British Art Fair

From 4 blocks, printed in chrome yellow, red, permanent blue & Chinese blue.

The Artist

Private Collection, Canada (purchased from the above)

Osborne Samuel London

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 13

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 15.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Collectors’ Collections,” February 19, 2020–October 5, 2020. (another copy)

Printed from 3 blocks in Chinese orange, spectrum red and Prussian blue

Private Collection, London

Private collection, Denmark
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, published by Lypiatt Studio, 1997, cat. no. C28, p. 361 (ill.b&w)

Bath , Beaux Arts, September – October 1986 (another cast)

Estate of the Late Eugen Manfred Pezold
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr and Éva Chadwick (2014) Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, Farnham: Lund Humphries, cat. no. 802, p.345 (another cast illustrated) .

Edinburgh, Mercury Gallery, Lynn Chadwick, 25 February – 31 March 1983, cat. no. 24, (another cast)

Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

Exhibition catalogue, Chadwick: Recent Sculpture, London, Marlborough Fine Art, 1974, pp. 7, 28, no. 26, illustrated.
Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, cat. no. 657s, p. 295 (ill. b&w, another cast).

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Chadwick: Recent Sculpture, January 1974, no. 26.

The Estate of the Artist

Osborne Samuel Gallery

John Craxton: A Poetic Eye, Dorset County Museum, March-September 2015

Salisbury Museum, January-May 2016

Osborne Samuel, John Craxton in Greece, 10 May – 8 June 2018, p.57

Christopher Hull Gallery, London
Mr. and Mrs. Mark Holeman, Indiana, U.S.A. (acquired from the above in 1988)
Osborne Samuel, London

London, Christopher Hull Gallery, John Craxton Recent Work, October 4 – November 5, 1988

John Craxton’s dialogue with Greece stretches from paintings made in the late 1940s, in which the liberation from wartime England is palpable, to radiant compositions such as Sun, Cat and Bird (1986–88). Craxton was drawn equally to the landscape and its people – sailors, priests, shepherds and dancers, whom he portrayed in charcoal studies or in paintings on canvas or board. The hedonistic tenor of his early encounters is encapsulated in a postcard from 1948, where Craxton wrote, ‘I am off again in a day to an island where lemons grow & oranges melt in the mouth & goats snatch the last fig leaves off small trees the corn is yellow and russles [sic] & the sea is harplike on volcanic shores’.[1]

Sun, Cat and Bird splinters elements of this landscape into a mythical, sun-drenched scene. Sun electrifies the fur on the cat’s tail and haunches; the cat stalks its quarry through tangled rock and vegetation; the bird realises too late its fate. Craxton’s deep admiration for Byzantine mosaics is evident in the tessellation of the imagery and jewel-like colours that shimmer across the composition.

[1] Postcard to E.Q. Nicholson, quoted in Ian Collins, John Craxton (London: Lund Humphries, 2011), p. 99. 

The artist’s estate

The Artist’s Estate

The Estate of John Craxton

This fascinating and bold study for Lucian Freud’s impressive 1946 oil on canvas, Man with a Thistle (Self-Portrait) (Tate collection) fleshes out the finished composition with detailed accuracy and artistic spontaneity. All aspects of Tate’s painting (purchased in 1961) are incorporated into this small monochrome design, so that the viewer is presented with an insightful snapshot of the artist’s working process.

Lucian Freud, Man with a Thistle, 1946 

‘The artist shows himself looking through a window at a spiky thistle resting on a ledge in the foreground. At the same time, the thistle may also be read as an emblem occupying flattened space at the bottom of the painting. This ambiguity allows the thistle to be interpreted as a real object, but also as a device which suggests the mood of the painting and Freud’s own psychological state. (Tate Gallery label, September 2004) 

Gifted by the artist to the sitter (John Craxton’s aunt), who gifted it to John Craxton

The Estate of John Craxton

Christopher Hull Gallery, London, 1984, exh.no.57 

From the edition of 6

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, UK  (purchased from the above 2006)

The Leicester Galleries, London, 2 February 1962
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Woodland became a key feature of Hitchens’ paintings from the early 1940s onwards, following the family’s move to Lavington Common, Sussex, after his studio in Belsize Park was badly damaged by a bomb. This was a turning point for the artist, having escaped London to the seclusion and tranquillity of the countryside and surrounded by nature, his work took on a fresh spontaneity that is particularly evident in this painting.

Peter Khoroche noted:

“About Yellow Autumn from a Terrace -there is a note in IH’s Despatch Book, under Summer 1949, to the effect that certain pictures from the Leicester Galleries were transferred to the Leger Galleries at this time. Among these was Yellow Autumn from a Terrace. So we can be sure that it was painted before Summer 1949. I think ‘ca.1948’ would be a reasonable guess as to when it was painted.”

