catalogue · lords, tennis at wimbledon, the aldershot tattoo via green line bus, football fixtures...

Printed from 3 blocks in Chinese orange, spectrum red and Prussian blue. Signed, titled and numbered upper right from the edition of 50 Coppel SA 13

From 3 blocks in venetian red, viridian & Chinese blue. Signed,titled & numbered TP1 (Trial Proof), aside from the edition of 60 Ref: SA 24 Provenance: Redfern Gallery Private Collection, UK Osborne Samuel

Catalogue SPRING MASTERS 2014

In Full Cry, 1931

Linocut 29 x 42 cm (11½ x 16½ in)

Sybil Andrews (1898-1992)

Bringing in the Boat, 1933

Linocut 33.5 x 26 cm (13¼ x 10¼ in)


Printed from 4 blocks in chrome yellow, spectrum red, permanent blue & Chinese blue. Signed, titled & numbered lower left in pencil from the edition of 60 Ref:Coppel SA28 Provenance: Private Collection, Canada Osborne Samuel

Printed from four blocks in raw sienna, venetian red, permanent blue & Chinese blue. Signed, dated & numbered from the edition of 60 Ref: Coppel SA29 Provenance: Private Collection, USA Osborne Samuel Literature: Linocuts of the Machine Age, Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, illustrated in colour on the cover and in black & white p.114 Andrews, together with Cyril Power and Lill Tschudi, formed the core of an informal group that learned the art of linocutting under Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London’s Pimlico district during the late 1920s and 1930s. Andrews came to London from Bury St Edmunds with her friend and companion Cyril Power in the early 1920s. They shared a studio in Brook Green in Hammersmith and worked alongside each other for many years until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Andrews’ subjects mostly depicted the labours of man and religious themes. However, sporting subjects were also an integral part of her oeuvre. Flight encouraged his students to visit sporting venues and capture the swirling curves and dynamism of sporting people. In this famous linocut, used as the cover of Stephen Coppel’s definitive book Linocuts of the Machine Age, we see three masked and helmeted speedway riders, the very essence of the ‘machine age’, aerodynamically crouched, arms outstretched and taut on the handlebars heading straight at the viewer. The year before this linocut was made, Andrews and Cyril Power were commissioned by the legendary Frank Pick who was chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, now Transport for London, from its creation in 1933 until 1940, to produce highly innovative posters for sporting venues reached via London Transport underground stations or buses. These were made under the nom de plume Andrew-Power and included iconic posters for cricket at the Oval and Lords, tennis at Wimbledon, the Aldershot Tattoo via Green Line Bus, football fixtures for Saturday afternoon matches in London and for the Derby at Epsom. Andrews’ linocuts of the 1930s are highly sought after by collectors in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They are in major museum collections including the British Museum, the National Gallery of Australia and Glenbow Museum, Calgary; impressions of Speedway are in the collection of museums in the USA, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Flower Girls, 1934

Linocut 24 x 21.8 cm (9½ x 8½ in)


Speedway, 1934

Linocut 32.6 x 23.3 cm (12¾ x 9¼ in)


Oil and wax on linen

Oil and wax on linen

Signed lower right Provenance: Private Collection, UK

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Laden, 2013

166 x 200 cm (65¼ x 78½ in)

Brendan Burns

Quiver, 2014

164 x 200 cm (64½ x 78½ in)

Brendan Burns

Composition:Red & Black, c.1965

Gouache 36.8 x 27.9 cm (14½ x 11 in)

Alexander CALDER (1898-1976)

Provence: Redfern Gallery, London Private Collection, UK (Purchased from the above 1969)

