John Swarbrooke Fine Art is delighted to return to Cromwell Place to present an exhibition dedicated to Modern British landscapes.
Between the First and Second World Wars there was a flourishing of landscape painting in Britain. As Jim Ede wrote of this resurgent interest in landscape, it had ‘the refreshing quality of wind after a sultry day’.
Shared Horizons shows how painting in the period reflected the heightened imagination and collaborative efforts of artists in the inter-war years.
All pricing includes framing but excludes shipping and artist resale right.
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Augustus JOHN OM, RA (1878-1961) was a Welsh portraitist, landscape painter, draughtsman, lithographer and etcher, and is now considered one of the most important artists of the 20th Century. He is known primarily for his penetrating portraits of distinguished contemporaries and was a significant exponent of Post-Impressionism in England, pioneering the technique of oil sketching directly onto bare canvas.
The Little Railway, Martigues, 1928
signed lower left John
oil on canvas
54 x 73 cm. (21 1/4 x 28 1/2 in.)
£35,000 + Artist Resale Right
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Provenance:
Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London (stock no. C3526).
Adams Gallery, London.
Anon. sale; Christie's, London, 8 June 1990, lot 247.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale; Christie's, London, 9 June 2000, lot 90.
Private Collection, London.Literature:
M. Chamot, D. Farr and M. Butlin, Tate Gallery Catalogues: The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, vol. I, London, 1964, p. 327.Exhibited:
London, Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., Augustus John, April-May 1929, no. 7 or 23.
(Possibly) London, Agnew's, Contemporary British Artists, Nov.-Dec. 1930, no. 18.
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Diploma Gallery, Exhibition of works by Augustus John O.M., R.A., 1954, no. 383 (lent by Adams Gallery)
Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Augustus John, O.M., R.A., 1956, no. 38 (lent by Cyril Adams).
The present work depicts the environs of Martigues, a little town in Provence situated half-way between Arles and Marseilles. John tells us that Provence ‘had been for years the goal of my dreams’ and Martigues was, of all the towns there, the one for which he had most affection. John travelled round Provence in search of the ideal place. As he wrote:‘Leaving Arles for Marseilles, the railway skirts the northern shores of the Etang de Berre. Looking south from the train I caught a glimpse in the distance of spires and buildings which seemed to belong to a town sitting in the water. With a feeling that I was going to find what I was seeking, an anchorage at last, I returned from Marseilles, and, changing at Pas des Lanciers, took the little railway which leads to Martigues.’
(Augustus John, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography, 1952, p.106).Augustus bought the Villa Ste Anne at Martigues and over the years painted a series of landscape paintings on small wooden panels which are today among his most sought after works. The Little Railway and another smaller version held by Tate Britain, were painted in 1928, the year the family left Martigues.
Sir Matthew SMITH CBE (1879 - 1959) was born in 1879 in Halifax, West Yorkshire. He studied design at the Manchester School of Art from 1901 to 1905[and painting at the Slade School of Art in London from 1905 to 1907. In 1908 Smith went to Pont-Aven in Brittany, France, and in 1911 he studied in Paris under Henri Matisse. This influence of the Fauve movement can be seen in his early works.
Smith stayed in France until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, which prevented him from returning to England, but was able later to get to Cornwall. He trained for the army in Hertfordshire in 1916. He was made temporary second lieutenant for the Labour Company. He was wounded in September 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele. After having been hospitalised, he returned to active duty in 1918, was made lieutenant, and was posted at the Abbeville prisoner-of-war camp. His experiences in the First World War would continue to affect the artist psychologically in the proceeding years.
Landscape near Lyons, c. 1922
signed with initials lower right MS
oil on canvas
38.1 x 45.7 cm. (15 x 18 in.)
£65,000 + Artist Resale Right
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Provenance:
Mr Richard Smart, acquired from Arthur Tooth & Sons, 1938 (inventory no. C. 9281).
David Gibbs (Director of Arthur Tooth & Sons during the 1950s.
