BRITISH PAINTINGS & SCULPTURE Jonathan Grant Galleries
Francis McCracken (Ireland 1879 - 1959 Scotland) Still Life With Apples c.1930 Oil on canvas, 62 x 73 cm, signed
Illustrated cover: (Detail) Vanessa Bell (British 1879 – 1961) Still Life With Jug & Chrysanthemums Oil on canvas, 64 x 40 cm, signed
William George H Rosenberg (British 1843 – c. 1900) The Emigration, New York Watercolour, 30.5 x 24 cm Signed, inscribed and dated 1880 verso
William Edward Millner (British 1848 – 1895) The Milk Maid Oil on canvas, 61 x 46 cm, signed with monogram
George Henry Laporte (Germany 1799 - 1873 England)
A Working Horse Resting in a Stable Oil on board, 15 x 22 cm, signed
Patrick Hayman (British 1915 – 1988) Ices Gouache on paper, 30 x 40 cm, signed & dated ‘73 verso
Margaret Lovell FRBS, RWA (British b.1939) Tokoroa Bronze on granite base, 28 x 6.5 cm, signed Ed. 3/4
Nic Fiddian-Green (British 20th Century) Still Water, 2015 Bronze on oak base, 36 x 14 cm high, signed, Ed. 3/25 Henry Spencer Moore OM, CH. (British 1898 – 1986) Seated Mother and Child, 1981 Etching and Aquatint, 68.5 x 56.5 cm, signed & numbered, Ed. XIX/XXV
James Boswell (British 1906 – 1971) The River Seine Oil on board, 47 x 58 cm, signed & dated 1952
Patrick Caulfield CBE, RA. (British 1936 – 2005) Fruit and Bowl Screenprint on paper, 83 x 59 cm, signed, Ed. 38/110
Patrick Caulfield CBE, RA. (British 1936 – 2005) Cream Glazed Pot Screenprint on paper, 83 x 59 cm, signed, Ed. 72/100
Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) was one of the leading artists of the storied Bloomsbury
Group and for a short period amongst the most progressive painters in England of her generation. Bell’s Still life on Corner of a Mantelpiece and Abstract Painting (both 1914, Tate Gallery) mark the apogee of her modernism, along with her very progressive, striking and vibrant decorative work for the Omega Workshops, established in 1913 by Roger Fry, with whom she had recently had a passionate affair. Bell had four works in Fry’s ground-breaking Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition. British, French and Russian Artists in 1912. One of the four children of author and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Duckworth, who had been a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward BurneJones, Vanessa’s younger sister was the novelist Virginia Woolf. Vanessa married the writer Clive Bell in 1907, with whom she had two sons, and she had a daughter, Angelica, to fellow artist and lifelong companion, Duncan Grant, in 1918. Grant’s superb portrait of her, not long before Angelica’s birth, is in the Auckland Art Gallery (Mackelvie Collection) and is the cover illustration of her biography by Frances Spalding. Vanessa Bell was a prolific and successful artist throughout her life, which has been minutely documented, along with all the other members of the Bloomsbury Group. However, perhaps surprisingly, there is no detailed catalogue raisonné of her entire oeuvre; paintings, works on paper, decorations and designs, including those for the Omega Workshops, and book jackets (mostly for the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press) and much more. And there is no detailed exhibition history. Still life, especially flower pieces, was possibly Bell’s most preferred genre and she painted many throughout her career from art school to her death at Charleston, Sussex, where she and Duncan lived. Bell’s life and work has most recently been celebrated at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London with a major retrospective exhibition and fine catalogue.1
Two of them were at the Lefevre Gallery in 1934 and in 1937, the latter of 32 recent paintings, mostly painted in Rome, after which she visited Picasso in Paris where he was at work on Guernica. In 1941 she showed at the Leicester Galleries and in 1956 at the Adams Gallery, Davies Street, where her memorial exhibition was held in 1961 and attracted the comment that “a number of pictures produced in the 1950s testify to the vigour of her later years”. Besides Grant’s painted vase, Still Life features a vase of flowers and a piece of fruit, all on a mantelpiece or table with a background of vertical stripes, harking back to her most modernist works around 1914-15. The flowers are most likely dahlias, especially scarlet, amongst Bell’s favourite flowers from her garden at Charleston. Writing to Fry she described “the wealth of dahlias and red admirals” in the summer and hated to leave her garden when travelling on the Continent. She regularly took the flowers from her garden up to London to her Fitzroy Street studio to paint. It is possible that the background vertical forms in Still Life are a painted folding screen, implying that the objects are on the corner of a table covered with a cloth. Formally, it is a visually satisfying balanced exercise of curved forms against verticals, thrust right up against the picture plane, with both the round fruit (an apple?) and the slightly off-vertical reflection on the flower vase working rather like punctuation marks. Given the date of Grant’s vase, Bell’s signature on the painting, “V Bell”, and its painterly handling, Still life, can be dated to the mid 1930s, when it was surely exhibited, although it does not get a mention in any of the reviews in The Times, for example. However, Spalding’s commentary on her March 1934 Lefevre exhibition makes the painting’s inclusion quite likely, given that the 1937 exhibition was mostly painted in Rome: “her subjects were mostly confined to scenes in and around Charleston and to still lifes - the subject that Roger [Fry] had once praised as ‘in modern times... one of the purest expressions of modern feeling’. Virginia [Woolf] again provided a foreword in which she tried to suggest the beauty and strangeness that Vanessa found in familiar things. It was an art, she said, that took one over the boundary into a world where words have little meaning: ‘And yet it is a world of glowing serenity and sober truth’. And not financially unsound, for it brought in more than any of her previous shows, earning Vanessa some £500.”