Steel and sheet steel rusted & varnished, 1976-1977 Provenance: Private Collection, Switzerland Galerie Marwan Hoss, Paris Osborne Samuel Since his seismic shift away from expressively modelled bronze figures towards an abstract welded steel idiom at the turn of the 1960s Caro developed his sculpture in an unflinchingly architectonic and post-cubist direction. The spur to this sudden change was a revelatory first trip to the United States where the English sculptor encountered New York School artists such as Kenneth Noland and David Smith and, decisively, gained the lifelong support of the influential art critic Clement Greenberg. Early steel compositions such as Twenty Four Hours (1960) and Early One Morning (1962) established Caro’s reputation at the artist’s groundbreaking Whitechapel Art gallery exhibition in 1963. The new sculpture seemed to defy space and gravity, the heavy material of industrial steel cantilevered, constructed and made to appear weightless. The influence of Picasso’s metamorphic wit, Miro’s whimsy and Gonzalez’s biomorphic poetry variously made its presence felt although Caro’s immediate challenge, both in an ideological and stylistic sense, was to address the lessons of Henry Moore - in whose studio he had worked as an assistant in 1953 - and Smith, from whose Bolton Landing workshop in the United States Caro would inherit steel stock after the American’s death in 1965. The elegant rhythms and flowing lyricism of the large coloured sculptures Orangerie and Sun Feast (1969) set a benchmark for Caro to react against during the 1970s and beyond. In 1970 the New York Times critic Hilton Kramer spoke of the artist, “having totally mastered a new and difficult area of sculptural syntax - Caro is now permitting himself a freer margin of lyric improvisation.” Soon after Caro relinquished the decorative device of colour to rely increasingly on the intrinsic colour and raw substance of rusted and varnished steel. The important piece Ordnance (1971) also heralded a new rectilinearity which incorporated the table or supporting plinth, a la Brancusi, into his sculptural language. Sculpture was thereby directly returned to the floor plane in the manner of his innovatory early constructed sculpture. In this context the title Floor Piece is rhetorical, showing up Caro’s environmental, architectural and formalist criteria. The slanting composition is a compromise between vertical and horizontal orientations, the semi-transparent steel mesh - first seen in New York MOMA’s Source (1967) - joining with an adjacent triangular gap to open up the jumbled planar ensemble to the surrounding space. Despite its compositional intricacy Floor Piece has a calligraphic gestalt, a letter-like morphology that imparts the look of effortless improvisation belied by the realities of the heavy industrial process of its making.

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Untitled, 1967

Gouache on paper 107 x 73.5 cm (42 x 29 in)

Alexander CALDER (1898-1976)

Floor Piece C 89, 1976

92.7 x 128.3 x 88.9 cm (36½ x 50½ in)

Sir Anthony Caro

Edition of 6 Reference: Farr & Chadwick 314

Literature: Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p.155, published by Lund Humphries, no. 314 Koster-Levine (1988), 46 (in colour) Exhibited: Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover (with Kenneth Armitage), Apr. - May 1960 (another cast)

Provenance:

Private Collection, USA

Osborne Samuel, UK

Edition of 8 Cast by Burleighfield 1973 Reference: Farr & Chadwick 675S

Provenance:

Private Collection, Canada

Osborne Samuel, UK

Literature: Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p.290, published by Lund Humphries, no. 675s

Exhibited: Arte Contacto Galeria de Arte, Caracas (in collaboration with Marlborough Gallery, New York), Mar. 1975 (another cast)

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Stranger VII, 1959

Bronze 100 x 76 x 20 cm (39¼ x 29¾ in)

Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003)

Maquette IV Two Reclining Figures, 1973

Bronze 21 x 40 x 30 cm (8¼ x 15¾ in)


Edition of 8 Reference: Farr & Chadwick 772 Literature: Lynn Chadwick Sculpture, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p.320, published by Lund Humphries, no.772

Edition of 9 Cast by Pangolin, 1987 Reference: Farr & Chadwick C44

Provenance:

Private Collection, USA

Osborne Samuel, UK

Literature: Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p.361, published by Lund Humphries, no. C44

Exhibited: Galeria Freitas, Caracas, May 1988 (another cast)

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Walking Cloaked Figures II, 1978

Bronze 29 (H) cm (11½ in)


Maquette IX Walking Woman in Wind, 1986

Bronze with black patina 21.9 x 15.8 x 15.2 cm (8½ x 6¼ in)


Edition of 9 Cast by Pangolin in 1986 Reference: Farr & Chadwick C45S

Provenance:

Private Collection, UK

Osborne Samuel, UK

Literature: Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p. 361, published by Lund Humphries, no. C45

Exhibited: Galeria Freitas, Caracas, May 1988 (another cast) The small maquette ‘Walking Woman in Wind’ was made after Chadwick had turned 70. At a stretchthe image of a walking figure with the wind behind her could almost be a metaphor for the artist’sthen senior position as an internationally acclaimed and commercially very successful sculptor with awealth of background and experience behind him. Soon after, throughout the first half of the 1990s,Chadwick produced no fewer than 70 new sculptures, entertaining novel postural arrangements andanimations. This was an Indian summer and it gave him scope to investigate new ideas or tomodulate old themes. Farr contends that Chadwick “had always been intrigued by movement, eitheractual or implied. From his early mobiles to his dancing ‘Teddy Boy and Girl’ series of the 1950s tohis cloaked walking women with windswept hair of the 1980s, he had explored figures in motion”.

