Modern British Art

Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York
Artcurial, Paris, 1996
Connaught Brown, London (purchased at the above)
Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above 30 October 1997)
Osborne Samuel, London

Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work (Much Hadham/London: The Henry Moore Foundation, in association with Lund Humphries, 1997), KA 50.
James Scott and Claudia Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), ill. p. 103, no. 50.

New York, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, catalogue not traced, another cast exhibited, March / April 1956
‘Kenneth Armitage: sculpture & drawings; S W Hayter: paintings & engravings; William Scott: paintings’, the British Pavilion at the XXIX Venice Biennale 1958, organised by the British Council (14 June – 19 October 1958), essay by Herbert Read, cat. no. 8.
‘Kenneth Armitage, S W Hayter, William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (22 November – 21 December 1958), essay by Herbert Read (text in French), cat. no. 8.
‘Kenneth Armitage, S W Hayter, William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (7-29 March 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in French), cat. no. 8.
‘Sculptuur en tekeningen van Kenneth Armitage en schilderijien van William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, based on the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (3-30 June 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in Dutch), cat. no. 8.
‘Stanley W. Hayter: Gemälde und Graphiken; William Scott: Gemälde; Kenneth Armitage: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (10 January – 8 February 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in German), cat. no. 8.
‘Stanley W. Hayter: Gemälde und Graphiken; William Scott: Gemälde; Kenneth Armitage: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Kunsthaus, Zürich (April-May 1959), cat. no. 8.
‘Kenneth Armitage: a retrospective exhibition of sculpture and drawing, based on the XXIX Venice Biennale of 1958’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (July-August 1959), essay by Alan Bowness, cat. no. 17.

Estate records an edition of 6

‘Sculpture should express a liking for ordinary unheroic people who are not idealised in any way. People are funny; their bodies and actions having teasing and tantalising forms … obstinate lovable lumps of flesh continually falling short of their aspirations. In this attitude of life I express something beyond my own nature, something more general about the human predicament. I don’ t seek an idealised form of perfection or what is sometimes called grace. Grace makes an object remote and unattainable.’ – Kenneth Armitage

By 1954, Armitage was poised to move into the next stage of his career. He had exhibited with success at the Venice Biennale in 1952, alongside Adams, Butler, Chadwick, Clarke, Meadows, Paolozzi and Turnbull. The following year, he built a foundry at Corsham Court, with Meadows, enabling him to experiment with casting his own work. Armitage’s sculpture was being sold internationally, and in March 1954 the Bertha Schaefer Gallery opened a solo exhibition in New York, where his bronzes were described as ‘impressive’, ‘natural and convincing’.₁

Amid this, and within the increasingly confident evolution of Armitage’s group sculptures, Standing Figure (1954) appears strikingly anomalous. Unlike the composite figures, it has a lightness stemming from the voids created by its arms hanging perpendicular to its shoulders. The figure’s singularity, in fact, endows it with a quiet magnetism. Far larger than the hand-sized Cycladic figurines that may have inspired it, it stands gaunt, head angled quizzically.

Armitage had studied the British Museum’s Egyptian and Cycladic collections as a student, and would retain an interest in the frontality of Egyptian sculpture throughout his life. There is cross-currency, too, with the sculpture of William Turnbull, who was likewise, albeit briefly, a teacher at Corsham. Armitage’s Standing Figure echoes Turnbull’s heads, from the 1950s and later, whose impassive flatness – in common with Cycladic sculpture, as well as Picasso – is relieved only by dots, dashes or wedges. And while the gently incised surfaces of Standing Figure imply antiquity, they also parallel those of ceramic vessels made by James Tower, an artist friend at Corsham, with whom Armitage shared his first exhibition at Gimpel Fils. These are concerns common to sculpture of the decade. What is remarkable, however, is Armitage’s skilful orchestration of their effect, subordinating their impact to his own creative voice.

₁. New York Times review (1954), quoted in James Scott and Claudia Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), p. 40.

Christie’s, Amsterdam,  1997
Private Collection
Sotheby’s, London,  2015
Private Collection, Brussels
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, published by Lund Humphries, no. 735, p.320

Galerie Farber, Brussels, Lynn Chadwick, Victor Pasmore, November – December 1976 (another cast)

Female figure 49.2 cm. (19 3/8 in.) high, Male figure 50.2 cm. (19 3/4 in.) high

Chadwick’s Winged Figures are not allegorical beings but are a result of his intuitive dialogue with materials and process. The leitmotif throughout Chadwick’s career was the paired figure. From 1953 onwards, Chadwick developed an array of typologies, whose features he inflected and interchanged. The first manifestation was Conjunction, followed by Two Dancing Figures (or simply Dance), then Encounter, Teddy Boy and Girl  and Winged Figures.  These were never passive meetings, or, for that matter, decorative pas-de-deux. In each instance, an electricity seems to arc between the figures. 

Private Collection, Europe

Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, with a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2005, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2006, cat. no.349, illustrated p.180(another cast)

Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick, London, 2014, no. 5-16, illustration of another cast p. 122

Marlborough Fine Art, London, Nov-Dec, 1961

In 1959 Chadwick began working on an iconic series of sculptures: ‘The Watchers’. These mysterious creatures stand in majestic isolation, even when they appear in triads. All marks of the individual have been removed from the figure, to create an image that is neither human nor animal, neither male nor female. Writing about The Watchers, Herbert Read dubbed Chadwick’s unique aesthetic as “the new image of man”.

