^Born
on 07 April 1901: John Christopher Wood,
British painter who commited suicide on 21 August 1930.
— He studied architecture at Liverpool University; there he met Augustus
John, who encouraged him to take up painting seriously. On moving to London
in 1920, he met Alphonse Kahn, a wealthy Jewish art collector who took him
to Paris in 1921, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian and later
at the Grande Chaumière. In Paris he met the Chilean diplomat, Antonio
de Gandarillas, who introduced him to a number of painters, among them Picasso.
In this period Wood’s contacts with artists in Paris were soon unrivalled
among British artists.
— Wood was born in Knowsley, near Liverpool, son of Mrs. Clare Wood
and Dr. Lucius Wood MD, a general practicioner. At fourteen, Wood began
to draw during recuperation from septicemia, and went on to study architecture
briefly at Liverpool University (1919-1920). In London in 1920, the French
collector Alphonse Kahn invited him to Paris, where Wood studied drawing
at the Académie Julian in 1921. He entered effortlessly into fashionable
artistic circles, meeting Augustus John and the Chilean diplomat Antonio
de Gandarillas, with whom he began to live. As well as providing financial
support, Gandarillas introduced Wood to Picasso, Georges Auric, and Jean
Cocteau, and to the use of opium. Although his painting was regarded as
charmingly untutored, he learnt from these acquaintances, especially adopting
the elegant line of Cocteau's drawings.
By 1926 Wood was in a position to make designs
for Romeo and Juliet for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. When these
designs were abandoned at the last moment, he concentrated on England, becoming
a member of the London Group (1926) and the Seven and Five Society (1926-1930).
He exhibited with Ben and Winifred Nicholson at the Beaux Arts Gallery (April-May
1927), becoming close to them personally and artistically. In particular,
Winifred was supportive in the aftermath of his failed elopement with the
painter and heiress Meraud Guinness (subsequently Meraud Guevara). He painted
with the Nicholsons in Cumberland and Cornwall in 1928. On a trip to St
Ives, he and Ben Nicholson encountered the fisherman painter Alfred Wallis,
whose work answered a shared interest in 'primitive' expression and helped
Wood to establish a personal style.
A solo exhibition at Tooth's Gallery (April
1929) was followed by an exhibition with Nicholson at the Galerie Bernheim
in Paris (May 1930), in which Wood showed paintings made in Brittany in
1929. The results of a second stay in Brittany (June-July 1930) were intended
to open the Wertheim Gallery in London in October.
Traveling with his paintings, Wood met his
mother in Salisbury on 21 August 1930. Possibly believing himself pursued
(an effect of withdrawal from opium), he threw himself under the London
train. In deference to his mother, his death was often subsequently described
as accidental.
Posthumous exhibitions were held at the Wertheim
Gallery (Feb 1931) and the Lefèvre Galleries (1932). In 1938 Wood's
paintings were included in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
In the same year a major exhibition was organised by the Redfern Gallery
at the New Burlington Galleries, which attempted to re-unite Wood's complete
works, and gave impetus to Neo-Romanticism.
— LINKS
— Boat
in Harbour, Brittany (1929, 79x108cm) _ Wood, a self-taught artist,
spent much of his working life in Paris. However, towards the end of his
short life he spent periods working in Cornwall and Brittany in pursuit
of a 'naive' style of painting. In 1928 Wood visited Cornwall with his friends
Ben and Winifred Nicholson. In St. Ives the two men came across Alfred Wallis,
whose 'primitive', child-like paintings made a deep impression on their
subsequent work. Wood made two trips to the Breton fishing port of Tréboul,
in search of authentic, pre-industrial subjects for his art. This was painted
during his first visit between July and September 1929. In all he produced
at least forty paintings there.
Boat in Harbour, Brittany was painted
on a relatively large piece of poor quality millboard of the type favored
by Wood when away from his studio. The white oil ground was applied in a
single thick layer with a household brush, a practice common to the artist's
other paintings on board, including Church at Tréboul and
Douarnenez, Brittany. This is consistent with the commercial primer
called Coverine, which Wood had recommended to the Nicholsons in the previous
year for covering rejected compositions. The condition of Boat in Harbour
suggests that the board was prepared by the artist himself, as the ground
was applied over a label which remains visible where the rigging meets the
main mast; its cursive inscription, '[?Leay]', remains partially legible
though unintelligible. An attempt was made to strengthen the board after
completion by tacking it to a pine stretcher; as a consequence of this arrangement,
the layers of millboard have required consolidation at the edges and the
tacks, which are visible along all sides, have had to be treated for rust.
