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Lot Essay
A monumental vision spanning three metres in width, Rose Wylie’s Sailing Boat (2015) is a panoramic exploration of memory and historical perception. Painted during a period of growing critical recognition, it belongs to a series of works dedicated to the Mayflower voyage: the 66-day journey that transported a group of pilgrims from England to America in 1620. Wylie, recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, is celebrated for her bold and eclectic language, drawn from a rich mental archive and staged in vivid, theatrical tableaux. The present work’s vibrant hues, tactile brushwork and immersive scale are hallmarks of her practice. Based on memories of a flat-pack model of the Mayflower she received for Christmas as a child, the boat itself assumes an almost anthropomorphic quality, crowned with a humorous figurehead and singing with playful wit. The work was unveiled in Wylie’s acclaimed exhibition History Painting at the Plymouth Arts Centre in 2018, celebrating the city that launched the ship almost four hundred years prior.
Rather than seeking to replay historical fact, Wylie instead paints her memories of encountering the past. Created between 2015 and 2017, the Mayflower series is less about the voyage itself than about the artist’s recollections of learning about it more than seven decades earlier. ‘It’s not history I’m drawing,’ she explained; ‘it’s the visual impact, and how it impacted on me’ (R. Wylie, quoted in Rose Wylie: History Painting, Round One Films, 2018). In this, her work invites comparison with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger, all of whom sought to dramatise the layers of meaning that historical events and images accrue over time. For Wylie, this process is part and parcel of her own working method more broadly. Reams of old newspapers line her studio floor, while notebooks are filled with extensive visual research, drawing and jottings. She plunders a vast treasure trove of sources—from films and advertisements to fashion photography and art history—relishing the slippages and jolts that occur in the act of reconstructing these images from memory.
Wylie attended art school during the 1950s, pausing to raise her family and later graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1981. As she entered her eighties, she experienced a surge of critical interest in her work. Sailing Boat dates from this triumphant period: 2014 saw her receipt of the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize, followed by a major exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2017. The following year, alongside her exhibition at Plymouth, she was awarded an OBE. The works painted during these years are widely considered to represent the artist’s finest, crystallising the raw painterly language and sophisticated commentary on image-making that had been simmering in her work for more than three decades. The present work, in particular, captures her instinctive handling of line, colour and form, demonstrating her admiration for the work of Philip Guston. Thick black lines and gestural streaks of blue are offset against passages of raw canvas. The surface is by turns visceral and vacant, ebbing and flowing as if with the tide itself. Aglow with life, it is a thrilling picture of how history embeds itself in the mind, its forms at once tangible and fleeting.
Rather than seeking to replay historical fact, Wylie instead paints her memories of encountering the past. Created between 2015 and 2017, the Mayflower series is less about the voyage itself than about the artist’s recollections of learning about it more than seven decades earlier. ‘It’s not history I’m drawing,’ she explained; ‘it’s the visual impact, and how it impacted on me’ (R. Wylie, quoted in Rose Wylie: History Painting, Round One Films, 2018). In this, her work invites comparison with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger, all of whom sought to dramatise the layers of meaning that historical events and images accrue over time. For Wylie, this process is part and parcel of her own working method more broadly. Reams of old newspapers line her studio floor, while notebooks are filled with extensive visual research, drawing and jottings. She plunders a vast treasure trove of sources—from films and advertisements to fashion photography and art history—relishing the slippages and jolts that occur in the act of reconstructing these images from memory.
Wylie attended art school during the 1950s, pausing to raise her family and later graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1981. As she entered her eighties, she experienced a surge of critical interest in her work. Sailing Boat dates from this triumphant period: 2014 saw her receipt of the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize, followed by a major exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2017. The following year, alongside her exhibition at Plymouth, she was awarded an OBE. The works painted during these years are widely considered to represent the artist’s finest, crystallising the raw painterly language and sophisticated commentary on image-making that had been simmering in her work for more than three decades. The present work, in particular, captures her instinctive handling of line, colour and form, demonstrating her admiration for the work of Philip Guston. Thick black lines and gestural streaks of blue are offset against passages of raw canvas. The surface is by turns visceral and vacant, ebbing and flowing as if with the tide itself. Aglow with life, it is a thrilling picture of how history embeds itself in the mind, its forms at once tangible and fleeting.