Lynn Chadwick was interviewed by Cathy Courtney for the British Sound Archive and she asked specifically about ‘the Watchers.’ 

Chadwick answered, ‘it is my way of saying the same thing as the Easter Island figures are saying…. They’re not in any way, representative of anything. They are just shapes….. You see, the Easter Island things …. have this great intensity of … message, as it were and I wanted to do the same thing….. All I was aware of was that they ….satisfied me that I had done what I wanted to do, I wasn’t trying to do anything specific but it was just this way of having this intense feeling.’1

In 1959, Chadwick began a series of over forty sculptures titled Watcher. The earliest maquette angled its block-shaped head inquisitively, its torso curved in a gentle, questioning arch. More characteristically, the Watchers would appear erect and level headed, their gaze directed resolutely ahead.

Watcher VI (1961) was conceived in the same year that Chadwick began work on the group of three monumental Watchers, a cast of which was sited in Roehampton, overlooking the modernist architecture of the Alton Estate, by the London County Council in 1963. Like them, it inhabits a rectangular profile, upright and self-contained. Yet within this simplicity of profile there is abundant detail, subtly reinforcing the stance: no plane is left unconsidered. The head bears traces of horizontal seams, layered as a dry-stone wall. The torso is articulated with diamond facets. This particular Watcher twists its head, slightly: a receptor stilled in observation.

1.Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick, London, 2014, p.112

Minimum footprint of legs at base 28.5 x 25 cm (11 1/4 x 10 in)

A study for the ‘Watcher’ series of 1961, executed in ink and watercolour on paper, is held in the collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 

Other ‘Watcher’ sculptures in public collections, include the Berman Museum, Pennsylvania, the Sprengel Museum, Hanover and the San Diego Museum of Art.

The London Gallery

The Mayor Gallery, London

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

Osborne Samuel Gallery

Monnow Valley Arts. The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection of British Neo-Romantic Art. ABC Print Ltd: Hereford. p.17

Head of a Sleeping Fisherman, painted in 1949, continues the theme of young men at rest that so absorbed Craxton in the early 1940s, following his discovery of the 19th century British Romantic artist, Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), through his new friendship with Peter Watson (see catalogue note for Boy with Bird). It was through Watson that Craxton was introduced to Lady ‘Peter’ Norton (née Noel Evelyn Hughes), co-founder of the London Gallery in 1936 and wife of Sir Clifford Norton, Ambassador of the United Kingdom to Greece (1946-51). This association was pivotal to Craxton’s career progression, with his Greek odyssey beginning in Athens in May 1946, initially using a room above the British embassy’s garage for lodging, before moving to the idyllic island of Poros in the Aegean Sea. During the year Head of a Sleeping Fisherman was painted, Lady Norton had, via the British Council and her influential position, arranged two Craxton exhibitions in Athens, thus facilitating a new
audience appreciation to those already established in London, Paris and Brussels.

It was during Craxton’s first year on Poros that he painted his landlady’s son, Petros. A sublime recumbent figure, titled Sleeping Fisherman, provided the subject for some of the artist’s most dazzling imagery over the following three years. Shepherds near Kossos and Sleeping Fisherman
of 1947 and 1948 respectively are both major oils from this moment of Greek exploration, which included trips to Crete, the Cyclades and Dodecanese. The head of the McDowall Craxton, with its sun-kissed skin and gently closed eyes, proved a favoured motif of Craxton’s and one that clearly appealed to the McDowalls, evidenced by Nicolas’s comments alongside the painting in the
Monnow Valley Arts’ catalogue, accompanying their
2015 exhibition:

A very early and happy purchase. I remember thephysical shock of pleasure I experienced on first layingeyes on this picture… Here was a perfect distillation ofneo-romantic spirit.1It was this ‘Neo-Romantic’ terminology that Craxtonhimself refuted; not the whole phrase per se, but the‘Neo’ prefix. ‘You are either “Romantic” in spirit or youare not. You can’t be “Neo-Romantic”. There was never a“Neo-Romantic” group as such…’2

Despite Craxton’s personal feelings, it was a phrase whichpermeated post-war art historical conversation, owing toits significance within the British modernist movement.Dr. Peter Wakelin sums this up perfectly in his catalogueintroduction to the Monnow Valley Arts’ exhibition:During the war years and from then until the shock ofAmerican Abstract Expressionism’s arrival in Britain inthe 1950s, neo-romanticism was a pervasive style forthe age, a lingua franca which artists absorbed as partof their early development.3 

1. Monnow Valley Arts. The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection ofBritish Neo-Romantic Art. ABC Print Ltd: Hereford. p.17 

2. Pallant House Gallery magazine interview for the exhibition, Poets in theLandscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art, Pallant House, Chichester,2007

3. op.cit. p.9

Sale, Christie’s London, 7 June 1991, lot 207
Christopher Hull Gallery, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2018)
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Ian Collins (ed.), John Craxton, Lund Humphries, London, 2011, no. 165, illustrated, p. 136

Tokyo, Tokyo International Biennale, New Image in Painting, 1974, illustrated in the catalogue

From May 1946, when John Craxton first moved to Greece, through to 1967, much of his work drew on its people, nature and landscapes for inspiration. He depicted sailors, fishermen and shepherds, along with taverna life, coastal scenes, local animals (particularly goats) and the bountiful sealife. But a coup in April 1967 resulted in a military junta ruling Greece, after which a fractious and suspicious relationship developed between Craxton and the new regime, with accusations of espionage. The situation did not improve and eventually the artist decided to leave his beloved Greece.