The brushstrokes of the ground provided a rough texture for the painting,
which was washed and brushed in a thin layer over the preliminary pencil
drawing. The white ground remains exposed in the sky, while in other areas,
such as the gunwales, a little paint has been rubbed into the surface. The
painter's casual technique is evident in the partially scratched-out figures
on the quayside to the left. The use of scratching to lighten the surface
and to reveal the layer below was one shared with Ben and Winifred Nicholson.
Here it exposes pencil underdrawing; although the bonnets of the women have
been repainted, the upper parts of their bodies have been left unresolved.
Close observation of the surface indicates
that the boat itself was painted first. The inky sea was painted into the
textured ground around the boat, but before the drawing of the rigging for
the furled sail to the right. The main burnt-red sail has been considerably
adjusted. At first it billowed to the right in a curve that is still visible
in the adjustments then made to the sea and the pier. The present position
of the yardarm and the pushing sailor make the sail curve away more forcefully
from the observer. This is associated with the ambiguous relationship of
the boat and the port. The inward movement of the boat indicated by the
sails appears to be contradicted by the tautness of the anchor chain and
the slack rope to the dinghy. The port itself was first sketched in pencil
but was only painted after the boat. This is especially noticeable in the
thick working of the quay wall around the succinct handling of the foremast
and sail. The evident speed of execution, facilitated by a reliance on familiar
subject matter, suggests that Boat in Harbour may have been completed
in one day, a practice of which Wood wrote later (letter to Mrs. Wood, 01
Jul 1930).
Sailing boats were a passion for Wood, and
he painted them throughout his short career. They were characteristically
the central focus of the composition and seen in broadside, a view which
favored the display of the activities of the crew and the detail of the
rigging and equipment. Leaving Port (1927) helped to establish
this format. The ship itself is painted in the smooth static style of the
period, and Wood considered it one of his most successful (letter to Mrs
Wood, 07 Sep 1927). Because of its greater size but compositional similarity
Boat in Harbour may be considered the culmination of the ship paintings
made during the spring of 1929, such as The Quay, Dieppe (1929).
In 1930, he implied the frequency of the subject: 'I
have painted a good deal of architecture and less boats for a change and
this seems to make it easier to make a quieter composition'.
(letter to Winifred Nicholson, July 1930)
Boat in Harbour was probably painted
during Wood's first trip to Brittany in the summer of 1929, when he visited
Dinard, and then stayed at the twin ports of Douarnenez and Tréboul.
By 30 July he was in Douarnenez but, by his own admission, it took him some
time to get down to work. On 15 August, he wrote to his mother in England:
It is the most charming place with a lovely port and beautiful bathing beach
not far away on the right [to] which one walks through cornfields and pine
woods, on the left is another little port with lovely boats that go to Spain
and Ireland to fish, and then another beautiful beach with nice little hotels
and hills and woods and the most lovely country behind. It is more like
Devonshire than Cornwall, but much the same.
His comparison to Cornwall implicitly referred
to his mother's Cornish ancestry, and to his extended stay there with the
Nicholsons in the previous year. Wood was not entirely isolated in Brittany.
He maintained his correspondence with the Nicholsons and others. What is
more, the poet Max Jacob (of whom he painted a portrait, now in the Musée
de Quimper) and the painter Christian ('B?b?') Berard were staying at the
same Douarnenez hotel, and Wood was joined by his mistress, Frosca Munster.
Towards the end of August Wood rented a house
across the river at Tréboul. It was there that he did most of his
painting. His letters confirm boats as his favored subject, and indicate
that his experience of them came on several different levels. Initially,
he was an observer of the devout and apparently timeless life of the fishing
communities. This picturesque aspect had been exploited since the end of
the nineteenth century by academic painters, such as Jules Breton [01 May
1827 – 05 Jul 1906], and avant-garde painters, such as Paul Gauguin
[07 Jun 1848 – 08 May 1903]. Just as they had shown peasants dressed
in traditional costume, so Wood placed figures on the quayside in Boat
in Harbour wearing Breton bonnets which signal the location. The casual
handling and rich coloring of Wood's paintings may also be seen as lying
within the tradition established by Gauguin.