Taking a horizontal canvas, often propped low in front of him, Hitchens worked in the open air from landscapes hemmed close by foliage, bracken and the dank mass of water. He had moved to Greenleaves, six acres of woodland in Lavington, Sussex, following the bombing of his London studio. Never finding a reason to leave, he continued to paint its seasons, finding infinite variety where others might hardly register change.

Hitchens frequently drew analogy with music to describe his approach to painting, referring to the instruments in the ‘ painter’ s orchestra’ , a picture’ s rhythm and harmony, or the notation of tones and colours necessary to its ‘ visual music’ .1 Yet if his canvases are scanned, in the same way as musical scores, the attentive viewer soon notices that Hitchens’ calligraphic strokes are precise rather than bravura , the balancing of tone to unpainted canvas as calculated as that of an experienced orchestrator.

In Yellow Autumn from a Terrace , Hitchens creates a foreground scaffolding of tree trunks, arched brambles, shrubs, the suggested curlicues of ironwork, letting the eye find its own way towards chinks of cerulean-grey. As Christopher Neve wrote,

“…nature seemed to consist to [Hitchens] more of spaces than of objects, and it often appears that he instinctively drew the air and light that vibrates in the interstices of the view rather than the view itself.”2

1. Ivon Hitchens, Statement in Ark (1956), based on notes made a decade earlier.

2. Christopher Neve, ‘ Ivon Hitchens: Music’ , in Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century English Painting (Faber, 1990), p. 139.

The Artist
George Dix, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent
Private collection, Virginia
Osborne Samuel, London

University of Virginia Museum of Fine Art, February 1949

A major figure in the neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s and 50s, English painter John Minton was also an abundantly gifted graphic artist and prolific illustrator. His commissions spanned book illustration, dust-jacket design, illustrations for magazines and journals, advertising, commercial posters for film, wallpapers, theatre design and importantly a large canvas commissioned for the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain. Notable projects also include illustrations for food writer Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Alan Ross’s Time Was Away, and Kay Dick’s An Affair of Love.

Minton was clearly influenced by the previous generation of Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland. As Gerard Hastings wrote in his essay for our exhibition in 2018, the impulse was to preserve picturesque scenery and to locate a poetic vision among our home-grown hops and thistles. A distinct nostalgia for something familiar that might soon disappear. The Fisherman is a wonderful example of this.

This drawing previously owned by George Dix who was stationed in London during the Second World War and remained there for a time afterwards. During this period in England, he befriended many of the luminaries of mid-century British culture, among them Minton, Wells, Vaughan and Piper, along with the famed sculptor Henry Moore. He maintained these relationships even after his return to America, where he worked as a partner in the New York office of the bi-continental gallery Durlacher Brothers. In Manhattan, Dix remained part of the intelligentsia, enjoying the company and friendship of Gore Vidal and Leonard Bernstein, among others.

The Artist
Private Collection, London
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, Volume 2, Lund Humphries, London, 1965, p.40, cat. no. 318 (ill.b&w, another cast)
John Hedgecoe, A Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore, Collins & Brown, London, 1998, p. 214, no. 295 (ill.b&w, another cast)

Henry Moore is widely recognised as one of the most celebrated and significant British artists of all time. The artist’s work had a profound effect and impact on the course of art, his influence spanning for generations beyond his longstanding and remarkable career.

Moore grew up in a mining community in Yorkshire, England, and he was surrounded by the physical labour of the miners, as well as the rugged, rocky landscape of the area. As a child, he spent a great deal of time exploring the moors and the surrounding countryside, and he developed a keen eye for the natural shapes and forms of the world around him.

Later, as a student of sculpture, Moore was drawn to the work of ancient civilizations, particularly the art of ancient Egypt and the Aztecs. He was intrigued by the way that these cultures used the human figure as a symbol of power, strength, and spiritual significance.

Moore’s interest in the figure continued throughout his career, and he produced a vast body of work that explored the human form in a variety of ways. His sculptures ranged from highly abstracted figures to more naturalistic depictions, and he was particularly interested in the way that the figure could convey a sense of energy and emotion.

The present work was conceived in the same year as Moore was working on his seminal masterpiece Reclining Figure, which would be later installed at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France.

Overall, Moore’s obsession with figures can be seen as a reflection of his deep curiosity about the world around him, as well as his fascination with the human form as a symbol of power, spirituality, and the inherent beauty of nature.