In many respects, Chadwick’s late career follows Moore’s in opting for an undistracted studioexistence in which the steady flow of new work continued unabated. Free from the distractions of citylife, Chadwick lived to work, aided by his wife Eva and an elegant and tranquil environmentconducive to creativity and industrious purpose. Farr explains how “up to his 82nd birthday, when hiseyesight and physical powers began to decline, he remained vigorously active”. He turned 82 in1986, so that the small ‘Walking Woman in Wind’ is among late works making up the final productiveflourish.

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Maquette X Walking Woman in Wind, 1986

Bronze 26 x 16 x 9 cm (10¼ x 6¼ in)


Edition of 9 Cast by Pangolin Editions in 1988. Reference: Farr & Chadwick C52 Provenance: Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg (aquired from the artist in 1989) Acquired from the above Osborne Samuel, UK Literature: Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p.363, published by Lund Humphries, no. C52 Exhibited:

Galeria Freitas, Caracas, May 1988 (another cast)

Edition 2/9 C79s

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Sitting Woman in Robes I, 1987

Bronze 33 x 33 x 38 cm (13 x 13 in)


Back to Venice (Small Version II), 1988

Bronze 63.5 x 76 x 53 cm (25 x 29¾ in)


Signed, titled and dated twice on the reverse Reference: SF78-177 Provenance Galerie Kornfeld und Klipstein, Bern Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1983 Osborne Samuel Exhibited Bern, Galerie Kornfeld, Sam Francis: Ausstellung Ölbilder und farbige Zeichnungen von 1976-1983, 1983 Following his early studies in the sciences and serving in the armed forces in World War II, Sam Francis began to paint in earnest in 1945 and quickly became influenced by the major figures of American Abstract Expressionism such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Whilst Francis is now located within a loosely associated group of second generation Abstract Expressionist painters, much of his career was spent in Paris, Japan and Germany, which distinguished his work stylistically from his American peers and gained him an international appeal and following.

Francis’s work of the 1970s is characterised by a more concerted use of structure, based around a formal grid. In the present piece Francis has created this structure by applying broad strokes of a base colour with a wet roller, before building up bold colour with pools and splatters of paint. Francis described this use of colour as follows: ‘I prefer to think of colours in relation to each other, rather than just one colour at a time. So, even very small amounts of colour related to large amounts of another have a very curious and mysterious relationship set up the minute you start using colour; I'm working with that all the time and I think about it and dream about it and read about it and I've studied it all my life.’

Colour became central to Francis’s work following his move to Paris in the early 1950s. Much like his peer Joan Mitchell who also moved to Paris from the United States, Francis found fresh inspiration and a new release of colour in the work of Monet, Bonnard and Cezanne. As with all of Francis’s mature work, in this painting blank areas of white paper are left as an active part of the overall composition. This aspect of his work derives from his study of Zen Buddhism whilst in Japan that teaches of the void or absence as inherent in all phenomena.

As the title suggests, the work was created in Bern, where the artist had one of his studios.

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Untitled, 1978

Acrylic on paper 35.5 x 50.5 cm (14 x 19¾ in)

Sam Francis (1923-1994)

Signed & dated verso Ref: SF79-283 Provenance: Gimpel-Hanover & Andre Emmerich Galerien, Zurich Osborne Samuel Exhibited: Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 'Kunst Nch '45 Frankfurter Privatbesitz, 1983 Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 'Sam Francis' 1981

To be cast in a bronze edition of 6

From the edition of 6 Cast stone base in five parts: 65 x 65 x 113 cm

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Untitled, 1979

Acrylic on paper 34.6 x 43 cm (13½ x 17 in)

Sam Francis (1923-1994)

The Way It Is, 2012

Ceramic, oil paint 81 x 33 x 22 cm (31¾ x 13 in)

Sean Henry ( b. 1965)

The Way It Will Be, 2012

Bronze, cast stone and oil paint 50 x 44 x 42 cm (19¾ x 17¼ in)

Sean Henry ( b. 1965)

