Beschreibung:

Oil on canvas Signed and dated '25 lower left 50.8 x 60.8cm. (20 x 24in.) Provenance: Mr & Mrs Leonard Elmhirst, Private Collection (by 1938) Sale: Sotheby's London, 12th November 1986, lot 153 Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited: London, New Burlington Galleries, Christopher Wood Memorial Exhibition, March - April 1938, no.51 Literature: Eric Newton, Christopher Wood 1901-1930. His Life and Work, London, The Redfern Gallery, 1938, no.124 When Christopher Wood arrived in Paris in 1921 to study at the prestigious Académie Julian, he proclaimed, in a letter to his concerned mother, that his ambition was to ‘be the greatest painter that has ever lived’ (the Artist, quoted in Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood An English Painter, London, 1995, p.13). He had settled in Paris at the invitation of the influential art collector, Alphonse Kahn and he fitted effortlessly into the chic Parisian art world, making important connections with painters such as Pablo Picasso Jean Cocteau and founder of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev. In all accounts, a handsome, magnetic young man, he formed romantic attachments with both men and women, amongst then a Guinness heiress and a Chilean diplomat. By 1925, the date of this painting, Wood had spent two years travelling through Europe and North Africa and absorbing the influences this experience had to offer. He was on the cusp of returning to London where he would meet Ben and Winifred Nicholson and begin his love affair with the Cornish landscape and have his first major exhibition alongside the Nicholsons at Beaux Arts in 1927. The exact location of the present view is not known. Wood painted landscapes in the south of France as well as the south and north coasts of England in 1925, although the former is the most likely, accounting for the greatest number of landscapes in that year. Since his arrival in Paris, Wood had been immersed in the vibrancy and dynamism of that constantly evolving art scene. He absorbed the many eclectic styles he was exposed to and drew inspiration from a great number of the French avant-garde artists of the period. Wood’s own unique naïve approach for which he would become renowned is still in its infancy and the present work is testament to that emerging style whilst also revealing the influence of artists such as Maurice Utrillo Leonard Knight Elmhirst (1893-1974) was a philanthropist and agronomist who worked extensively in India and was the co-founder, with his wife, Dorothy, of the Dartington Hall project in progressive education and rural reconstruction. The couple owned a number of oils by Wood, as did his wife's son from her first marriage, Whitney Straight. Dorothy was a member of the prominent American Whitney family. The picture was exhibited at the New Burlington Galleries in 1938 and was hung in the first room. Wood was clearly fond of this subject matter and in the same year he made a watercolour version of the same view. This work was purchased by Duncan Phillips and is now held in the Phillips Collection in Washington (See Fig. 1). We are grateful to Robert Upstone, who is preparing the forthcoming Christopher Wood catalogue raisonné, for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work. Condition report disclaimer