Private Collection, purchased at the November 1972 exhibition 

Thence by descent

Osborne Samuel, London

Exhibition catalogue, Small Bronzes and Drawings by Henry Moore, London, Lefevre Gallery, 1972, pp. 8-9, no. 1, illustrated.
A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture 1980-86, Vol 6, London, 1999, p. 28, no. 175a, another cast illustrated.

London, Lefevre Gallery, Small Bronzes and Drawings by Henry Moore, November – December 1972, no. 1. (this cast)

Private Collection, UK

Alan Bowness and Herbert Read (Ed), Henry Moore, Sculpture and drawings Volume 3, Sculpture 1955-64, London, Lund Humphries, no.495, p.54 

Henry  Moore Animals, Gerhardt Marcks Haus, Bremen, 1997, p.185

Casts of Snake Head  are with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada and the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham.

Henry Moore Foundation
Berkeley Square Gallery, London 
Private Collection, U.K. (purchased from the above)

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore, Volume 5, Complete Drawings 1977-81, Lund Humphries, London, 1994, cat. no. AG.80.307, p.149, (ill.b&w.)

Madrid/Lisbon, Henry Moore: Sculptures, Drawings, Graphics 1921-1981, Parque de El Retiro, Palacio de Velazquez and Palacio de Cristal, Madrid; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 1981, cat. no. 178 (Madrid), cat. no. 177 (Lisbon)
Scottish Highlands and Islands, Scottish Arts Council Tour, Henry Moore Sculpture, toured the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 1982 (no cat. no.)

The Leger Galleries, London
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

Nicholson’s work in Italy, although closely related to the central concerns of his art, is a special category in his oeuvre, which demonstrates his appreciation of Italian architecture and landscape. He visited Italy in 1950 and this was his first trip to the country since the end of the Second World War. Nicholson produced various drawings of some of his most favourite views throughout Italy – the regions of Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. Peter Khoroche has commented that, “laying no claim to a technical or historical knowledge of architecture, what interested him was the shape, the proportion, the lie of a building…Building, like objects, were a starting point only, naturally there was no point in mere imitation…Architecture in landscape offered an opportunity to combine his love of precise structure with his feeling of poetry and acute sensitivity to the spirit of place”.

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Marlborough Fine Art, Rome
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

The Artist
Galerie Farber, Brussels.
Private collection, Brussels
Osborne Samuel Ltd, London

Alan Bowness & Luigi Lambertini, Victor Pasmore: with a catalogue raisonne of paintings, constructions and graphics 1926-1979, published by Thames and Hudson, 1980, ref. B 549

Galerie Farber, Brussels, 1974

The formal neutrality of the square format has been retained from the 1960s constructed reliefs. The ensuing stability and order gives an underlying counterpoint to the more random deployment of rounded brown oblongs, coloured ovals and black lines. Whatever associations with the natural world these shapes may contain Pasmore was clear that,  the symbol is intrinsic in the form of the painting and not a conceptual factor outside it. ₁ In other words the imagery is, intrinsic and organic» and is not a distortion or abstraction from natural appearances.

As well as reflecting the relative influence of the Maltese environment works like Linear Symphony reveal the experimental tenor and conceptual restlessness of Pasmore’ s work, its moving between different aesthetic poles. He talked of the developing process which printmaking and the collaboration with architects and urban planners on the long drawn out Peterlee New Town project in the north east bought to the fore. In 1988 Pasmore explained to Peter Fuller how Peterlee, gave me a sense of multi dimensional space, mobile modern space, not the confined space of the Renaissance. ₂

Such qualities of flux, movement and infinite space are evident in the aptly titled Linear Sympony. The hardness of architecture is, though, replaced by the organic softness of shapes whose residual associations with nature are only of an ambiguous kind.

The early 1980s proved an important moment in Pasmore’ s ever-evolving career. An Arts Council touring show in 1980 was followed by his becoming Companion of Honour (1981) and Royal Academician (1983).

₁  Victor Pasmore. Ed. Grieve.Tate Publishing p 139. 2010.
₂ Grieve 2010 p.98.

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Hugh Fowler-Wright.

John Piper was a hugely significant and influential British artist, known for his romantic depictions of ruined landscapes and buildings. This work is a moving and enigmatic evocation of the Island of Portland off the Dorset coast, that had been a major focus for the artist’s work since 1948. Drawn to the rubble strewn landscape, Piper creates an image that is simultaneously modern and ancient. The artist described it as ‘very important to me…with great blocks of stone lying about on the low quarry shore in magnificent disarray.’ These Portland works were exhibited in New York in the 1950s. Piper was a member of the avant-garde group the Seven and Five Society alongside Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens, and was designated an Official War Artist during the Second World War. His depictions of the Blitz are amongst the most famous and remembered works of the period.