From the edition of 7 cast from a slate model, sculpted in the same year. Signed and numbered from the edition of 7 and dated 1967 on upper surface of base. Inscribed "Morris Singer Foundry London" on side of base. Literature: Barbara Hepworth, Alan Bowness, number 454 (plate 174) The artist's cast was exhibited at Tate, 1968 and is now at the entrance to the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield This piece was cast in an edition of 7+0 from a slate model, sculpted in the same year (no. 449 in ‘The complete sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-69’ ed. Alan Bowness, Lund Humphries, London 1971) Since arriving in Carbis Bay, Cornwall as a ‘refugee’ from wartime Hampstead, Barbara Hepworth responded for the rest of her career to the wild, pagan, rock-strewn landscape of west Penwith. While her wartime ‘oeuvre’ limited sculpture, instead developing cosmopolitan constructivism with the crystal drawings and other geometric compositions, Hepworth emerged from the war with the painted spherical wood carving Pelagos investing the purism of the 1930s with oblique, symbolic references to her new environment.The streamlined pierced geometry of Pelagos persisted, re-appearing in Six Forms in a Circle, a medium-sized assembly of roughly rectangular polished bronze members on a dark circular base. The famous holes, while opening the forms to space and light in a plastic synthesis between exterior and interior surfaces, related to the pierced monoliths at Men-an-Tol and at other ancient Penwith sites. Indeed, Alan Wilkinson discusses how Hepworth, “has created a twentieth century visual equivalent of the menhirs and stone circles from prehistoric times.”1 The accommodation of such emotive and timeless anthropological themes within a language of advanced abstraction was an achievement that gave Hepworth’s international aesthetic an individual and culturally site-specific distinction. 1. Alan Wilkinson. ‘Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective’ Tate Liverpool 1994

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Six Forms on a Circle, 1967

Polished Bronze 33.7 x 60 x 60 cm (13¼ x 23½ in)

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)

From the edition of 9 Literature: Alan Bowness, "The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-9", Lund Humphries, London, 1971, Plate 185

India ink, brush, wash & charcoal on paper, laid down on paper. Signed & dated lower right Provenance: Curt Valentin Gallery, New York Joan & Lester Avnet, Great Neck M. Knoedler & Co Inc., New York Jeanne Frank, New York Estate of Max & Isabell Smith Herzstein, USA Literature: Henry Moore, Complete Drawings, 1930-39, London, 1998, vol. 2, p.114, no:AG34.15

Pencil, wax crayon, chalk, coloured crayon, watercolour wash, pen and ink Signed and dated in ink lower left Ref: HMF1538; AG40.5 Provenance: The Rita & Taft Schreiber Collection, Califorina, USA Exhibition: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 'Henry Moore in Southern California, 1973' Literature: Ann Garrould (Ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Drawings 1940-49, Volume 3, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2001, cat.no.AG 40.5, pp.22-23 (ill.b&w)

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Disc with Strings (Moon), 1969

Aluminium 45.7 x 46 x 14 cm (18 x 18 in)

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)

Seated Nude in a Wicker Chair, 1934

55.9 x 38 cm (22 x 15 in)

Henry Moore (1898-1986)

Standing Figures, 1940

Watercolour 18.1 x 26.6 cm (7 x 10½ in)


Watercolour, pen and India ink, colored wax crayons, pencil and white chalk on paper.

Signed 'Moore.', lower right and inscribed 'Seated figure.' center left; Inscribed 'Two reclining figures.' verso.

HMF 2040; AG 42.148

Provenance: Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), New York (by 1955). Erna Futter, New York; Estate sale, Christie’s, New York, 15 May 1986, lot 181. Acquired at the above sale by the late owner. Literature: Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings, with an introduction by Herbert Read, published by Lund Humphries, first published 1944, illustrated p. xxxii A Garrould, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Drawings 1940-49, London, 2001, vol. 3, p. 156, no. AG 42.148 (illustrated p.156). As its title implies this working, energetic sheet is a graphic rehearsal or blueprint for possible sculptures and contains both reclining, seated and figures with internal forms, themes which were to dominate Moore’s career. Elements hark back to the surrealist tendencies from the late 1930’s but also formal sculptural resolutions have evolved on the sheet and are familiar in works from the 1940’s onwards. The energetic application of layers of mixed media echoes the bony, taut surfaces of the sculptures. The memorable drawing ’Crowd looking at a tied-up object (1942) recalls Yves Tanguy’s ocean-bed surrealism. Ideas for Sculpture, though a set of un-related studies rather than an independent or cohesive narrative, contains a similarly elusive feeling of mystery and atmospheric flux. P D

