Dry Bones

Details

Sam Haile (1909-1948)
Dry Bones
signed and dated 'Haile ii 37' (upper right)
oil on canvas
16 x 24 in. (40.7 x 61 cm.)

Provenance

Mrs Marianne Haile.
with Birch & Conran, London.

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, Sam Haile, London, Birch & Conran, October - November 1987, no. 2, illustrated. Exhibition catalogue, I Surrealisti, Milan, Palazzo Reale, May - September 1989, p. 467, illustrated.

Exhibited

London, Birch & Conran, Sam Haile, October - November 1987, no. 2. Milan, Palazzo Reale, I Surrealisti, May - September 1989, not numbered.
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Die Surrealisten, November 1989 - February 1990, not numbered.
Aldeburgh, Peter Pears Gallery, Festival Exhibition, June 2006, no. 23.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Sam Haile was born in London in 1909. He left school at the age of fifteen, and worked for several years in a shipping firm, while attending evening classes at Clapham School of Art. In 1930, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art to study painting and later transferred to the pottery school under Staite Murray (see lots 126-128). He was to become actively Surrealist between 1937-39. Dry Bones was painted at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The war brought strong fears of the likelihood of a Second World War and Haile depicts a gruesome manifestation of destruction and death with rotting corpses strewn out over a deserted plain. The bones themselves, entwined with the legs of a giant tarantula, take on the organic forms of his pottery.

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