Private Collection, USA

In 1943 Piper received a commission to document a slate quarry inside the mountain of Manod Mawr, north Wales, where the collections of the National Gallery were sent for safe storage during the war. While the interior proved too dark to draw, Piper took the opportunity to explore the region, using John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in North Wales (1898) as his guide.

Returning to Snowdonia in the summer of 1945, he discovered and rented ‘Pentre’, a cottage halfway down the Nant Ffrancon valley, through which a river runs, and to which, at the time, there was an unmade track barely passable in winter. Piper acquainted himself with the geology of the area by reading A.C. Ramsay’s The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales (1860) and by drawing the mountains repeatedly, thereby beginning to notice how rocks near to hand often resembled the contours of those in the distance. Writing to Paul Nash in November 1945, he described a gale ‘which made the clouds whirl round the mountains in circles and lifted the water off the river in spray’, adding, ‘I hope you will see the place one day.’¹

It is likely that Rocky Sheepfold, which resembles Piper’s photographs of a drystone enclosure in the Nant Ffrancon valley, relates to the landscape near this cottage.² The painting balances topographical detail against broad washes of tone, evoking the mood of lithographs commissioned for the poetry volume English Scottish and Welsh Landscape (1944), described in a review as ‘sinister … livid and menacing’.³ To the perimeter of Rocky Sheepfold, scattered stones extrude from the grass; larger boulders shelter and form part of the enclosure. Elemental and windswept, it demonstrates an opportunistic intervention into the landscape.

¹ Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 267–8.

² John Piper, photographs of sheepfold in Nant Ffrancon, Caernarvonshire (c. 1930s–1980s), black and white negatives, Tate Archive TGA 8728/3/3/10–11.

³ English Scottish and Welsh Landscape 1700–c. 1860, verse chosen by John Betjeman and Geoffrey Taylor, with original lithographs by John Piper (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1944); The Studio (December 1944), p. 192.

The Artist
Marlborough Fine Art, London, April 1983
Private Collection, U.K. (acquired from the above)

Pittsburgh, The Carnegie International, March – June 1950

Around 1947, Piper rented Bodesi, a house facing the mountain of Tryfan in the Ogwen Valley of Snowdonia. This was not the first place where the family had stayed in Wales: in 1945 Piper rented a cottage named Pentre, in the Nant Ffrancon valley, which was prone to flooding and reached by a track that became impassable in poor weather. Bodesi was available only outside the summer months, accounting for Piper’s often stormy depictions of the landscape. As Piper recalled, ‘for the first time I saw the bones and structure and the lie of the mountains, living with them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog’.[1]

Tryfan, the fifteenth-highest mountain in Wales, is easily recognised by its conical, jagged profile. In Piper’s painting, it dominates a landscape raked by low sun, revealing the texture and detail of rocks, scree and boulder fields.

[1] John Piper, in Richard Ingrams and John Piper, Piper’s Places (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986), p. 105.

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Cyril Power Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue – Philip Vann, published by Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel Gallery, 2008. Catalogue No 27
Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School – Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, Farnham, 1995, Catalogue No CEP 27

Printed in 5 blocks in 1) light yellow ochre; 2) transparent golden ochre; 3) spectrum red; 4) permanent blue (oil paint); 5) Chinese blue (oil paint).

The watercolour is one of a number Procktor made from drawings made in New York, when he, Gervase Griffiths and Ossie Clark were staying at the apartment of John Kloss, a fashion designer friend of Clark’ s who was away on business. The watercolours were made when Procktor was back at home in London.

The following is taken directly from Ian Massey’ s book, Patrick Procktor: Art and Life , page 111:

Eric Emerson, a dancer who had appeared in Warhol’ s 1967 film Chelsea Girls, joined Procktor, Griffiths and Clark at the apartment. Over a couple of days and through the night of the sixth and seventh of December they took LSD. The eleventh-floor apartment overlooked Central Park and had mirrored walls, so that the effect was of the park entering the room. When the moon rose, its light was reflected in the mirrored room and combined with the reflections of plant foliage – all was magnified and made stranger by the effects of drugs. Procktor made a series of annotated drawings in pen and pencil on sheets of paper joined together as 180-degree panoramas. Back in London he was to develop watercolours from these drawings, in which he played with changes of scale in order to capture something of the disorientation of the experience.

This is the footnote relating to the above text: Eric Emerson, born 1945. Appeared in four Warhol films, including Lonesome Cowboys , 1969.Died as result of drug overdose on 28th March 1975. See Jean Stein’ s biography of Edie Sedgwick, Edie: an American Biography , 2006, p 276 for an anecdote about Emerson.

