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Lot Essay
Christopher Wood first visited Brittany in the spring of 1929 and returned over the summer, painting in the ports of Dieppe, St Malo, Douarnenez and Concarneau. 'This is a nice place', Wood wrote to Ben Nicholson soon after he had arrived, 'you would like the boats, for they only sail here and the big ones are wonderful with their brown sails. They go to Spain to fish and are about ten times the size of the biggest St Ives ones. The place is very like St Ives. In fact everything here looks like Cornwall, which makes me want to be back there again with you' (C. Wood quoted in R. Ingleby, Christopher Wood, London, 1995, p. 7).
Wood returned to Brittany in June 1930, renting a hotel room just across from the house he had stayed in the previous year. He continued to see Brittany in terms of his memories of Cornwall and sought unspoilt images in the region's picturesque simplicity, especially the churches and fishing boats. The Breton works of summer 1930 thus have a primitive directness and urgency, expressive of the artist's own intense emotional response to these subjects. As Winifred Nicholson later wrote:
'The colour was very simple and of the utmost purity like Hope itself. Human passion is at its highest tension, thought is mystic, and the theme of travel beyond the horizon which had constantly recurred in all his work now reached a pitch of utmost intensity beyond which it is not possible to go' (W. Nicholson quoted in V. Button, Christopher Wood, London, 2003, p. 60).
Wood returned to Brittany in June 1930, renting a hotel room just across from the house he had stayed in the previous year. He continued to see Brittany in terms of his memories of Cornwall and sought unspoilt images in the region's picturesque simplicity, especially the churches and fishing boats. The Breton works of summer 1930 thus have a primitive directness and urgency, expressive of the artist's own intense emotional response to these subjects. As Winifred Nicholson later wrote:
'The colour was very simple and of the utmost purity like Hope itself. Human passion is at its highest tension, thought is mystic, and the theme of travel beyond the horizon which had constantly recurred in all his work now reached a pitch of utmost intensity beyond which it is not possible to go' (W. Nicholson quoted in V. Button, Christopher Wood, London, 2003, p. 60).