The view of a timeless ruralism found in
Brittany was made more immediate for Wood by his sympathy for the work of
Alfred Wallis [08 Aug 1855 – 29 Aug 1942], itself primarily of ships.
Wood's extended period in St Ives in the previous autumn resulted in
a genuine admiration. This had been succinctly expressed when he wrote to
Frosca Munster (28 Oct. 1928): 'Winifred
says that no one has taken the slightest interest in Wallis's things in
London, how stupid people are, uncivilised brutes. How do you think I will
sell my pictures which are far less good than his.' Wallis painted
out of his own experience of the subject, creating a pictorial parallel
for the original activity, whether fishing, putting into port or navigating
by recognizable headlands. This immediacy had a particular resonance for
Wood and he considered the fisherman painter one of his most important teachers.
His example was reflected in the loosening of Wood's technique and the greater
spontaneity in brushwork which took place between Leaving Port, 1927
and Boat in Harbour. Evidence is also found in the casual nailing
of the board of Boat in Harbour to the stretcher, a practice used
by Wallis, and in the detail of the boat itself. Indeed, the closely comparable
image of a Penzance boat in harbor, confirmed that Wood recognised the fishing
boats on both sides of the Channel as representations of the sort of international
exchange of which he had written to his mother. In relation to the subject
of Boat in Harbour, it is worth noting that Wood was also an experienced
sailor. The delight he had in boats was a recurring theme. In an undated
letter to his mother from Tréboul, he wrote: I
have a little sailing boat which I adore, I sit in and glide along looking
quietly at all the things I love most, I see the lovely fishing boats with
their huge brown sails against the dark dark green fir trees and little
white houses instead of always against the sea and an insipid sky. We go
in our little boat in the evening to Douarnenez dine with some friends,
she [Frosca] plays bridge and back we go. (Aug 1929) His use
of this boat around Tréboul, Douarnenez and their inshore waters
meant that he had to handle it amongst the large fishing vessels built for
crossing Biscay. As with many other images of ships, Wood was careful to
include in Boat in Harbour the registry number, Dz2134, of a boat
registered at Douarnenez. The relevant records are no longer extant in the
Archives du Service Historique de la Marine in Brest, that would show whether
it was a real boat. The port entrance is that of Tréboul, with the
church tower of Saint Joseph introduced at the left. However, as Barthelemy
has observed, Wood took liberties with the view in including the church
and the foreground quay, and excluding the Ile Tristan. Despite these modifications,
the particularity is persuasive. The efforts of the sailors on board the
boat are strenuous and set against the schematic zigzag division of land
and sea created around the boat by the harbour wall. The extension of the
masts out of the top and right side of the painting means that the structure
of the boat determines and dominates the composition. It appears close-up
and immediate. However, it is notable that in comparable images of ships
Wood introduced mythological and symbolic references associated with Cocteau's
'rappel à l'ordre'. In the contemporary Le Phare (1929) a red-sailed
ship is juxtaposed with playing cards and the newspaper of the title to
evoke a sense of fatality. By early September 1929 Wood had exhausted both
his creative and his financial resources in Brittany, but he was satisfied
with his output. He wrote to his mother on 09 September: 'I
have learnt so much and made huge progress in my work which I will take
the opportunity of showing to certain people in Paris on my way to London'.
