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1999, p. 42)

This interplay of shapes, colours and expressive brushstrokes are used to mesmerising effect in River Boat Blues. It is a painting which benefits from repeated viewings. The artist owned a glass-bottom boat on which he rowed himself on the rivers of Cornwall. He would then paint images, using his observations of being on and in the water, onto his canvas which lay flat on the ground, much like Jackson Pollock worked.

The title of the painting derives from the song River Boat Blues, which was recorded in 1956 by both Alton Guyon and Buddy Phillips, the same year Wynter painted this dynamic and powerful oil on canvas. It is known that Wynter often played new jazz releases while working.

River Boat Blues has always been considered a pioneering work by Bryan Wynter. This is evidenced in its extensive exhibition history across the world, from Latin America to Africa, Asia to Australia. It has often been the Wynter chosen by authorities to best broadcast the artist’s credentials to new audiences.

The painting was acquired for the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation in the mid-1960s, whose collection aimed to represent British artists at a formative point in their career. The parameters were that no painting should be earlier than 1951, and no artist younger than those included in the seminal Young Generation exhibition, sponsored by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964. Just three years later, in 1967, the collection was shown in its entirety at the Tate as Recent British Painting, an exhibition that toured to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

There has been a marked upturn and re-appraisal in Bryan Wynter’s market recently, partly brought about by a major 1957 canvas, Meeting Place, de-accessioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024, which measures the same size as River Boat Blues and went on to realise in excess of US$500,000 at auction.

The Redfern Gallery,  1957
The Waddington Galleries, 1965
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation
Bonhams, 29 July 1989, lot 1
The Redfern Gallery, July 2002
Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above)
Osborne Samuel, London

D. Lewis, St Ives 1939-1964, Twenty-five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1985, p. 207, cat. no. 187
M. Bird, Bryan Wynter, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2010,  pp. 94-95 (ill. col.)

London, The Redfern Gallery, Metavisual Tachiste Abstract, April 1957
Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Museum, Fourth International Art Exhibition, 23 May – 15 June, 1957; this exhibition toured to Osaka, Ube, Fukuoka, Sasebo, Kumamoto, Hiroshima, Takamatsu and Nagoya, 28 June – 24 November, 1957
Australia, Recent Paintings by Seven British Artists, 1959
Mexico, The British Council touring exhibition, Six British Artists, 1960 – 1961, cat. no. 35; this exhibition toured to Kenya and Peru
Bristol, Arnolfini, Exhibition of Paintings by Bryan Wynter, 1 – 26 February, 1963
London, Tate Gallery, Recent British Painting: Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection, 15 November – 22 December, 1967; this exhibition toured to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand
Adelaide, The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Festival of Arts, Recent British Painting, 6-28 March, 1970, cat. no. 18
London, Hayward Gallery, Bryan Wynter 1915-1975: Paintings, Kinetics and Works on Paper, August, 1976, cat. no. 26 (ill.)
Paris, Artcurial, English Contrasts: peintres et sculpteurs anglais 1950-1960, September – November, 1984
London, Tate Gallery, St Ives 1939-1964, Twenty-five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, 13 February – 14 April, 1985, cat. no. 187
London, The Redfern Gallery, Bryan Wynter, July 2002