Yellow Estuary Landscape

細節

John Craxton, R.A. (b. 1922)
Yellow Estuary Landscape
signed and dated 'Craxton 43' (upper left)
black crayon and coloured chalk
15 x 19¾ in. (38.1 x 50.2 cm.)

來源

Purchased by Sir Colin Anderson at the 1944 exhibition.

出版

New Road, 1944, illustrated.

展覽

London, Leicester Galleries, John Craxton, May 1944, no. 7.
C.E.M.A., Contemporary Watercolours and Gouaches, 1945, no. 8.
London, Tate Gallery, The private collector: An exhibition of pictures and sculpture belonging to members of the Contemporary Art Society, March - April 1950, no. 30 as 'Yellow Estuary'.
Wakefield, City Art Gallery, Personal Choice: paintings from nine private collections, March - April 1953, no. 18.
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, John Craxton paintings and drawings 1941-1966, January - Feburary 1967, no. 105.

注意事項

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

拍品專文

Yellow Estuary Landscape was executed during the year that Craxton accompanied Sutherland and Peter Watson to St. David's Head in Pembrokeshire. Craxton comments, 'There were cloudless days and the land was reduced to basic elements of life: rock, fig trees, gorse, the nearness of sea on all sides, a brilliant clear light. Everything was stripped away - all the verbiage, that is - to the essential sources of existence. Sitting and talking there one day with Peter Watson, I was told that the landscape was like Greece, and this was possibly the crystallization of my desire to travel to Greece' (Exhibition catalogue, John Craxton paintings and drawings 1941-66, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967, p. 6).

The present work, which is close in composition to the oil of the same date, Tree Root in a Welsh Estuary (private collection), demonstrates the influence that Sutherland had on Craxton at this time and also his debt to Samuel Palmer. Malcolm Yorke comments, 'In these works he has moved beyond his apprentice stuggles to record exact appearances and textures towards deriving art from his own fantasies and his studies of other artists. The plant forms in his works now swarm with jungle fecundity, develop conical branches or leaves like sickles, and instead of Palmer's top-heavy wheat, things like skittles or knife-blades pierce through the earth' (see The Spirit of Place Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, London, 1988, p. 310).