The success of his summer's work secured Wood's solo exhibition in Paris
in the following May at the Galerie Bernheim. Boat in Harbour was amongst
those shown. The painter placed great importance on this Parisian début
and was aware that it could make his reputation. However, he became worried
about whether he had enough work to fill the gallery, and he generously
suggested that it should be shared with Ben Nicholson. In his letter to
Bernheim of 16 March, written in awkwardly formal French, he explained his
thinking: “In relation to my exhibition at your gallery of 15-30
May 1930, to which I look forward with great impatience and for which I
will have some beautiful canvases - I think that I will not have sufficient
really to fill your two immense rooms, not having large canvases like Max
Ernst, for instance, and I would much prefer to exhibit twenty-five or thirty
select pieces. This is what I would like to propose to you. Ben Nicholson,
a friend of mine and the painter whom I admire the most in England among
the young and who has in his work the same character as in mine, will be
ready to exhibit twenty-five canvases in your gallery. He is well known
to your London friends the Lefevre Galleries, and Mr Macdonald, who has
given Nicholson two exhibitions, will give you all the information about
his painting. I propose that he has this exhibition at the same time as
me, that he takes one room and I the other, in that way you would have more
variety and a greater chance of selling well. He is well known in England,
being the most inventive painter with great sensibility combined with an
exquisite coloring. You could put on the catalogue 'Exhibition of Two English
Painters' for example.” (16 March 1930) The dealer acquiesced
in this plan. Wood's work was well received, interest being shown particularly
by the English collector and prospective dealer Lucy Carrington Wertheim.
According to Wood's letter to his mother of 13 May, Wertheim already had
'a lot of my pictures' and had come from London to see the exhibition.
There she was responsible for the majority of the eleven sales made. She
subsequently reported to the Tate Gallery that Boat in Harbour,
'was purchased by myself from the artist in the summer of 1930. It hung
in the place of honour at the Georges Bernheim Exhibition in the spring
of that year (May?)' (8 April 1962). Sales were restricted primarily
as a result of the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 which, as Wood's letters
indicate, had hit his fashionable friends, and shaken the confidence of
those not directly affected. Wertheim's interest was, therefore, of significance
not only because the painter was continually in need of such support but
also because it came at a time when support was increasingly unlikely from
any other quarter. It should be noted that after the painter's death that
summer, Ben Nicholson drew up a list of 'some
of Kit's good ptgs' many of which had featured in their joint
exhibition; from its size Boat in Harbour is likely to be 'a
large ptg (the largest in Paris show) not sold' (letter to H.S.
Ede, Aug or Sep 1930). On the strength of her purchases and her continued
interest in the artist and his work, Wertheim proposed to become Wood's
London dealer and to open a new gallery with an exhibition of his work.
It was for this show that he worked so feverishly during the following summer
spent at Tréboul. By her own account, Wertheim found that there was
a perceptible change in style between the two seasons of work in Tréboul:
'I had got so used to the
sombre depth and colouring of the paintings I now owned by him - "The Yellow
Man," "The Yellow Horse," "Purple Crocus," "Dieppe," "Boat in Harbour,"
etc., that this new mood in which he was painting came to me as something
of a shock'. Although she warmed to subsequent works, it was
the 1929 paintings that formed the basis of her enthusiasm. As a result
of their close working relationship, Wertheim built a choice collection
of Wood's late paintings which included also what she had always called
pendants to Boat in Harbour: Evening, Brittany and The
Crab Boat, Brittany. As the term suggests, these works are smaller
but closely associated in subject and detail. The Crab Boat, Brittany
(also known as Tréboul, French Crab Boat) shows a very similar
boat with red sails setting to sea between bonneted women in the foreground
and a port behind. In particular, the washy handling of the inky blue sea
is very close to that in Boat in Harbour. Having said this, there is no
indication that the relationship between the paintings suggested by the
collector was one specified by the artist.
The strength of the works from the last eighteen
months of Wood's life secured his posthumous reputation. Without being too
obviously incapable of being idealized, the seaside scenes had a certain
uncompromising strangeness which Wood knew very well how to capture. In
Boat in Harbour, a good mature painting, poetry is lasting, because
it is not merely a poetry of subject. The poetry is in the paint, in the
colors and the forms of the picture. Wood's gift as a colorist is very marked.
The dark intensity of color in such paintings as Evening, Brittany
and French Crab-boat, Tréboul, is equally personal and impressive.
It is clear also that many of these paintings, so lyrical and immediate
in their effect, have highly organized designs of great ability. When these
gifts of noble design, subtle and unusual color harmony, and lyrical poetry
are fused in works such as Boat in Harbour, Brittany, it does not
seem an exaggeration to describe the result as a masterpiece.