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’.

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).

Desmond Coke
Sotheby’s London, 23 July 1931
Christie’s London, 12 November 1987
Geoffrey Beene
His sale; Christie’s New York, 24 May 1994
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel, London

Andrew Gibbon-Williams & Ruth Artmonsky, William Roberts & Jacob Kramer, The Tortoise and the Hare, Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, London, 2003, ill.p.10

Leeds, University Gallery, William Roberts and Jacob Kramer: The Tortoise and the Hare, 30 April – 20 June 2003; toured to London, Ben Uri Art Gallery, 7 July – 7 September 2003, ill.p.10

The original owner of Bathers, Desmond Coke (1897-1931), was a British writer commissioned into the 10^th (Service) Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment in October 1914. At the Western Front, as Adjutant of the Regiment, he was responsible for writing up the Battalion diary. Eventually invalided out of the army after contracting trench fever in May 1916, he went on to write adventure stories for boys under the pseudonym Belinda Blinders. He also collaborated with the artist John Nash, who illustrated his 1921 book, The Nouveau Poor. Coke may well have been friends with William Roberts and will certainly have been aware of the latter’s significant World War I commissions received from the Canadian Memorials Fund and the British Ministry of Information. 

Drawn in 1923, it has been suggested (by the William Roberts Society) that Bathers was probably exhibited in Roberts’ first one-man exhibition, Paintings and Drawings by William Roberts at the Chenil Gallery, London in November 1923. An untraced work from this show, titled Sea Frolic, would seem to match Bathers, and further drawings in the exhibition are known to be inscribed with titles which are not consistent with the exhibition catalogue. 

Following Coke’s death in 1931, Bathers was offered for sale at Sotheby’s where it disappeared into an unknown collection, until it re-appeared again at auction, in the 1980s. The drawing then entered the collection of Geoffrey Beene (1924-2004), one of New York’s most famous fashion designers in the 1960s and 1970s, who was recognised for his artistic and technical skills. Latterly, it was in the collection of Ruth Artmonsky, gallerist and curator of William Roberts & Jacob Kramer, the Tortoise and the Hare, staged at Ben Uri Gallery, London, and the University Gallery, Leeds, in 2003, in which Bathers featured (cat.no.16).

Commenting on the artist’s Chenil Gallery exhibition in 1923, Gibbon Williams states, ‘Roberts’ first solo exhibition was a heavyweight spectacle. It comprised nearly sixty works – paintings, drawings and prints…Muirhead Bone’s catalogue introduction was especially perspicacious. It pinpointed the very qualities that marked Roberts out from the generality of his contemporaries: his “boldness”, “mordant irony” and “sense of design”. “A strong love of character at it raciest” Bone wrote, “especially where it shades into the grotesque – he presents to us his memories of life in a sharp manner, odd, vivid, and quite his own, whose foundation is a really sterling draughtsmanship.”’1

Whilst Bathers has been lightly squared for transfer, it is possible Roberts abandoned the oil painting. An oil on canvas, titled The Bathers and dated to circa 1925 bears little resemblance to this drawing, in which all of the figures are standing, and appear to be engaged in a loose and joyous procession or dance around the central figure, not dissimilar in compositional design to the right-hand side of The Dance Club (The Jazz Party) painted in the same year and now with Leeds Museums and Galleries, City Art Gallery, Leeds. Whilst it is tempting to draw parallels with Cézanne and his bathers, Roberts doesn’t depict the group of nude figures as a formal exercise as Cézanne would have, but as was often the case with Roberts there seems to be an underlying narrative idea, although intriguingly one that is not explained. That the figures in the drawing are unclothed seem to give Bathers a Dionysian element. However, considering the tailpiece drawings that Roberts produced for Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1925–26 several of them such as A Reluctant Shepherd and Male and Female feature unclothed figures where the nudity seems to be driven purely by design elements rather than any relevance to the narrative. The bodies, arms and legs of the eight figures depicted in Bathers are entwined in a complex arrangement of angles and curves, with a heavy use of pencil and subtle shading, which recalls the artist’s own earlier forays in Cubist experimentation, as seen in his studies on paper for the now lost Two Step (1915).

Referring to Roberts’ work dating from the early 1920s, Gibbon Williams remarks, ‘While fidelity to the visual truth of a specific event is rarely sacrificed to formal requirements, his drawings and paintings of this period are an example of Cubism being manipulated with realistic intent.’2 It is this quasi-Cubist aesthetic which Roberts embraced during the early 1920s which makes Bathers, and other drawings from his significant 1923 Chenil Gallery show so appealing. 