Travelling was on the agenda once again, with an absence from Greece for much of the 1970s. At first Kenya (1970), then Tunisia (1971) and Morocco (1972). By 1973, the year Volcanic Landscape was painted, Craxton found himself on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Ian Collins comments on this time, ‘Craxton warmed to stark Lanzarote, with camels and peasants labouring in a black moonscape where each man-made crater held a single fig tree or vine. He added lava dust to the pigment for a series of literally gritty pictures.’ 1

It is this description which we are presented with in Volcanic Landscape. The lava dust has been liberally and thickly applied to create interesting textures and depth to the picture surface. The single, sparse tree winds its way up through the centre of the composition, above which a prehistoric bird commands the upper third. The goat lower centre, outlined in pink and feeding on the lone tree, reminds us of Craxton’s love affair with Greece.

The whole painting is infused with a dream-like atmosphere as the psychedelic sky with its pink, yellow and green pigments and blazing sun, highlights the ancient volcanic scene below.

1  Ian Collins, John Craxton, Lund Humphries, 2011, p.132

Leicester Galleries, London
Julius Fleischmann Foundation, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (purchased from the above)
Mr & Mrs Nicholas Lott
Private Collection, UK

Ian Collins , John Craxton , Lund Humphries, London, 2011, Cat No 152 (illus p123)

In our May 2018 exhibition John Craxton in Greece – The Unseen Works we showed an earlier version of the same subject, the same young man minus the cigarette, the same pose with his left leg raised on a
grey block, right hand on his hip and his left elbow resting on his left knee. His tee-shirt is dark blue with white stripes and his trousers are grey. It is signed and dated 1959. Craxton spent Christmas of 1959 with his close friend the Greek artist Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas (1906-1994), known as Nikos
Ghika, in an 18th century ancestral mansion built by his great-greatgreat-grandfather above the fishing village of Kaminia on the island of Hydra.

Ghika invited numerous artists, writers and performers to stay for protracted periods, among them Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy) who wrote Mani, his acclaimed travel book there and arranged a studio for John Craxton to use on his visits (where he also designed the book cover). The three men remained the closest of friends and their work and lives were celebrated in the 2018 British Museum exhibition Charmed Lives in Greece.

During the 1959 Hydra visit the builders at Ghika’s house had some unused plaster that Craxton put to good use. He frequently used whatever was at hand and the plaster fitted his curiosity for texture and technique while embarking on a painterly voyage of discovery – in this case building a relief on board by applying the plaster with various tools and then painting the figure in tempera. His love of classical sculpture and ancient reliefs is manifested here in a monumental image of a modern young man.

In 1960 Craxton moved to a ruined Venetian-Ottoman house onthe Cretan harbour of Chania, a thriving port and former islandcapital well-known for its vibrant atmosphere. Below his new homewere the tavernas and bars frequented by off-duty sailors and locallabourers who became the artist’s companions and models in hiswork. This second relief emerged again from left-over plaster duringthe renovation of the Chania home just like the 1959 portrait. In thisversion, the young man has a white tee-shirt and off-white trousersand holds the same pose with the addition of a cigarette depictedwhere the white plaster remained unpainted and the previous greybox has been substituted by a low side-table or stool.Both pictures were exhibited at Craxton’s 1961 exhibition at theLeicester Galleries. This final version was bought by the Julius Fleischmann Foundation, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA where it remained fordecades before being repatriated. 

Gordon Samuel 

Private Collection, USA

Craig Hartley 55; Starr Figura 76

Sarah Howgate 123; Sebastian Smee 1

William Feaver 66; Yale 41

Toby Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, published by Modern Art Press, 2022, No. 80, illustrated p.207

London, National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud: Portraits, 9 Feb – 27 May 2012, illustrated p.197, another impression

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings, 16 Dec 2007 – 10 Mar 2008, illustrated p. 76, another impression

Lucian Freud was one of the most significant portraitists of the last century, acclaimed Internationally. His portraits are both ruthless, coldblooded examinations and yet also intimate and impartial. This seemingly contradictory approach stemmed from seeing himself as “a sort of biologist”, interested in “the insides and undersides of things.” ₁

He refused to work from photographs as he stated, “the aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell.”₂ Sitters had to be patient and prepared to be nocturnal, so inevitably this led to self-portraits. Freud depicted mirror images of himself throughout the breadth of his career and often referred to this process in titles, such as in the etching, Self-Portrait: Reflection. 

This etching is an extraordinary portrait and display of technical command, the artist as in so many portraits, naked, filling the large plate from the chest upwards. Freud stood his copper plates upright on an easel from the mid 1980’s onwards and found he was able to work with greater force and fluidity. He claimed to find etching easier than drawing.

Self-Portrait: Reflection is uncompromising, the irregularities of the surface and lack of balance to his features are laid bare. The artist’s eyes scarcely visible but piercing, self-examining and yet also boring into the viewer.  