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Ideas for Sculpture, 1942

22.5 x 17.3 cm (8¾ x 6¾ in)


Pencil, wax crayon, coloured crayon, watercolour wash, pen and ink, gouache Signed lower right in pen and ink HMF 2026; AG42.125 Provenance: Fischer Fine Art Mary Keen Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1961 Lord Cottesloe, London Private Collection, South Africa Private Collection, USA Osborne Samuel, 2013

Edition of 7 Cast at Fiorini Reference: LH1/223 Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist and thence by descent Osborne Samuel, UK In the early 1940’s Moore executed a series of terracotta studies of the Madonna and Childs as sketch models for the Madonna and Child, 1948-9 (Height 48 in) in brown hornton stone, St Peter's Church, Claydon, Suffolk.

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Standing and Seated Figures (Verso: Ideas for Sculpture), 1942

Watercolour 18.4 x 25.4 cm (7¼ x 10 in)


Madonna and Child, 1943

Bronze 14.6 x 5.5 x 6 cm (5¾ x 2¼ in)


Pencil, crayon, ink & gouache on paper Signed & dated lower right, inscribed 'Lithograph' upper centre Provenance: The Leicester Galleries, London, where purchased by Sir Eric Maclagan, May 1951 Thence by family descent Osborne Samuel Exhibited: The Leicester Galleries, London, New Bronzes and Drawings by Henry Moore , 1951, cat.no.41 Henry Moore’s vast graphic output echoed the work ethic that guided an equally prolific production of sculpture. Arguably his greatest, and certainly most famous, drawing series was the Italianate Shelter Drawings, documentary yet imaginatively improvised line and wash studies based on the sleeping families taking refuge from the wartime blitz on London Underground platforms. The war also presaged the coalminer drawings with their Barbizon-like labour postures and dramatic subterranean chiaroscuro. Then, with the return of peace and the birth of an only child, Mary, in 1946, Moore continued to develop Madonna and Child or Family Group themes, subjects that again touched a popular nerve in the optimistic, if austere, post-war climate of social reconstruction. The animated Three Female Figures contains a cryptic, interactive narrative while continuing the draped or blanketed surface rhythms of the dormant shelter figures. Moore’s drawings, with their characteristic bony textures, segmented sections and undulating lines used to describe weight, bulk and volume, are quintessentially those of a sculptor. The dramatic shading and highlighting further emphasises the play of light on solid form. The drawing was chosen as the basis for one of Moore’s earliest lithographs to be published by Cowell of Ipswich. The project was never realised and only a few trial proofs are known to exist. This mixed media drawing has the vividly modelled weight of a painting and the trio of female figures resemble the post-war classicism of his sculpture. A major show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1946) and his winning first prize at the Venice Biennale (1948) set him on course for spectacular international success. P D

Edition of 9 Numbered and stamped with the foundry mark `Noack Berlin' LH4/565 Provenance: Entwistle Gallery, UK Private Collection, USA Osborne Samuel, UK

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Three Female Figures, 1949

29 x 23.5 cm (11½ x 9¼ in)


Reclining Figure: Cloak, 1967

Bronze 15.9 x 38 x 18 cm (6¼ x 15 in)