— A
Fishing Boat in Dieppe Harbour (1929, 65x81cm) _ In 1929 Wood wrote
to his mother that he had found 'a very
good painting place'. He was writing from Dieppe where he had
arrived a few days earlier with his friend Frosca Munster. The Normandy
port, renowned for its scallops and herrings brought in by the fishing fleet,
had attracted many artists, notably Walter
Sickert [31 May 1860 – 22 Jan 1942] who had painted the buildings
of the town, and Georges
Braque [13 May 1882 – 31 Aug 1963]. Braque had visited Dieppe
in 1928, and built a house and a small studio in nearby Varengeville the
following year. He painted the foreshore and studies of small boats, which
Wood may have seen. Furthermore Dieppe would have reminded Wood of St Ives,
where he had stayed with his friends Ben
Nicholson [10 Apr 1894 – 06
Feb 1982] and Winifred
Nicholson [1893-1981] a few months earlier. There he had become fascinated
with boats and the traditional life of fishing communities, a subject that
was to become a recurring theme in his paintings during his last years.
A Fishing Boat in Dieppe Harbour is characteristic of many of Wood's
paintings from the late 1920s. Many art historians, including Charles Harrison,
have made comparisons between these paintings and the work of Alfred Wallis
[1855-1942]. Wood had met Wallis, a reclusive seventy year old Cornish fisherman,
whilst staying in St Ives in 1928. Harrison suggests that, following frequent
visits to Wallis's studio to see his naïve paintings of sailing boats on
irregular shaped pieces of cardboard and wood, Wood's paintings became more
robust in shape and color. Wood's interest in the design of Wallis's little
pictures is evident from the manner in which he allows the boat to dominate
the composition. In addition the boat is poised at an angle to the sea,
like an object on a table top. This enabled Wood, who himself was an experienced
sailor, to include details of the equipment and rigging. Behind the harbor
wall he paints the tall cliffs, the homes of the fishermen in Le Pollet,
and a weather vane, which appears to be out of scale to the rest of the
scene. In contrast to many of the pictures Wood made at Dieppe, in which
he used a neutral palette of black, white, grays, and creams, A Fishing
Boat in Dieppe Harbour is richly colored. The turquoise sea and threatening
grey sky contrasts with the brightly colored houses and yellow wooden boards
in the boat. A preparatory drawing for this painting in the collection of
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums reveals that, despite its childlike appearance,
Wood thought carefully about the composition of the finished work. He integrated
the boat fully into a complex interplay of lines, and color values, creating
a composition that is at once densely structured and rigorously simplified.
The painting was done in oil paint on stretched,
primed canvas. It is framed in a deep molded wooden frame painted with off-white
housepaint. The artist did not prepare his own support but acquired it ready-stretched,
sized and primed on a French fixed wooden strainer. The priming is probably
oil, it is well-bodied but thinly-applied to create a smooth surface. The
artist drew out the design probably in pencil and then filled in the regions
with oil paint, probably artist's tube paint. In each pre-defined area the
paint appears to have been used directly from the tube in simple mixtures
of a basic color and white. Linear detail is painted on top with a thin
round brush. In the townscape these lines are added after the underlying
paint was dry but in the nets and baskets the artist worked into wet paint,
pushing and scoring through the pasty surface with his brush. In this way
he carved colored ripples and waves into the paint. The sky and the cliffs
are created from heavy applications of thick paint brushed in short staccato
strokes. Similarly, the sea, which was the last part to be painted, is filled
in methodically in green and various quantities of white and blue. The paint
is distorted by a thin layer of loosely applied natural resin varnish, which
has now yellowed and is covered by a layer of black surface dirt. There
is a small amount of overpaint at one corner but otherwise the painting
is in very good condition.
— Church
at Tréboul (1930, 73x92cm) _ Wood spent June and July 1930 painting
in Brittany, basing himself in Tréboul, close to Douarnenez. This area was
popular with both British and French painters and was close to Pont-Aven,
which had been made famous by Gauguin whose work, together with that of
Van Gogh, was important to Wood. In the space of forty days Wood painted
some sixty canvases both from life and, at night, from postcards, mostly
depicting scenes from the daily lives of the fishing community. Moving from
the depiction of boats to architecture he claimed helped him to paint a
'quieter composition'.