1.    Andrew Gibbon William, William Roberts, an English Cubist, Lund Humphries, 2004, p.68
2.       op. cit. p.60

Gimpel Fils, London 
Galerie Angst + Orny, Munich, 1976
Christie’s, London, 24 May 2012, lot 171
Private Collection, UK

Munich, Galerie Angst + Orny, William Scott Gouachen, January – February 1976

Verified by the William Scott Foundation

Scott’s still lifes reduced a narrow canon of domestic objects to a set of outlines and solids, tilted parallel to the picture plane. If his method was avowedly to look at Cézanne through the eyes of Chardin, ₁ he brought to this vision a particularly British sensibility. David Sylvester encapsulated this tendency, neatly, as a ‘liking for strange shapes, queer, misshapen shapes, either abstracted or invented’. ² Typical, for Scott, would be the long-handled frying pan, but also lemons, grapes and, most frequently, pears.

Chelsea Suite No. 4 (1975) was exhibited in a selection of gouaches and oils at the Galerie Angst + Orny, in Munich, at the same time as an extensive retrospective of drawings at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. Hilton Kremer, reviewing the New York exhibition, drew attention to the trajectory of Scott’s still lifes:

In the earlier drawings, there is more attention lavished on representational detail – details constantly and eloquently subject to correction, revision and the shifting ambiguities of perception – whereas in the later drawings, there is a more intense concentration and simplification. Objects and light, together with the spaces they occupy, are transmuted into a bold orchestration of shapes, textures and tonalities. ₃

In Chelsea Suite No. 4, Scott distils his subject to the chalk silhouette of a plate, with a knife, lemon and two pears, against a charcoal-grey ground. Enigmatically, he crops the second pear to a marginal sliver, as if it has just rolled out of sight.

₁ William Scott, in William Scott: Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches 1938–71, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate Gallery, 1972).

² David Sylvester, ‘Sickert’, in About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948–96 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 155

₃ Hilton Kramer, ‘Art: Seeing an Emotion’s Shape’, New York Times (11 January 1975), p. 21.

Private collection, South Africa
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

Bedridden for several years during childhood, the Norwich-born artist Edward Seago began to paint scenes from his bedroom window. He later rebelled against this restrictive experience by joining a circus, travelling and sailing, including a voyage to Antarctica in 1956–7, all of which provided inspiration for his paintings. Seago served in the Royal Engineers in World War II, and after being invalided out in 1944 was invited to document the Italian Campaign. In 1953 he was appointed as official artist of the Coronation.

Stylistically, Seago drew sustenance from the English landscape tradition: from the Norwich School of Artists, Alfred Munnings, and above all John Constable. Thames from Lambeth Bridge (c.1973) is characteristic of his mature style in its impressionistic approach, deftly conveying the play of light on water, the breadth of the river and London’s architecture, veiled by distance and the city’s haze.

The Artist

Waddington Galleries, London, May 11, 1987

Private Collection, USA

Thence by descent

Amanda A Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, published by the Henry Moore Foundation, 2005, no.267, p. 176

London, Serpentine Gallery, William Turnbull, 1995 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 1998, cat no.1, p.16, illustrated p.17 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 2004 illustrated p.32 (another cast);

London, Sotheby’s S|2, William Turnbull, 9 October – 17 November 2017, p.140, illustrated p.17 (another cast).

‘The idea of metamorphosis in Turnbull’s work is at its most intense in the Blade Venus series. These large sculptures suggest the shapes of Chinese knives, Japanese Samurai swords, pens, paintbrushes, leaves and goddess figures in one elegant, slightly curved form. Their form and inspiration relate them to the Zen paintings that inspired Turnbull and to the calligraphic paintings, drawings and reliefs that he produced in the 1950s. Like a single gesture, with a wide and a thin section, they combine all of the breadth of the front view with the slenderness of the side view in one perception. Part of their ambiguity and their dynamic presence stems from the spectators’ simultaneous ability to see both the wide element and the narrow section as the handle or the blade or tip of the tool. Although they are absolutely still they are also balanced on their sharpest point, poised to act.’

(Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation & Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, pp.72-73).

R N Kershaw, Wargrave
Leicester Galleries, London
Private Collection
Prof. John Ball
Private Collection
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

John Rothenstein, British Art since 1900, Phaidon, London, 1962 (pl.150)
Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012 p.16 no. 9 (ill.)
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012 p.107 no. AH260 (ill.)
Gerard Hastings, Visions and Recollections , Pagham Press, 2014, (ill.), Cat. No. 101.