Private Collection, Connecticut by descent from the above; and thence by descent to
Private Collection, Connecticut.Literature:
A Memorial Exhibition of works by Sir Matthew Smith, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1960, p. 9, no. 65 (dated ‘1922’).
Matthew Smith 1879-1959. A Loan Exhibition, exh. cat., Arthur Tooth & Sons & Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London, n.p., no. 59 (dated ‘1921-22’).
Matthew Smith, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, Barbican Art Gallery, p. 70, no. 30 (dated ‘1922’).
J. Gledhill, Matthew Smith: Catalogue Raisonée of the oil paintings, London, 2009, no. 104 (not illus.)Exhibited:
London, Royal Academy of Arts, A Memorial Exhibition of works by Sir Matthew Smith, 1960, no. 65.
London, Arthur Tooth & Sons & Roland, Browse and Delbanco, Matthew Smith 1879-1959. A Loan Exhibition, 27 April - 27 May 1976, no. 59.
London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Barbican Art Gallery, Matthew Smith, 15 Sept. - 30 Oct. 1983, no. 30.
Landscape near Lyons bridges two significant periods in Matthew Smith’s oeuvre: the first, his celebrated Cornish landscapes and the second his paintings of the Southern French countryside. As John Russell has written: ‘Matthew Smith loved France, lived in it for a great part of his life, did his best work there...to see him walk down a French street was an education in awareness’ (quoted in Matthew Smith, exh. cat., Barbican Art Gallery, op. cit., p. 29). In the year in which this landscape was painted Smith had sought psychiatric treatment first at a clinic in Lausanne and then from his therapist in Lyons. For the artist painting was a ‘release’ from his nervous condition, caused by his experiences in the First World War as well as his turbulence in his romantic life.As Malcolm Yorke writes, 1922 was a significant turning point for the artist: ‘Smith, now living temporarily In Lyons to be near his therapist, began to paint flowers and landscapes again in colours no longer so bruised and lowering, perhaps because his anguish was easing...now the rigid underpinning of structure in the Cornwall pictures had been loosed...grabbing the essence was all’ (M. Yorke, Matthew Smith: His Life and Reputation, London, 1997, p. 116).
Landscape near Lyons displays what Yorke describes as the ‘hail of juicy rhythmic brushstrokes reminiscent of the late works of the mentally disturbed Van Gogh’. The mastery of colour in this painting reflects the bold palette of Smith’s Cornish works but also looks forward to the artist’s focus in the 1930s on the landscapes of Southern France, from Arles to Aix-en-Provence. Bright reds, yellows and oranges make up the path, applied in broad brushstrokes, whilst the trees and sky are rendered in fluid dashes of green and blue. Smith here captures a fleeting moment in the heat of a summer’s day.
For Francis Bacon, an admirer of Smith’s work, the artist was ‘one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting – that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable. Painting in this sense tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint...every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image’ (Francis Bacon, 1953, quoted in Matthew Smith, exh. cat., Barbican Art Gallery, 1983, op. cit., p. 42).
Sophie Royde-Smith has written of the present work: ‘In one of the landscapes that he painted near Lyons, where he spent some time in Cornwall, he used the symbol of the road that divides and leads nowhere to express his irresolution and despair, and the result is overwhelmingly reminiscent of Van Gogh’s ‘wheatfield’ of July 1890’ (Sophie Royde-Smith, The Early Paintings of Matthew Smith, PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 1981).
His first one-person show was at Tooth’s Gallery, London, in 1926. He had shows at London Group, the Carnegie International Exhibition, Lefevre Gallery, and Mayor Gallery. His works were bought by Roger Fry and the Tate Gallery. His work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1938 and 1950. In 1949 he was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE). He was knighted in 1954.
Ben NICHOLSON OM (1894-1982) was a key twentieth-century British artist and early proponent of Modernism.