Church at Tréboul was painted on
poor quality soft millboard, which has been scuffed and damaged at the edges.
The thick ground of white commercial oil was applied with a decorator's
brush. It is consistent with the artist's own preparations of similar boards
which he used in the last years of his life, especially when away from his
studio. The paint layer combines artist's and decorator's oil. The figures
were painted quite thickly but, typically of Wood, the exposed ground and
underdrawing are visible on the apse of the choir. A number of small abrasions
and losses in the sky and the roof of the church have required restoration.
Wood spent periods during the summers of
1929 and 1930 painting in Douarnenez and Tréboul in Brittany. During the
second stay at Tréboul in June-July 1930, he was tremendously productive,
making some three dozen paintings. At the beginning of this stay Wood wrote
from the Hotel Ty-Mad describing his plans to his mother:
I expect I shall be here at least 6 weeks as I want to do my very best work
possible. It is extraordinary how I have to hurry hurry from one thing to
another, but its just the one moment or chance I have to get one, and for
everyone else it seems almost impossible, quite apart from making a possible
living. (12 June 1930)
This urgency was brought on by the prospective
exhibition at Lucy Wertheim's Gallery in London in October.
Church at Tréboul followed the preparatory
drawing, Study for 'Church at Tréboul' and it is probable that
they were both made during this period. Wood gave his mother a glimpse of
his working arrangements: 'I
have to have two rooms on account of the smell of the paint. They are charming
simple rooms with a table, chair, nice clean bed with white cover, a wash
basin with running water and white walls peints à la chaux and they are
cheerful.' (11 July 1930) This and other comments suggest that
he did not paint outside, but enlarged his paintings from drawings made
on the spot or even from post cards on which he made color notes. This reduces
the possibility that the painting was made from the drawing at some stage
between the two stays in Brittany, as has previously been suggested. It
is notable that Church at Tréboul is not recorded as having been in Wood's
show at the Galerie Bernheim in May 1930, and this would indicate either
that he did not consider it worthy of inclusion or that it had not yet been
completed.
The church is that of Saint-Joseph in Tréboul.
Designed by the architect J.M. Abgrall in 1881 and bearing the dedication
date 'XIX 8bre 1884' over the main portal, it was built as the parochial
church to replace the Chapelle Saint-Jean which had become too small. Barthelemy
has indicated that Wood must have made his study from the garden of the
presbytery opposite. The painting differs from the drawing in a number of
particulars. The details of the architecture are repeated, but the general
viewpoint appears to be further back and from a slightly more elevated position.
Although familiar to the painter, the adjusted view would probably have
required other drawings in addition to Study for 'Church at Tréboul',
as it includes the whole of the spire and a broader view of the houses to
either side. The effect is of less concentration upon the church and a greater
sense of its position within the village. This was primarily a physical
presence, and Wood repeated the contrast found in the drawing between the
detail of the village and the open sky above and wall below. That this juxtaposition
interested Wood is confirmed by the slightly smaller Tréboul Church.
It is seen from further to the left, with the tower diminished in relation
to the bulk of the southern flank of the building, but with the white wall
assuming its important compositional role.
The expansion of the context of the church
may also be seen as emphasising a spiritual centrality. Wood showed his
concern with the places of devotion within the Breton communities in paintings
such as Breton Women at Prayer (1930). While there is a sophisticated
fascination with the religious fervency and superstition of the peasants,
there is also a suggestion of admiration for the simplicity of belief. The
introduction of the figures in pairs of contrasting ages in Church at
Tréboul (which constitutes the most important change from the drawing)
may be seen as part of this concern. Like the boats in the other painting
(which have been introduced despite being some distance from the sea), they
are sheltered by the wall below the church. They wear local costumes and
are drawn in a deliberately faux naif style. It is in these details that
the imaginative painting contrasts most tellingly with the drawing made
on the spot. The simplicity of style and subject in Wood's Breton paintings
made them easily acceptable to a broad audience.
— Douarnenez,
Brittany (1930, 33x46cm)
— Landscape
near Vence (1927, 54x65cm; 529x640pix, 71kb) _ Wood was in the south
of France for a prolonged stay in 1927, when he painted this landscape,
in which he captured both the topographical details and the idyllic mood
of this Provençal town.
|