Freud stated, “Many people are inclined to look at portraits not for the art in them but to see how they resemble people. This seems to me a profound misunderstanding.” ₃

Frank Auerbach began to unravel this ‘misunderstanding’ in the Tate catalogue that accompanied Freud’s retrospective of 2002:

‘When I think of the work of Lucian Freud, I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter he would come off his tightrope; he has no safety net of manner. Whenever his way of working threatens to become a style, he puts it aside like a blunted pencil and finds a procedure more suited to his needs.I am never aware of the aesthetic paraphernalia. The subject is raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art, not covered in a gravy of ostentatious tone or colour, nor arranged on the plate as a ‘composition.’ The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.’₄

₁ Royal Academy Blog, 22^nd October 2019
₂ Lucian Freud: A Life, David Dawson and Mark Holborn, published by Phaidon, 2019
₃ Freud cited in Cape, J., Freud at Work, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2006, p. 32
₄ William Feaver, Lucian Freud, Tate Publishing, 2002, p.51

Terry Dintenfass, Inc., New York
Private Collection, USA

Osborne Samuel, London

James Fitzsimmons, Elisabeth Frink, Art International, vol. 232, no. 2, May 1979, p. 19 (another example illustrated)
Bryan Robertson, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné, Salisbury, 1984, no. 220, pp. 108, 185 (another example illustrated)
Edward Lucie-Smith, Frink A Portrait, London, 1994, p. 46 (another example illustrated)
Elisabeth Frink: Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat., Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 11 June – 29 August 1994, p. 31 (another example illustrated, p. 14)
Stephen Gardiner, Frink The Official Biography of Elisabeth Frink, London, 1998, p. 187 (another example illustrated, p. 203)
Annette Ratuszniak ed., Elisabeth Frink, Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, London, 2013, no. FCR 248, p. 130 (another example illustrated)

Winchester, Great Courtyard, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture in Winchester, 17 July – 13 September 1981 (another example exhibited)
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture and Drawings, 1952 – 1984, 8 February – 24 March 1985, p. 52 (another example exhibited and illustrated, pp. 17, 25)
Washington D.C., The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings 1950 – 1990, 1990, pp. 8-9, 65 (another example exhibited and illustrated)

Conceived in 1975, Dame Elisabeth Frink’s series of Tribute Heads explore themes of suffering and endurance, inspired by the work of Amnesty International and the stoic resolve of the nameless figures around the world who have been persecuted as a result of their beliefs. The artist began this series shortly after her return to London following a number of years living in France, continuing her exploration into the same forms and subjects that had underpinned her Goggle Heads and Soldiers’ Heads sculptures. For Frink, the head was a conduit through which she could channel an array of emotions, one which allowed her to delve into the internal psychological landscape of her figures. As she explained: ‘Heads have always been very important to me as vehicles for sculpture. A head is infinitely variable. It’s complicated, and it’s extremely emotional. Everyone’s emotions are in their face. It’s not surprising that there are sculptures of massive heads going way back, or that lots of other artists besides myself have found the subject fascinating’ (E. Frink, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Frink: A Portrait, London, 1994, p. 125). Through subtle alterations from figure to figure in this series, Frink captures an insightful glimpse into the full emotional impact these experiences have on the individuals involved.
Pairing the features back to the minimal suggestion of its essential forms, the artist focuses our attention on the figure’s highly nuanced expression, eloquently conveying a careful balance of tension and serenity in their face. In this way, the figure at the heart of the present work retains a poise and dignity, as they defiantly face their torment. Frink, reflecting on this aspect of the Tribute heads, explained: ‘they are the victims, except that they are not crumpled in any sense … they’re not damaged. They’ve remained whole. No, I think they’re survivors really. I look at them as survivors who have gone through to the other side’ (E. Frink, National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives interview with Sarah Kent).

Waddington Galleries, London 
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation
Belgrave Gallery, London
Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above, 2001)
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Alan Bowness, Recent British Paining, 1988, page 60, Illustrated No 22

Galerie Charles Linehard, Zurich, Terry Frost 1963;
North Carolina Museum of Art, Young British Painters, 1964
Bolton Art Gallery 1966-67 (on loan)
Tate Gallery, London, Recent British Painting, 1967, No 22
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Recent British Paintings, 1970
Gillian Jason Gallery, London, Terry Frost, 1988, No11

In 1963 Frost moved with his young family from St Ives to Banbury. While looking at the area, a year earlier, he had discovered Compton Wynwates, a Tudor house belonging to the Marquis of Northampton. Inside he saw a Cromwellian chair upholstered in ‘unforgettable blue’ against the black of the wood which, with the space between its legs, looked like a piece of sculpture. The chapel outside contained flags that had been carried in the battle of Edge Hill. One of them, ‘fragile as a spider’s web’, had black chevrons with blue circles all round. As Frost left, he saw, in the peeling layers of the plaster, a blue full moon on the wall:

These experiences were so moving they have affected my paintings ever since. I came home and painted a grey, mixing my oils in such a way that I could get a black craze, and then I ran that blue through it; it had to be a single wet stroke and absolutely accurate; and there it was. What I had experienced gave a whole new meaning to chevrons for me, and new meanings for circles as well.[1]

These shapes would accrue new significance during Frost’s years in Banbury, when he became fascinated by the town’s preponderance of road signs. Yet while the mid-1960s’ paintings gained a colourful, emphatic energy from such experiences, earlier examples, such as Blue, Black Arrow (1962) have a focused intensity.

The canvas of Blue, Black Arrow is divided into three sectors. A circle and ellipse fill the blue segment, the lower right area is colourfully striped, while the upper grey sector is traversed by a black, blue-tipped, arrow. These elements impel the downward motion of the composition, which is further animated by the pendulous ellipse and thrust of the arrow. Throughout, energy radiates from the multiplication of outlines, in shades of blue, aquamarine, turquoise, red and yellow.