Edition of 10 Cast by Art Bronze Foundry in London Reference: LH4/592 Provenance: The Artist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Waddington Gallery, London Annely Juda Fine Art, London (acquired from the above) Veranneman Fondation, Belgium (acquired from the above) Private Collection, Belgium Exhibited: London, Annely Juda Fine Art, From Picasso to Abstraction, 1989, no. 65, illustrated in the catalogue Literature: Henry Moore Carvings and Bronzes 1961-70 (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough Gallery Inc. & Knoedler & Co. Inc., New York, 1970, no. 36 Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, New York, 1971, no. 74, illustration of another cast p. 367 Alan Bowness, (ed.), Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1964-73, London, 1977, vol. 4, no. 592, illustrations of another cast p. 54 & pls. 108-109 Henry Moore at the Serpentine (exhibition catalogue), Serpentine Gallery and Kensington Gardens, London, 1978, illustration of the larger version pls. 18-19 Henry Moore Sculptures, Drawings, Graphics 1921-1981 (exhibition catalogue), Palacio de Velázquez, Palacio de Cristal and Parque de El Retiro, Madrid, 1981, illustration of the larger version p. 215 Franco Russoli, Henry Moore: Sculpture, New York, 1981, illustration of the larger version p. 453 William S. Lieberman, Henry Moore: 60 Years of His Art, New York, 1983, illustration of another cast p. 102 During 1968-70 Moore was involved, on a trial and error basis, in designing sculptures intended for sitting on a hill top. Ideas included Upright Motives, Maquettes for Hill Monuments, Sheep Piece, Hill Arches and Spindle Piece, the latter cast in a large 11 foot version and the smaller present variation. The art historian Alan Bowness has referred to, “the pointing beacon-like quality of this sculpture”, which makes it appropriate for sitting in an exposed, elevated, outdoor environment. It is an intriguing, almost biomorphic object and reflects Moore’s earlier involvement with surrealism and metamorphosis. The prominent pointed form is shared with several ‘oval with points’ sculptures of the same period. Moore was looking for a degree of complexity and ambiguity at this late juncture. Bowness has accordingly explained how in, “this demand for obscurity and complexity, for the work of art that will permit manifold and inexhaustible interpretations, Moore is making an implied criticism of much of the art of our time which aspires to purity and simplicity and concentration on a single element, in the manner of Brancusi.” As head of the Henry Moore Foundation after retiring as Director of the Tate Gallery in 1988, Bowness interpreted Moore’s later work as a, “paradigm of the human relationship”. Spindle Piece’s abstract sublimation of likely mother and child interactions bears out such interpretations. P. D. 1. Henry Moore. Complete Sculpture 196-73 ed. Alan Bowness. P. 16. Lund Humphries, 1977

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Spindle Piece, 1968

Bronze 83.82 x 68 x 68 cm (33 x 26¾ in)


Pencil, charcoal, grey wash, watercolour wash, chinagraph & gouache. Executed circa 1973/1977 Signed upper left & numbered '29' upper right Study for CGM 473, lithograph

Edition of 9 Cast by Fiorini in 1980 Reference: LH6/784 Provenance: Private Collection - bought directly from the artist Osborne Samuel, UK

Edition of 9 - cast by Fiorini in 1981 LH6/820 Provenance: Weintraub Gallery, New York Private Collection, USA, early 1980s Osborne Samuel

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Draped reclining figure in a landscape, 1973

17.2 x 25.4 cm (6¾ x 10 in)


Draped Mother and Child on Curved Bench, 1980

Bronze 19 x 15 x 15 cm (7½ x 6 in)


Maquette for Draped Reclining Mother & Baby, 1981

Bronze 11.5 x 20.8 x 10 cm (4½ x 8¼ in)


Signed & dated in pencil lower right margin, 'CRW Nevinson 1916' on off-white laid paper from the edition of 75 published in 'Modern War Paintings' by CRW Nevinson with an accompanying essay by PG Konody, published by Grant Richards, 1917. The book is to be sold with the print. Provenance: Private Collection, UK Osborne Samuel, UK At the outbreak of the First World War Nevinson was attracting critical attention as a committed Futurist and an avant-garde artist in London. The conflict on the Western Front suddenly provided him with something his art had lacked previously, serious subject matter. He was the son of a distinguished war correspondent, Henry Wood Nevinson (1856-1941) and this journalistic background appears to have informed the son’s approach to his art. With his father’s assistance and encouragement Nevinson joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and went to Dunkirk in November 1914, three months after the outbreak of war. As an ambulance driver, stretcher-bearer and orderly he experienced at first-hand the brutal reality of modern warfare. The wounded and dying, removed from the battlefield, lay in sheds where the medical attention available was simply unequal to the numbers of soldiers brought from the trenches. Nevinson witnessed scenes of indescribable human suffering and horror. This provided him with the ‘news story’ which the soldiers experienced but which was not widely known back in Britain. Avant-garde art had met with much adverse comment from critics in the years leading up to the First World War, but with new subject matter Nevinson began making images which struck a chord with critics and the public alike. The pictures did not attempt to show objective reality, nor to comment, nor to infer a moral judgement. Like a photo-journalist he witnessed the reality which few then had, and in a series of paintings and related prints he was amongst the first to bring back the real story, creating some of the most powerful and enduring images of the conflict. P.D.