This Still Life is undated but we have a terminus post quem for it because the vase, which it features, was one of several made in 1932 and remains at Charleston. Its form was cast by the potter Phyllis Keyes (a regular collaborator) from Grant’s Decorated Vase (also at Charleston, c1914, made in Tunis) and then decorated by Grant. One of these decorated vases was exhibited in December 1932 when Bell and Grant conceived a “Music Room” for the Lefevre Gallery. A photograph shows the vase on the mantelpiece in front of a large decorated mirror by Bell, which was bought by Virginia Woolf, who had guaranteed the exhibition by committing to spend £100. All the objects were for sale, although the primary objective was to attract commissions for decorative schemes, following the artists’ work on the homes of Lady Gerald Wellesley and Ethel Sands. However, no commissions eventuated directly from the exhibition although cxCunard commissioned decorative panels for the liner RMS Queen Mary in 1935. Grant included the vase in several of his paintings and decorations but, in the absence of a catalogue raisonné, it cannot be said with any confidence that Still Life is the only painting of hers to include it.
Still life was most recently exhibited at the d’Offay Couper Gallery just off New Bond Street in London’s Mayfair, the forerunner of the renowned Anthony d’Offay Gallery, which held exhibitions of Bell’s and Grant’s work in the 1970s, which contributed to a revival of interest in the artists. At a glance, Vanessa Bell’s Still Life transports one to the era of later Bloomsbury and picturesque Charleston, and to the heart of English painting in the inter-war years.
Bell had several solo exhibitions in the 1930s along with two and three person shows and was included in numerous group shows, including the annual exhibitions of the London Group.
Christopher Johnstone 1.
Vanessa Bell, Sarah Milroy and Ian Dejardin, eds, Dulwich Picture Gallery 2017
Vanessa Bell (British 1879 – 1961) Still Life With Jug & Chrysanthemums Oil on canvas, 64 x 40 cm, signed Exhibited: d’Offay Couper Gallery, London
John Yardley RI. (British b. 1933) Connaught Hotel, London Watercolour, 36 x 51 cm, signed
John Yardley RI. (British b. 1933) Early Morning, Dartmouth Watercolour, 36 x 48 cm, signed
John Yardley RI. (British b. 1933) Turl Street Oxford Watercolour, 36 x 51 cm, signed
John Yardley RI. (British b. 1933) No School Watercolour, 30 x 41 cm, signed
Felix Kelly (New Zealand 1914 - 1994 England) Oldany House Overlooking the River Alde Near Aldeburgh, Suffolk Oil on board, 28 x 28 cm, signed and dated 1955 Illustrated: Country Life, September 12, 1957
David James (British 1853 – 1904) In St Ives Bay Oil on canvas, 29 x 48.5 cm, signed, inscribed & dated 1892
Sir Terry Frost RA. (British 1915 – 2003) Millennium Disc 1999 Murano Glass, 50 cm diameter, signed & dated 1999 Executed by Mario Badioli, Murano, Venice
Paul Hanrahan (New Zealand b. 1936) Covent Garden Market Watercolour, 26 x 37 cm, signed Paul Hanrahan (New Zealand b. 1936) Cathedral Gate, Canterbury, Kent Watercolour, 30 x 40 cm, signed
Paul Hanrahan (New Zealand b. 1936) Radcliffe Square, Oxford Watercolour, 30 x 40 cm, signed
Paul Hanrahan (New Zealand b. 1936) Trio at Bath Abbey Watercolour, 41 x 51 cm, signed
Katherine Airini Vane (New Zealand 1891 – 1965) Edinburgh Oil on canvas board, 28 x 40 cm, signed & dated ‘32
Keith Money (British b. 1935) Mill Reef at the National Stud in Cambridge, 1973 Oil on board, 61 x 71 cm, signed left Inscribed Mill Reef
John Francis Kavanagh ARCA, ARBS. (Ireland 1903 - 1984 New Zealand) Portrait Bust of Wanda Tiburzzi Bronze, 70 x 45 x 35 cm, signed & dated 1933
Dianne Flynn (British 20th Century) Donkeys at Cromer Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 76 cm, signed
Samuel John Lamorna Birch RA. (British 1869 – 1955) A Cornish Farm Watercolour, 25 x 35 cm, signed
Florence Fitzgerald (British 1850 – 1927) An Old Church in Kent Oil on canvas, 38.5 x 59 cm, signed & dated 1920
George Charles Haité RI, RBA. (British 1855 – 1924) At the Well, a Girl Picking Grapes on the French Riviera Watercolour, 29.5 x 46.5 cm, signed & titled verso
Alfred Fontville de Breanski Jr (British 1877 – 1957) Cadair Idris, North Wales Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 76 cm, signed lower left Titled & signed verso
Alfred Fontville de Breanski Jr (British 1877 – 1957) Ullswater from Pooley Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 76 cm, signed lower right Titled & signed verso
280 Parnell Road PO Box 37673 Parnell Auckland New Zealand jg@jgg.co.nz Tel: (+64-9) 308 9125
www.jonathangrantgalleries.com
(Detail) Richard Adams (British b. 1960) A Corner of the Kitchen Garden Varnished pastel, 60 x 80 cm, signed
Finished Art Ltd 02.2018
Jonathan Grant Galleries