Leicester Galleries, London, 1958, Keith Vaughan – Recent Paintings (no.23)
Menier Gallery, London, Clough & Vaughan: Visions and Recollections, 2014

Nude Against a Rock is one of Vaughan’s more resolved depictions of the male form. Possessing a thorough knowledge of Ancient Greek art, it is Vaughan’s homage to the statuary of the Classical period, which developed the harmonious proportions he so admired in sculpture. He has positioned the figure in a contrapposto pose whereby the weight is supported mainly on one leg, while the other is more relaxed. In the upper torso the opposite arm is in tension, holding his staff behind, while the corresponding arm hangs free. This has the effect of tilting both the hips and the shoulders and gently enlivens, what would otherwise be, a static figure. Placing him slightly to the left and twisting his head to the right, augments this delicate animation and generates a sense of tranquillity and repose. 

In the distance, an ominous sky and dark trees frame the figure and, in the foreground, an imposing rock presses upon him. Vaughan offers us no information as to who this vulnerable youth is or why he stands here in this barren, rocky terrain. The intentional omission of facial features precludes identification or character analysis. Similarly, the absence of clothing prevents us making judgements about his social status or identity. By approaching the human form in this way Vaughan discourages us from imposing narrative associations and, consequently, the figure is universalised. While he may not be identifiable, we do know who the model was. Vaughan had met Johnny Walsh in the Black Horse pub in Soho the year before. He recorded their meeting in his journal.

January 8, 1956: Unforeseen encounter on New Year’s Eve with Johnny Walsh. L’Archange of Jean Genet. Captivating face of a young boxer. I invited him to come & let me draw him sometime. He finally arrived one afternoon last week. His clothes, all of which he at once took off, assuming that to be my wish, were either stolen or given to him. He gave me full details of his life. Brought up apparently in a perfectly respectable working-class family. Became involved with a car-stealing gang, ran a small-scale brothel (‘only 10/- a time’) & was finally caught & sentenced for petty larceny. Is now just released & has ‘no fixed address’ as the police would say. Lives by pickpocketing. All this he told me sitting naked beside the stove in my studio.

One of the most notable qualities of Nude Against a Rock is Vaughan’s treatment of the anatomy. It is broken down into small facets and angled planes of colour applied, for the most part, with a flat-ended brush. An array of blocked-in but related, fleshy tints of ochre, yellow and orange describe the articulation of the athletic figure. The more neutralised hues of the setting serves to frame this flame-like human presence.

Agnew’s, London, 1985
Private Collection, U.K.

Keith Vaughan: Journal and Drawings, 1939-1965, London, p. 59.

Vaughan’s war images are important historical documents concerned with the daily life of the Non-Combatant Pioneer Corps. While the official war artists recorded the more narratively dramatic and intense aspects of war, he immortalised the mundane, every-day events (see Breakfast in the Marquee (1942).

Graham Sutherland chronicled the horrors of the blitz, John Piper composed visual elegies to the bombed-out ruins of churches and Henry Moore documented the human terror experienced nightly in the subterranean London shelters. Vaughan was much more mundane in his selection of subjects and depicted soldiers constructing camps, showering themselves, urinating in the latrines, felling trees and peeling potatoes. His focus was on the day-to-day activities of his comrades and the overlooked moments of their routine existence. He scrutinised monotonous events undertaken by men separated from their loved ones and thrown together as part of the war effort. Their labours and recreations alike were detailed and documented by him as though the tedium of their humdrum existence was, in itself, a kind of heroic exercise.

In Potato Peeling, three men sit quietly as they scrape away at the mountain of potatoes required to feed Number 9 Company; they don’t speak, look or interact with each other as they get on with the mind-numbing activity. Vaughan has subtly arranged the group so that we view one figure from behind, another from the front and the third in profile. They are placed slightly to the left of the composition as though to marginalise them and communicate something of the boredom and dreariness of their labour.

In the hierarchy of army activities, cookhouse duty was considered the least worthy and the most emasculating. Certainly in the 1940s, cooking would have been identified as a woman’s activity and the preparation of vegetables was regarded as the least gallant activity imaginable. Vaughan interprets the scene with, perhaps, some gentle humour and more than a little sympathy.

He made another, more finished version of this subject a little later entitled Peeling Potatoes. In this he has worked over the figures with wax resists and coloured crayons. It is more intimate and, in some ways more poignant. The composition has been reduced to only two figures and this significantly concentrates the relationship between them. The gesture of the left figure, ostensibly reaching for another potato to peel, could also be interpreted as a more intimate reaching out towards his companion. As ever with Vaughan, this kind of intimacy is veiled and deliberately masked.