Nicholson was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire, and was the son of the artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He studied at the Slade School of Art, 1910-11. He spent 1912 to 1914 in France and Italy, and was in the United States in 1917-18. He married the artist Winifred Roberts in 1920. Over the next three years they spent winters in Lugano, Switzerland, then divided their time between London and Cumberland.
In 1931, Nicholson's relationship with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth resulted in the breakdown of his marriage to Winifred. He and Hepworth married in 1938 and divorced in 1951. Nicholson lived in London from 1932 to 1939, making several trips to Paris in 1932-3, visiting the studios of Picasso, Braque, Arp, Brancusi and Mondrian. From 1939 to 1958 he lived and worked in Cornwall, before moving to Switzerland. He returned to London in 1974.
Sketch for Walton Wood Cottage, Cumberland, 1928
inscribed and dated verso Cumberland 1928;
bears inscription on the backboard My father, Ben Nicholson, made this drawing of Walton Wood Cottage, near Brampton in Cumberland, where his sister Nancy was living/Jake Nicholson
pencil on paper
33 x 42 cm. (13 x 16 1/5 in.)
£18,500 + Artist Resale Right
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Provenance:
Private Collection.
Anon. sale; Christie’s, South Kensington, 16 Oct. 2003, lot 665. Anon. sale; Christie’s, South Kensington, 14 Oct. 2004, lot 107. Private Collection, acquired at the above sale.
Their sale; Sotheby’s, London, 14 June 2016, lot 139.
Anon. sale; Bonham’s, 10 July 2018, lot 96.
Jenna Burlingham Gallery, Newbury.
Private Collection, London.
This work shows a cottage at Walton Wood near Bankshead in Cumbria. The wild and isolated landscape of Cumbria had provided Ben and Winifred Nicholson with constant inspiration since their purchase of Bankshead, a stone farmhouse in Cumberland in 1923. It afforded them the opportunity to withdraw from London life and respond to their surroundings in a free and untutored approach.It was during this period that Nicholson’s work was particularly influenced by his wife Winifred and also Christopher Wood, with whom the Nicholsons visited Cornwall and Cumbria in 1928. Nicholson painted two oils in the same year of the same subject. The first of which is in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, previously the collection of Helen Sutherland.
Christopher ‘Kit’ WOOD (1901-30) was born in Liverpool. He was encouraged to be a painter by Augustus John whom he met at Liverpool University. He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and came into contact with the Parisian avant-garde between 1921 and 1924, meeting Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Serge Diaghilev. In 1926 Wood created designs for Romeo and Juliet for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, although they were never used. Ben and Winifred Nicholsons’ dedication to his work had a great influence and they exhibited together at the Beaux Arts Gallery in April-May 1927. His finest works are considered to be his landscapes painted in Brittany in the final year of his life. During his Parisian years Wood was introduced to opium, first by Tony Gandarillas, a Chilean diplomat. He became addicted to it and was under the drug’s influence when he was killed by a train at Salisbury station, at the age of 29.
Winter Landscape, 1928
pencil on paper
25.7cm x 34.2cm (10 1/8in x 13 1/2 in.)
£12,500
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Provenance:
The Fine Art Society, London, 1995.
Anon. sale; Christie’s, London, 9 June 2006, lot 91.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale; Sotheby’s, London, 28 Sept. 2016, lot 52.
Private Collection, London.
Exhibited:
The Fine Art Society, London, Christopher Wood, May - June 1995.Literature: R. Ingleby, 'Christopher Wood, An English Painter' in Modern Painters, Summer 1995, pp. 94-96 (illus.)
In 1928 Wood stayed with Ben and Winifred Nicholson in Bankshead, their renovated but still-spartan farmhouse in Cumbria; later that year he joined them again in St Ives, where they met Alfred Wallis. ‘He arrived like a meteor,’ Winifred recollected. They all painted furiously, sharing ideas and inspiring one another. But, for Wood, one of the important ingredients in this association was the Nicholsons’ way of life. ‘The Bankshead life’, he declared afterwards, ‘is the painter’s life.’ Winter Landscape was most probably drawn during this important stay in Cumbria, and bears close comparison to Ben Nicholson’s pictures of Walton Wood cottage.