Blue, Black Arrow was one of two paintings by Frost (with Red and Black, 1961) acquired for the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, 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.

[1] Terry Frost, interview with David Lewis (July 1993), quoted in David Lewis, Terry Frost (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 101.

From the Artist directly to:

Redfern Gallery, London

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above, 2001)

Osborne Samuel Gallery

Adrian Heath, at the centre of a small group of British avant-garde artists in the 1950s, was responsible for compiling Nine Abstract Artists (1954): a book including statements by the artists concerned – himself, Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Kenneth and Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore and William Scott – while contextualising their work in the development of abstract art since the 1930s. The publication was preceded by three exhibitions mounted in Heath’s studio at Fitzroy Street, London, where paintings and sculpture were displayed in a stylish, quasi-domestic environment.

Photographs of the first exhibition, in March 1952, show two oval paintings by Kenneth Martin and Victor Pasmore, a format that Heath would adopt for a series made between 1956 and 1959. For Heath, the origin lay in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book, On Growth and Form (1917), which demonstrated the ubiquity of spiral structures in nature. Oval Theme (1) builds outwards from a central red wedge, unfurling through larger slabs of colour towards the edge of the composition. The materiality of the work – incorporating hessian and Polyfilla – endows it with a tough physicality. 

In Nine Abstract Artists, Heath identified the importance of the size and format of the area to be painted, as well as his intention that colours and forms should bear evidence of their transitions, becoming richer through the process. As he wrote,

The thing of interest is the actual life of the work: its growth from a particular white canvas or board.[1]

With Oval Theme (1), the relatively large scale and unusual format directed the evolution of the composition. 

[1] Adrian Heath, ‘Statement’ in Lawrence Alloway: Nine Abstract Artists: their work and theory (London: Alec Tiranti, 1954).

[2] Adrian Heath, letter (1 February 1971), in The Tate Gallery Report 1970–1972 (London: Tate Gallery, 1972).

Estate of the Artist

Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, UK

Catherine Kinley & Marco Livingstone ‘Peter Kinley’, 2010, illustrated page 15, no 11

Born in Austria to a Jewish father and Protestant German mother, Kinley was sent for safety to England in 1938, not seeing his parents again until 1946. He studied at Düsseldorf Academy (1948–9), then St Martin’s School of Art (1949–53), in 1951 receiving special mention in the annual exhibition of ‘Young Contemporaries’. The following February, at the Matthiesen Gallery, Kinley saw the first exhibition in Britain of paintings by Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955). Like so many British painters, Kinley was profoundly affected by de Staël’s work, neatly summarised by Basil Taylor as ‘mosaic-like pictures built from roughly shaped rectangles of pigment applied with an extraordinarily rich and varied impasto’. ₁ Just two years later, Gimpel Fils – one of London’s most prestigious venues for contemporary art – gave Kinley, still in his twenties, his first solo exhibition. ²

The New Year had barely begun, in 1957, when ‘Statements’ opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Aiming both to review the condition of British abstract art and to demonstrate the impact of the previous year’s ‘Modern Art in the United States’, at the Tate, the result was an almost defiant diversity. Twenty-one artists submitted a single work with a statement. Alan Davie wrote on Zen Buddhism, Kenneth and Mary Martin on the significance of mathematics; Barbara Hepworth wrote a poem. Kinley’s work, praised as among the best, was ‘luxuriously painted … containing a dilatorily conceived nude which had less “presence” than the paint’. ₃ His statement, meanwhile, assessed and dismissed the various stylistic options available: Action Painting as philosophically inadequate, and constructivist art as ‘only of academic interest’. ₄

Landscape (1957) shows Kinley at precisely this moment, retaining his commitment to the spirit of de Staël, and to art’s ‘subject’, however freely considered. He had submitted a seascape to the Contemporary Arts Society’s 1956 themed exhibition ‘The Seasons’, and would continue to explore the implications of placing a figure within an interior setting. In Landscape (1957), he depicts a coastal subject broadly in planes of blue-grey, pale gold, gunmetal and green. The structure and texture of the lowest elements – water, rock, hillside – are related with tactile exigency, the occasional drip drawing attention to their material surface. It is only with the sky that Kinley loosens his control of structure, paralleling the sweep of the landscape with strokes that materialise air’s movement and the glint, behind cloud, of light.

In the Arts Council’s collection is an earlier Seascape (1954), comparable in scale, and similarly juxtaposing blocks of blue, black and gold, but which suggests a more rigid approach to landscape. The slabs of colour are edged by black or white, thus hemming and confining their intensity. By contrast, Landscape (1957) has an exhilarating immediacy: undeniably structured, it uses paint to express the mass of landscape, the weight of the sea and lightness of air.

₁ Basil Taylor, ‘Limited Gift’, The Spectator, Vol. 196, Issue 6672 (11 May 1956), p. 655.

²  ‘Paintings by Peter Kinley; Recent Paintings by Sandra Blow’, Gimpel Fils, London (May 1954).

₃ Robert Melville, ‘Exhibitions’, The Architectural Review, Vol. 121, No. 723 (April 1957), p. 269.

₄ Kinley, quoted in Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, The Paul Mellow Centre for Studies in British Art, 1998), p. 59.

