.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
The scene is the Livery Hall of the Drapers' Company in London where Nicholson attended a Livery Dinner on 21 March 1934. It is one of the very few paintings that the artist discussed in print. In the autumn of 1942 he described its origins to the poet Robert Nichols who had been commissioned to write on Nicholson in the Penguin Modern Painters series.
Nichols wrote, quoting the artist, 'Painting isn't only sight, it's knowledge. In addition it is capacity to remember, a capacity at times amounting to ability. You say that you like my City Dinner. Good! I enjoyed myself very much - yes, indeed! After brief preliminary exchanges between myself and my nearest neighbours [Sir Lynden Macassey, K.B.E., K.C., LL.D., D.Sc. and Mr T. Balston], we each discovered a want of interest in the other, and I a prodigious fascination in the scene before me. I drank a bottle of very fine white wine [Forster Kirchenstuck Hock, 1921] and in due course smoked an excellent cigar, and all the while I was enjoying these I gazed at the scene and took mental notes until I had it all by heart - until, in fact, I'd painted the scene in my head. When I got back to ATY [Apple Tree Yard], where I then lived, I didn't go to bed, but set to at once and got the substance of the thing down. Do you like it? Yes, I consider it a rare success'.
It seems likely that Nicholson had been invited as a guest of the Company with a view to a possible portrait commission, probably that of the Clerk to the Company, Sir Ernest Pooley. One of his former sitters, Earl Peel (1915, Guildhall Art Gallery) was also a guest of the Company that evening, but no commission resulted and Pooley's portrait was painted in 1937 by Richard Jack, R.A. 'The very spirit of wealthy pomp and gluttony ...' declared The Times, 2 January 1942, p. 2, reviewing Nicholson's retrospective at the National Gallery. One aspect of Nicholson's enjoyment of the scene is that while he has deprived most of the diners of their faces, he has yet managed to give them all distinct personalities.
Such was Nicholson's enthusiasm to commit the subject to canvas that he seems to have painted over an earlier work The Last of the Colonel's Brougham, which was exhibited at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928 as Les Restes de la voiture seigneuriale (no. 331).
(see The Art of William Nicholson, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy, October 2004 - January 2005, p. 153).
A smaller, less critical version of the subject Turtle Soup (private collection) was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1938, no. 20.
We are most grateful to Penelope Fussell, Archivist to the Drapers' Company, for her help in cataloguing this item.
Nichols wrote, quoting the artist, 'Painting isn't only sight, it's knowledge. In addition it is capacity to remember, a capacity at times amounting to ability. You say that you like my City Dinner. Good! I enjoyed myself very much - yes, indeed! After brief preliminary exchanges between myself and my nearest neighbours [Sir Lynden Macassey, K.B.E., K.C., LL.D., D.Sc. and Mr T. Balston], we each discovered a want of interest in the other, and I a prodigious fascination in the scene before me. I drank a bottle of very fine white wine [Forster Kirchenstuck Hock, 1921] and in due course smoked an excellent cigar, and all the while I was enjoying these I gazed at the scene and took mental notes until I had it all by heart - until, in fact, I'd painted the scene in my head. When I got back to ATY [Apple Tree Yard], where I then lived, I didn't go to bed, but set to at once and got the substance of the thing down. Do you like it? Yes, I consider it a rare success'.
It seems likely that Nicholson had been invited as a guest of the Company with a view to a possible portrait commission, probably that of the Clerk to the Company, Sir Ernest Pooley. One of his former sitters, Earl Peel (1915, Guildhall Art Gallery) was also a guest of the Company that evening, but no commission resulted and Pooley's portrait was painted in 1937 by Richard Jack, R.A. 'The very spirit of wealthy pomp and gluttony ...' declared The Times, 2 January 1942, p. 2, reviewing Nicholson's retrospective at the National Gallery. One aspect of Nicholson's enjoyment of the scene is that while he has deprived most of the diners of their faces, he has yet managed to give them all distinct personalities.
Such was Nicholson's enthusiasm to commit the subject to canvas that he seems to have painted over an earlier work The Last of the Colonel's Brougham, which was exhibited at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928 as Les Restes de la voiture seigneuriale (no. 331).
(see The Art of William Nicholson, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy, October 2004 - January 2005, p. 153).
A smaller, less critical version of the subject Turtle Soup (private collection) was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1938, no. 20.
We are most grateful to Penelope Fussell, Archivist to the Drapers' Company, for her help in cataloguing this item.