Marjorie Frances BRUFORD, known as Midge BRUFORD (1902 – 1958) was born in Eastbourne, but was educated at Badminton House girls’ school in Bristol where she became friendly with Mornie Birch, daughter of the artist S.J. ’Lamorna’ Birch. It was probably this friendship which first brought her to Cornwall. She started her artistic training at Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes’ School of Painting, supplemented by informal tuition from Birch. She later studied at Harold Harvey and Ernest Procter’s painting school, and exhibited alongside Harvey on several occasions.
Apart from a period of study in Paris, Midge Bruford remained in west Cornwall, finally settling in Paul village, not far from Newlyn. She exhibited at the Royal Academy thirty-two times between 1924 and 1955, and also showed work at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; New English Art Club, and Goupil Gallery, London, as well as at Newlyn Art Gallery.
As well as being an artist, she also modelled for other painters, including Dod Procter who painted her several times (here pictured is a portrait of Midge by Procter).
Cottages Above Mousehole, 1933
signed and dated lower right m. Bruford 1933;
inscription to verso Flower Fields, Cornwall - June 1933. To Auntie Ethel and Harold, from Midge. Christmas 1933.
oil on panel
35 x 45 cm. (13.8 4/5 x 17 7/10 in.)
£11,500 + Artist Resale Right
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Provenance:
Ethel Bruford (the artist’s aunt).Midge Bruford was born in Eastbourne, but was educated at Badminton House girls’ school in Bristol where she became friendly with Mornie Birch, daughter of the artist S.J. ’Lamorna’ Birch. It was probably this friendship which first brought her to Cornwall. She started her artistic training at Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes’ School of Painting, supplemented by informal tuition from Birch. She later studied at Harold Harvey and Ernest Procter’s painting school, and exhibited alongside Harvey on several occasions.
Apart from a period of study in Paris, Midge Bruford remained in west Cornwall, finally settling in Paul village, not far from Newlyn. She exhibited at the Royal Academy thirty-two times between 1924 and 1955, and also showed work at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; New English Art Club, and Goupil Gallery, London, as well as at Newlyn Art Gallery. As well as being an artist, she also modelled for other painters, including Dod Procter who painted her several times.
With a sensitive palette of greens, yellows and pinks, the present work depicts the cottages and flower fields above the Cornish harbour town of Mousehole in the height of summer. The painting was gifted to the artist’s aunt, Ethel Bruford, in the Christmas of 1933.
Lucy HARWOOD (1893 – 1972)
Bad Homburg
signed LUCY HARWOOD and inscribed with title verso
oil on canvas
61 x 51 cm. (24 x 20 in.)
framed: 80.5 x 70 cm. (31 2/3 x 27 3/5 in.)
Bad Homburg was painted during one of Lucy Harwood’s frequent trips to the continent, the intricately impastoed surface and bold palette revealing the influence of her mentor, Cedric Morris.
Lucy Harwood was born in 1893 at Belstead Park near Ipswich. As a teenage girl Lucy had shown outstanding musical ability and planned to become a professional pianist but a failed operation paralysed her right side, obliging her to abandon her musical ambitions. After studying Fine Art she attended classes at the Slade, showed a talent for drawing and after the death of her mother in 1938, moved to Octagon House, Dedham, becoming, at the age of 45, one of the first students at the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting set up by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. In later life Harwood’s spontaneous style and sense of colour won her approval from Cedric Morris, Augustus John and Matthew Smith.
When in 1940 the School accidentally burned down and moved to The Pound in Higham and later to Benton End Lucy bought a house in the nearby village of Upper Layham where she lived until her death. As Maggi Hambling, a former student, has said: ‘people maintained a respectful distance both from her paint-spattered car and the lethal port wine she served to visitors.’