Gimpels Fils, London

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

The years 1957 to 1959 formed a key period in Peter Lanyon’s artistic development. It was marked by a pronounced shift, in which the relatively concise forms of moorland and coastline found in his earlier work were replaced by an altogether more allusive, gestural approach. His focus now turned to the atmospheric effects of the weather, to the constantly changing movements of air currents, winds, tides, and rain. With it there came a concomitant change in palette, in which blues, greys, and whites tended to predominate. (See, for example, the painting Low Tide (1959), in the British Council collection).

The initial catalyst for this change of direction was the artist’s visit to the exhibition Modern Art in the United States at the Tate Gallery early in 1956, where for the first time he encountered paintings by the Abstract Expressionists Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Hartigan, Motherwell, Still and Kline. A year later, in January 1957, he made his first visit to New York, where he held his inaugural show at the Catherine Viviano Gallery. There he was introduced to some of the painters whose work had so impressed him in London; amongst them, Rothko and Motherwell were to become personal friends. Another key event was Lanyon’s visit to the Pollock retrospective, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in November and December 1958. What he took from the Abstract Expressionists, and certainly from Pollock, was a liberation from pictorial constraints: the idea of the canvas as a continuous field, untrammelled by the conventions of spatial and linear perspectives. The result was in a more instinctive fluidity, of both composition and application. Concurrent with this exposure to American abstraction was Lanyon’s realisation of his place within the tradition of English landscape painting; an awareness that his weather paintings formed part of a lineage in which Constable and Turner were antecedents.

Lanyon was deeply attuned to elemental nature, exhilarated by its drama, and by its oblivious indifference to human concerns. He deliberately sought imbalance and disorientation, standing on his head in order to look at the landscape whilst upside down, or lying precariously at the edge of a clifftop; strategies that provided a heightened sensory engagement with both the physical and the intangible. A further intensification, one that was decisive in the direction of Lanyon’s painting, resulted from his experience of flight, initiated when he joined a gliding club in June 1959. The resultant impact on his work was in a more expansive, lighter application, less stolidly earthbound than in much of his previous work.

Made in September 1959, Grey Shore dates from this pivotal period in Lanyon’s development. A work of barely contained energy, its mixtures and dilutions of chalky white gouache and Indian ink are applied in sweeps and scurries, the brush constantly changing direction as it moves across the paper surface. With its black column flanking the entire left-hand edge of the sheet, Grey Shore reads as a coastal storm on a darkening night, wind whipped to gale force in a primeval turbulence of air and water. In counterpoint to the bounding acrobatics of its curves and meanders sit small spatial recessions, pockets of relative calm in which fragments of white paper remain visible. At once oceanic and aerial, here the dramatic elemental conflict can be seen to symbolise the artist’s own bodily and existential engagement with the natural world, a relationship forever central to his artistic identity and purpose.

Dr Ian Massey

The Goodman Gallery, South Africa 

Private Collection, London (acquired from the above in 1981) 

Thence by descent

Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture: 1980-86, Vol. 6, London, 1988, no. 788, another cast illustrated, p. 36-37

Collegeville, Pennsylvania, Ursinus College, Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Henry Moore Relationships, Drawings, Prints & Sculpture from the Muriel and Philip Berman Collection, 1993-1994 (another cast).
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henry Moore, A Centennial Salute, An Exhibition in Celebration of Philip I. Berman, July-November 1998, no. 18 (illustrated, p. 30) (another cast).

A cast from the edition is owned by the Henry Moore Foundation.

In John Hedgecoe’s seminal book on the artist, Moore states, “from the very beginning the reclining figure has been my main theme.’₁  This subject is central to Moore’s creativity throughout his career. In his own words, “the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially… A reclining figure can recline on any surface. It is free and stable at the same time. It fits in with my belief that sculpture should be permanent, should last for eternity.” ₂

Reclining Nude: Crossed Feet is an iconic sculpture. The initial impetus for the posture of the woman was inspired by the Chacmool figures which the artist first saw at the British Museum in the 1920s; the arms perpendicular to the ground, the knees raised and the twisting contours of the body. However in Moore’s Reclining Figures, the masculine rain god of the Chacmool has been, in William Packer’s words,  ‘transformed into an image more general, unhieratic and benign, as a simple function of the softer, rounded forms that came with the change of sex, and the humanising informality of the relaxed and turning body.’ ₃

The crossed feet and hands are abbreviations of the limbs, an extension of the contradictory, relaxed  torsion in the body. The contours of the sculpture evoke, as Moore noted, the disparate and enigmatic contours of the landscape, opening up voids beneath the shoulders and under the arms, echoed in the arching of the legs.  The sculpture can thus be seen in the round, each angle stimulates a new and perhaps surprising interpretation.

₁ John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, published by Nelson, New York, 1968, p. 151

₂ Henry Moore cited in J.D. Morse, ‘Henry Moore Comes to America’, Magazine of Art, vol.40, no.3, March 1947, pp.97–101, reprinted in Philip James (ed.), Henry Moore on Sculpture, London 1966, p.264.

₃ Celebrating Moore, selected by David Mitchinson, published by Lund Humphries, 1998, p.125, extract written by William Packer

The Artist
Curt Valentin, Buchholz Gallery, New York 
Mrs. Vera List, philanthropist and supporter of contemporary art, Greenwich, Connecticut
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel Ltd 

Henry Moore, Volume Two: Sculpture and Drawings Since 1948, (London: Lund Humphries, 1955)

Robert Melville, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970) 

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Drawings, Volume 3, 1940-49; (London and Much Hadham: Lund Humphries, 2001, p.288, ref AG48.43; HMF 2515

New York, New York, Buchholz Gallery, Henry Moore, March 6-31, 1951, illustrated cat no. 66 (in this catalogue the drawing is incorrectly dated 1949)

This work is registered in the Henry Moore Foundation archives as HMF 2515 and research file number 2020.38. 