Concerning his art materials at this time, Vaughan had this to say: 

An artist who finds himself in the position of an ordinary soldier in the army can, I think, take one of two courses. He can put away his paints and brushes, forget all about his craft, submit himself without reserve to his new experiences, and hope that he will return to his work afterwards richer and wiser. On the other hand, he can trim his sails to a minimum, if it is only a note book and a pencil, and try and keep something going…On New Year’s Day, 1941, the first thing that went into my brand new army haversack was the largest drawing book it would accommodate and an unbreakable bottle of black ink…I now spent my off-duty hours with a pad on my knee on my bed in a barrack room. For a year I drew the raw material that was in front of me.⁶ 

Within a few years Vaughan’s considerable body of wartime drawings, such as Potato Peeling, had gained some public recognition. In December 1942, for example, a small suite of them was exhibited in a group show at the Lefevre Gallery. In 1943 the War Artists’ Advisory Committee purchased twelve of his pen and ink drawings and some of them were shown in an exhibition of war art at the National Gallery organised by Kenneth Clark.

______________________________

⁶ Introduction to Vaughan’s exhibition catalogue for the Lefevre Gallery, 1942

Leicester Galleries, London, 1955

E.P. Ortweiler

Christie’s, 30 May 1997, lot 49

Private Collection, U.K.

London, Leicester Galleries, Keith Vaughan, February 1955, cat. no. 53

London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan, 26 February – 3 March 2002 

The Artist’s Estate

Austin Desmond Fine Art, London

Private Collection, U.K.

Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012, p. 127, no. 130 (ill.)

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co. Bristol, 2012, p.173 no.AH502 (ill.)

Austin Desmond Fine Art, London, 1989, p. 31 no. 98 (ill.)

Agnew’s Gallery, London, 1990, no. 26

Vaughan painted two versions of Village After Sunset in 1968. Unfortunately, in neither did he supply pictorial clues, such as a church steeple or any identifying markers to help us locate which particular village he had in mind. It is most likely a generic conception of an Essex village close by Toppesfield, where he lived. Pictorial attention in both works is atmospheric rather than topographical. The glow of summer evening sunlight shimmers and glances off innumerable surfaces, some, perhaps architectural, others more organic. The effect is a dazzling array of prismatic colour. His tendency to fracture and break up landscape elements into quilt-like patterns at this time is, of course, derived from Cézanne and Analytical Cubism, though Vaughan’s palette is more succulent and sensuous. 

The Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester
Private Collection, U.K. (acquired from the above)

Vaughan produced many oil paintings and gouaches on the subject of gardeners, farmers and men labouring on the land and especially so during the mid-1950s including Man Sharpening a Sickle (1953), Harvest Assembly, (1956) and Two Labourers (1956). The subject of rural labour had preoccupied him since the start of the war when he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps and put to work clearing the land, digging trenches and bringing in the harvest. He made hundreds of ink drawings and gouaches of his fellow conscripts at work and considered man’s connection to the land and the seasons as something worthwhile and inspiring. Images of rustic toil had also formed the basis of much of the work of Nineteenth century British painters, such as William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, artists that Vaughan very much admired.

The empty wheelbarrow, emblematic of work and rural labour, is the focal point of the composition. Its two arc-like handles direct our gaze towards the gardener, at the right, busying himself in the shed. Yellow ochres and burnt umbers indicate an autumnal setting, one of the busiest times of the year for the country labourer.

Most of Vaughan’s so-called gouaches, including Wheelbarrow and Gardener, are in fact, executed in mixed media. During the 1930s, while he worked as a designer at Lintas Advertising Agency, gouache (or poster paint), was a medium he used daily to achieve flat areas of tone and to obliterate unwanted forms. Later, once he left the company, he developed the medium by transferring its use to the artist’s studio and extending its expressive range in his painting by combining it with pen, pencil, Indian ink and sometimes wax-resist. He further evolved his use of gouache during the war when army life precluded large-scale oil painting or easel work and was forced to carry his entire studio equipment around in his regulation knapsack.

Vaughan called gouache painting his ‘volatile medium’ since working with it often produced unexpected and capricious results. Here we see underlying pencil marks employed variously to guide his brush or block in general compositional forms. Vaughan’s rapid execution retains the freshness and spontaneity of a sketch. Watery passages of paint are played off against opaque areas of pigment, while rivulets of ink bleed into still-wet patches of colour. At the left, within the golden, translucent wash, we see a characteristic frothy texture. Vaughan discovered this effect by accident one day, having failed to rinse his brushes thoroughly after cleaning them. The next morning, left-over detergent in the bristles produced a frothy texture which remained on the surface of the paper once the gouache had dried.