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Returning to the Trenches, 1916

Drypoint 15.1 x 20.2 cm (6 x 8 in)

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946)

On wove paper, signed & dated in pencil lower right

Signed lower right Provenance: Private Collection 1940s Private Collection, Italy Osborne Samuel, UK The work featured was probably painted during the late spring or early summer of 1918 when Nevinson spent about a fortnight in France near St. Quentin while working for Beaverbrook’s Canadian War Memorials Scheme [CWMS]. He had been asked to paint an air battle featuring Canadian Air Ace William ‘Billy’ Bishop (1894-1956) VC, DSO & Bar, MC, DFC - the top scoring Canadian ace of the entire war with in the region of 72 kills. As Nevinson recalled in his entertainingly written, if often inaccurate memoirs, Paint and Prejudice (published in 1937) he was given the subject of Bishop by Beaverbrook’s art adviser the Hungarian-born art critic Paul G. Konody (he had written the text for Modern War a book of reproductions of Nevinson’s unofficial war art published in Decemebr 1916). However, it was not one which fully engaged Nevinson’s often fervid imagination as the artist had not actually witnessed the air combat Konody wanted him to celebrate. Nevinson was, apparently, taken up over Easter to France several times in two-seater Canadian recon aircraft of the type he had previously depicted in the oil/lithograph composition entitled Over The Lines (1918), first exhibited in March 1918 in an exhibition of Nevinson’s official war art supported by the Ministry of Information. Nevinson later recalled in his autobiography that he found that after each flight with the Canadians he began to feel distinctly unwell, experiencing fainting fits, giddiness and insomnia. He did manage to complete a canvas for the CWMS during the summer of 1918, entitled War in the Air (now in the collection of the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa) which was not judged a success when first exhibited at the Royal Academy in January 1919. This work is reminiscent of earlier compositions featuring flight such as Swooping Down on a Taube (1917) and Banking at 4,000 Feet (1917) both of which featured in his lithographic set Making Aircraft first exhibited at the Fine Art Society in London in July 1917 as part of the ‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals’ propaganda project. The featured work, as with Banking at 4,000 Feet and Over The Lines suggest in their compositions Nevinson’s fascination with the appearance of the earth far below him as he peered from an exposed cockpit, buffeted by glacially cold winds, the fingers clutching his sketchpad becoming less responsive by the second. Dr Jonathan Black

SPRING MASTERS 2014

Temples of New York, 1919

Drypoint 19.5 x 15 cm (7¾ x 6 in)


Three British WWI Bi-Planes, 1919

Oil on Canvas 72 x 92 cm (28¼ x 36¼ in)


On the artist's prepared board Signed & titled verso Provenance: The Artist's Estate Christie's London, June 2006, lot 143 Private Collection UK Osborne Samuel, UK Once again the date provides a vital clue to the circumstances of this two-coloured ink drawing of a Yorkshire wall and trees. During August 1958 Nicholson had effectively moved to Switzerland with his new German wife Felicitas Vogler whom he had married a year earlier at Hampstead Registry Office. During August 1957 the newlyweds took a busman’s honeymoon in Yorkshire, where they stayed at collector Cyril Reddihough’s house ( visiting Wharfedale and Fountains Abbey) then with art critic Herbert Read. A year later, in August 1958, the Nicholsons visited the Venice Biennale from their Ticino base. Thus this Yorkshire drawing must be based - either from memory or from thumbnail notes - on the previous year’s Yorkshire visit. Nicholson’s rhythmic contours and keen eye for idiosyncratic detail is present in a drawing of a humdrum,anonymous location. The warm beige and cool blue washes are offset by a jet black bar above, a declaratory reminder of the image as anchored to the surface of an irregularly shaped sheet of paper. Placed in a characteristic box frame this drawing assumes a concrete objecthood as much influenced by Nicholson’s thoroughgoing abstraction as by the almost ethnic example of the primitive Alfred Wallis’s shaped cardboard paintings.