Rocking Chairs was purchased at Buchholz Gallery in 1951. The drawing was executed in 1948, four years before the bronze, Mother and Child on Ladderback Rocking Chair. In this drawing, Moore depicts five figure groups on rocking bases, with the
mother figure holding the child in various positions. Each group is three-dimensional, indicating that Moore conceived of the figure group as a sculpture from the beginning.

Moore’s series of sculptural rocking chairs was begun in 1950, when his daughter Mary, a much-loved and long-awaited child, was four years old. Although Moore had explored the theme of the mother and child since the 1920s, these new works showed a joy and tenderness born of experience. Will Grohman described them as ‘enchanting impromptus, the offspring of a lighter muse.’ 1 Their creation offers a glimpse both into Moore’s domestic life and the extent to which his personal and creative identity intertwined. Just as he experimented with how to balance the sculptures, so that they rocked perfectly, he would encourage Mary to think practically through play. For her eighth birthday party he produced a set of scales and invented a game to guess the weight of each guest. Moore’s estimates, perhaps unsurprisingly for a sculptor, proved accurate to within a few pounds. 2

Moore’s drawings provide a different insight. In the Rocking Chair Notebook (1947–8) he experimented with radically varied designs for the chair as well as the figures seated within them. The drawing, Rocking Chairs (1948), shows Moore adjusting the postures of mother and child so that each suggests an altered dynamic: from a protective embrace, to the joyous wriggling of the child held aloft, to an independent stepping forward, away from the mother’s arms. While mass is weighed through the technique Moore described as ‘sectional drawing’, dividing surfaces into jigsaw grids to highlight curves and planes, relatively little attention is paid to the chairs’ potential for movement: certain of the rockers seem implausibly flat. Instead, Moore lavishes his imagination on the figures. Grohmann noted how such variation developed across the span of the rocking chair series, although his words apply equally to this sheet of drawings: ‘heads became archaic knots, the bodies clothed skeletons, but the expression remains elated.’ 3

Rocking Chairs was bought in 1951 by the American philanthropist and collector, Vera List (1908–2002), from the Buchholz Gallery in New York. List, who a year later bought Moore’s Mother and Child on Ladderback Rocking Chair (1952), was an early and dedicated patron. In 1961 she and her husband sponsored the commission of Moore’s large-scale Reclining Figure (1963–5), in bronze, for New York’s Lincoln Center.

1.    Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, new enlarged edition (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1960), p. 142.

2.       Mary Moore, in Elizabeth Day, ‘The Moore Legacy’, The Observer (27 July 2008).

3.       Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, p. 143

Christie’s, London 1977

Private collection, purchased from above 

Scolar Fine Art, London

Private collection, UK (purchased from the above 2001)

Osborne Samuel, London

Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Winifred Nicholson,
November 21st – December 16th 1972, cat. no. 3

Looking towards Bewcastle Fells in Cumberland, Winifred Nicholson’s painting draws no boundary between still life and landscape. Rather, the ridged or striped china seems placed on a stone ledge, its patterning continuing in shadows beneath it and stretching as a ribbon – whether river or drystone wall – into the distance.

Winifred had felt a strong attachment to Cumberland since the 1920s. In 1924 she moved with her husband, Ben Nicholson, to Banks Head, an old farmhouse on the Roman Wall. This is where she would return at the outbreak of war, after her marriage had collapsed and after spending time with her young children in Paris. The theme of a still life with flowers, whether table-top or framed by a window, was the most significant, distinctive and enduring of Nicholson’s career. As she recalled, ‘I have tried to paint many things in many different ways, but my paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower.’[1] The flowers in Bewcastle, possibly white nemophila and yellow ranunculus, are painted joyously and without fussiness.

Bewcastle unites the elements of its composition not only through form, but through colour. Yellow flowers and rimmed china link to the ochre landscape, grey drawing the eye from the foreground to the hills and skittering clouds. Nicholson’s friend, the poet Kathleen Raine, paid tribute to her skill in conveying the essence of this landscape, writing,

  Mountains she loved, but above all skies; the grey luminosity of the Cumbrian skies she depicted with virtuosity in her handling of the mingling of light with cloud and mist.[2]

[1] Winifred Nicholson, ‘The Flower’s Response’, in Andrew Nicholson (ed.), Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 216.

[2] Kathleen Raine, ‘The Unregarded Happy Texture of Life’ (1984), reproduced in Unknown Colour, p. 199.

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 Earl Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, 5th Earl Amherst
Gift from the above in 1985 to the current owner

Dark Fir, Shoreham (1952) forms a compelling companion piece to the larger-scale Abstract Landscape (Dark Fir Shoreham II Morning), painted in the same year and now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Both feature a central fir tree, simplified to a sequence of upturned branches, amid a landscape of trees and barns. One is night, the other day, while the smaller painting is more loosely, more immediately, executed.

Placed side by side, it is hard to resist envisaging the pair in terms of narrative. The central tree in Dark Fir, Shoreham, ragged against the sky, has the potency of a crucifixion: indeed, to its left, on a hill or barn apex, can be seen a small cross. By contrast, the tree in Shoreham II Morning, solid and symmetrical, cradles a weak sun above its branches. Crucifixion and resurrection? Both works are striking, yet it is the landscape of Dark Fir – with its cluster of trees, encircled as witnesses – which proves the more affecting.