£12,500 + Artist Resale Right
Paul NASH (1889-1946) was a British surrealist landscape painter and war artist, also working as a photographer, writer and designer of applied arts. The older brother of fellow artist John Nash, he was one of the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played an important role in the development of Modernism in British art.
Born in London, Nash grew up in Buckinghamshire where he developed a love of the landscape. He studied at the Slade School of Art and found his inspiration in landscapes with elements of ancient history. The artworks he produced during World War I are among the most iconic images of the conflict. During his career, he also designed stage sets, illustrated books and even designed fabric.
The Blue Pool, 1938
signed and inscribed lower right Paul Nash/Blue Pool no. 3
watercolour on paper
39 x 57 cm. (15 x 22 in.)
£60,000
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Provenance:
(Possibly) Leicester Galleries, London.
Edward Lysaght, acquired in 1938. Anon. sale; Sothebys, London, 6 April 1960, lot 20. (Possibly) Leslie Banks. David Gibbs & Co., London.
Lady Black.
Her sale; Christie's, 12 July 1974, lot 289.
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London.
Sir Nicholas Goodison, acquired from the above in June 2004.Literature:
M. Eates, Paul Nash: The Master of the Image, London, 1973, p. 129.
A. Causey, Paul Nash, Oxford, 1980, p. 438, no. 895.Exhibited:
London, Redfern Gallery, March 1938, (possibly) no. 10.
London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Recent Works by Paul Nash, 1938, (possibly) no. 25.
London, National Gallery, Six Watercolour Painters of Today, 1941, (possibly) no. 36.
London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, From Sickert to Sutherland: A Selection of Modern British Drawings 1910-60, June-July 2004, no. 59.The subject of this watercolour is the Blue Pool, situated near Wareham, Dorset. In September 1937 Nash was a guest of Tom and Gillian Barnard at Furzebrook House. The Blue Pool had originally been dug in the mid-19th century but was already disused when Augustus John and his friends came to paint there in 1910. The pool’s main attraction was its turquoise water, which was caused by the diffraction of light from minute clay particles in the lake. After his September 1937 visit to Furzebrook House, Nash wrote to a mutual friend, Cecily Grey: ‘I made a drawing of (the Blue Pool) and we are planning to produce a sort of guide to the pool.’ As well as making drawings, Nash took several photographs of the Pool.
John NASH CBE, RA (1897-1977) was a landscape and still life painter in oil and watercolour, a wood engraver and illustrator. After some encouragement from his younger brother, Paul Nash, he turned to watercolour landscapes and comic drawings having first worked as a journalist for a local newspaper. Both he and his brother served in WW1 and WWII as official war artists. Nash was a founding member of the London group. His work is held in the National Gallery, The Tate, The V&A and numerous other public collections in England. Nash became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1940 and a full member in 1951. He became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1964. His retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1967 was the first for a living painter.
The Farm, Isle of Skye
signed and dated lower left John Nash / Oct. 1973
watercolour and pencil on paper, with pencil sketch verso
22 x 28 cm. (8 2/3 x 11 in.)
£6,500 + Artist Resale Right
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Provenance:
Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester.
Private Collection, London.
Nash’s love and understanding of the countryside inspired him to travel the length and breadth of Britain in search of subjects. As Eric Newton wrote: ‘If I wanted a foreigner to understand the mood of a typical English landscape, I would show him Nash’s best watercolours’.Nash had been visiting the Isle of Skye, the largest of the Scottish Hebrides, since the early 1950s. In the present work Nash depicts a farmstead with a sensitive handling of line and watercolour wash, coupled with perspective lines and notes, which show what Andrew Lambirth describes as the artist’s ‘profound, subtle and unique relationship with his landscape subject’. As Lambirth writes: ‘the emotions and associations of this subject are inseparable from the forms and colours of his paintings…he seems to have felt more at ease in watercolour, valuing its spontaneity…and its capacity for lyrical suggestion’ (A. Lambirth, John Nash: Artist & Countryman, Norwich, 2021, pp. 196-7).