Female Nudes with Horse and Viaduct

Painted in the 1930s, Female Nudes with Horse and Viaduct is a powerful example of Mary Swanzy’s lyrical mature style, combining a delicate sense of colour and precise drawing with a dream-like play of figures and monuments, set within a mysterious landscape. Swanzy’s work underwent a vital transformation during this period—while her compositions remained rooted in the figurative, her subjects became increasingly enigmatic and complex, favouring almost hallucinatory images that elude interpretation. This shift may have been influenced by the rise of Surrealism in Europe, which the artist had encountered during her numerous visits to Paris through the 1920s and 1930s. While she was never one to follow the latest fashionable “isms” of the art world, Swanzy engaged with a plurality of avant-garde styles across her artistic career, from Cubism to Fauvism, Expressionism to Symbolism, often switching between idioms from one canvas to the next. With its focus on dreams and mystery, Surrealism struck a chord with Swanzy, and she absorbed many of the movement’s ideas and visual strategies into her unique painterly approach.

Executed in an array of subtly variegated blue and green tones, Female Nudes with Horse and Viaduct presents an ethereal, otherworldly scene, using a series of overlapping, semi-transparent planes to combine multiple different worlds within a single composition, in a manner that recalls Francis Picabia’s “Transparency” paintings. To the right of the composition, a pair of monumental nude figures and a horse rest within a rolling green landscape, offering a glimpse into a seemingly pastoral arcadia, where humans and animals co-exist in harmony. Their idyllic world is punctuated by the rhythmic arches of an enormous viaduct, its vertiginous profile directly recalling the monument near Sémur in France, which Swanzy painted on multiple occasions. Weaving these various diaphanous layers together, Swanzy creates a mesmerising composition that plays with the viewer’s sense of perspective and perception, blurring the boundaries between one scene and the next to conjure a strange, mystical image.