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

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 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.

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).

Redfern Gallery, London 

Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London 

Christie’s London, 1991

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above) 

Osborne Samuel, London

In 1964 Vaughan bought a row of derelict cottages in the heart of the Essex countryside and set about renovating them. He created a small studio upstairs where he worked on small-scale oil paintings and gouaches at the weekends and during the summer months. Having nowhere to swim, he cleared a patch of land at end of the garden and excavated a waterhole. Railway sleepers interspersed with plants were dug into a shallow embankment to create a picturesque setting. The pool was more than a mere source of recreation. The theme of bathers had been a central subject in Vaughan’s work since the mid 1940s and now he began to paint friends reclining and drying themselves at the water’s edge in his garden. Two Bathers by a Pool depicts such a scene. Fellow artists were invited to visit Harrow Hill cottage at weekends. Patrick Procktor was a regular guest from 1966 onwards as was Mario Dubsky, one of Vaughan’s most talented pupils at the Slade. He recalled days spent making drawings of each other by the pool and Vaughan being at his most relaxed:

‘Keith and Patrick and I had some great fun. We held summer parties in the garden, swimming naked of course, and drank freezing drinks in between skinny dips in the pool. Mrs. Vaughan sometimes sat knitting in her deckchair, at the other end [of the garden], keeping a watchful eye on us. God knows what she thought of me and Patrick larking around after several gins. But we also had some serious discussions well into the night, about painting and literature. Keith would tell me what I should be reading. Patrick and Keith used to talk endlessly about the ways they could turn their personal experiences of life into art.’1

Procktor also brought with him the filmmaker Derek Jarman who, apparently, loved nothing better than to strip down and dive off the railway sleepers into the pool. The BAFTA-winning documentary maker Peter Adam visited along with his illustrious friends, including David Hockney, the grand master of the pool-painting genre. He recalled them all swimming and wallowing together in Vaughan’s garden pond – a far cry from the glamorous Californian pools he was used to:

‘David was living in Los Angeles but on his annual visit to his family in Bradford, (his mother still thought that it was the sun that bleached his hair!), he always took care to visit Keith. Once we drove in his new Morris Minor convertible to Essex. We splashed about in his little natural pool…All that amused Keith greatly.’2

Gerard Hastings

1. Mario dubsky, from gerard hastings, ‘paradise found and lost: keith vaughan inessex’, pagham press, 2016 

2. Peter adam, from ‘gerard hastings, keith vaughan: the photographs’,pagham press, 2013

The Artist’s Estate

Jonathan Clarke Fine Art, London

Private Collection, UK

Osborne Samuel, London

Clarke, Jonathan, Ex Studio (exh. cat), p. 122-23

In 1928, during a brief break from his training to become a doctor, John Wells studied painting in Newlyn with Stanhope Forbes. He met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, and while working as a doctor in the Scilly Isles, during the 1930s, maintained his friendship through visits to St Ives. By the end of the war he had saved sufficient money to abandon his career as a doctor and to buy a studio once used by Forbes in Newlyn. The landscape of Cornwall would form a lasting influence on his work.

In the paintings and constructions Wells made from the early 1940s onwards, Patrick Heron detected a sympathy with Gabo, Hepworth, Arp, Nicholson, Klee and Miró. Yet he also identified a ‘sheer taste so exquisite and so personal as to obliterate any suggestion of undue derivativeness’.1 Wells’ work might allude to the curved forms of boats, to birds or to the horizon, but these references were rendered in terms of geometry – as ellipses, squares and triangles upon textured grounds.

A first solo exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in 1960 proved an unqualified success, selling every work on display. From a second exhibition in 1964, in which Constructed Relief (1963) was included, the only work sold was Painting (1962): a vertical grid-based composition purchased by the Tate. It was an experience that paralysed him, as he wrote soon afterwards to Nicholson, leaving him with ‘permanent depression.’ 2

James Burr’s review of the Waddington exhibition stressed the works’ refinement to such an extent as to imply criticism. Subverting Heron’s decade-old admiration of ‘sheer taste’ to suggest something safe and genial, he described

“a cool, restrained and precise style which echoes the geometric arrangements of Ben Nicholson, except that decorative elegance takes precedence over formal relations, so that one is aware of a faultless display of visual good manners. Clean rectangles with uninterrupted surfaces of tastefully controlled clear colour politely greet the eye in pleasing sequences that leave one agreeably reassured.”3

Looking afresh, there is scant evidence of the decorative, however, Constructed Relief  is an austerely conceived work in painted wood, polystyrene and perspex, composed rigidly of squares, planes and rectangles. It balances perfectly, yet without the complete symmetry that might pall. Was there a motivation beyond its pure form? Wells’ account of creating Painting (1962) provides an interesting parallel. As he worked on it, in the early hours, a storm raged: the roof began to lift and water collected in a bucket nearby. Wells completed the painting’s composition by adding a vertical white line. Only later did he perceive this as representing the wind, shrieking outside.4

1.    Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 204.

2.       John Spurling, ‘Eminent Edwardian’ [review of ‘John Wells: The Fragile Cell’ at Tate St Ives], The Spectator (1 August 1998), p. 42.

3.       James Burr, ‘Round the London Galleries’, Apollo (September 1964), p. 240.

4.       John Wells (October 1964), in Tate Gallery Report 1964–5 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1965), p. 57.