On the artist's prepared board. Signed, inscribed and dated 'Ben Nicholson/April 58/(PRATO)' (on the reverse of the artist's board) Provenance: Prestons Art Gallery, Bolton. Crane Kalman Gallery, London 1983 Private Collection, UK Osborne Samuel, UK Exhibited: London, Crane Kalman Gallery, The Nicholsons, June - July 1983. Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Ben Nicholson, Chasing out something alive, July - September 2002, no. 17: this exhibition travelled to Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, October - December 2002 and Southampton, City Art Gallery, January - March 2003. Literature: J. Russell, Ben Nicholson, London, 1969, no. 84, illustrated as ‘1958 still life’. P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, p. 82, no. 62, illustrated. Exhibition catalogue, Ben Nicholson, Chasing out something alive, Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, 2002, pp. 19, 55, no. 17, illustrated.

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Aug 58 (Yorkshire), 1958

Ink and wash on paper 48.3 x 29.2 cm (19 x 11½ in)

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982)

Prato, 1958

Pencil and watercolour on paper 34 x 29.5 cm (13¼ x 11½ in)


This beautiful still life composition is poised at the interface of drawing, painting and relief-making. The characteristic goblets and beakers are arranged into cogent linear silhouettes and overlaps within a compressed and shallow cubist space. The lemon and ochre watercolour wash makes an analogy with antique stone or faded yellowing paper. The sheet itself is a scissored off square and lies flat on a dark beige piece of hardboard, the scratched, sandpapered textures of which are a palpable paraphrase from his carved or painted wood reliefs. The playful linear energy, though adhering to a figurative plan - that of representing the abiding domestic still life objects he shared as subject-matter with his father Sir William - is architectonic in character. The tilted, almost diagonal thrust of the drawn cups are anchored to the surface through four thicker lines or wedges that lend the drama of an emphatic and hierarchical chiaroscuro. This exceptional drawing is also interesting for bearing the date April 1958. The previous month Ben Nicholson, besotted with his newly acquired wife-to-be the German photographer Felicity Vogler, had left St Ives for good. In April he visited the Ticino near the Swiss/Italian border with Vogler and would settle here for the next dozen or so years. Shortly after, during the summer, Nicholson would visit the Venice Biennale and enjoy the first of many successful solo exhibitions with the prestigious Galerie Beyeler in Basel. P D

Signed 'Ben Nicholson, dated June 1960 & titled' verso

Provenance

Mr Nebel

Galleria Lorenzelli, Milan

Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich

Private collection circa 1960s

Exhibited

Milan, Galleria Lorenzelli, Ben Nicholson, 1960, no. 40, illustrated in the catalogue

Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, Ben Nicholson, 1961, no. 113

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S Audley, 1960

Oil, pencil and plaster on board 73.7 x 70.9 cm (29 x 27¾ in)


Pen & ink, ink wash, watercolour & chalk. Signed, titled & annotated with colour notes Provenance: Marlborough Fine Art, London John Piper’s study of a church at dusk is bathed in an eerie neo-romantic atmosphere. Eastleach Martin also reveals his love of English ecclesiastical architecture which the Henley-based painter prolifically recorded throughout his long and peripatetic career. Using a documentary pen and ink style to faithfully record the structures of multi-various churches, Piper in the present example adds in dark nocturnal washes against which the front of the church is contrastingly illuminated with reflected light. This typical work is a late wartime picture which, after the abstractions and collages of his 1930s work, anticipated a more documentary and architectural emphasis in his post-war ‘oeuvre’. Eastleach Martin bears several tiny inscriptions by the artist referring to colours and tones in the subject. This suggests that the picture was sketched on site and completed in the studio at Fawley Bottom, an hour’s drive away. P D

Printed from 2 blocks in venetian red & viridian. Signed in pencil lower right, unnumbered impression aside from the edition of 50 Ref: CEP 19

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Eastleach Martin, 1944

Pen & ink wash on paper 37.5 x 50 cm (14¾ x 19¾ in)

John Piper (1903-1992)

Runners, 1930

Linocut 17.4 x 35 cm (6¾ x 13¾ in)

Cyril Power (1872-1951)

Printed from 3 blocks in spectrum red, light cobalt blue & viridian. Signed, titled & numbered from the edition of 60. Ref:CEP29 Provenance: Private Collection, UK Osborne Samuel

Signed, titled and dated recto Provenance: Mayor Rowan Gallery, London Osborne Samuel, UK The diagonal bands of colour - soft, pastel -like shades - hold the surface as static compositional elements. The fleeting moment of the title does, however, suggest the fugitive and impressionistic play of light in the natural world. Such ‘organic’ references have, in Riley’s art, only the most oblique naturalistic ring, the language the famous sixties ‘Op’ artist evolved being an entirely abstract and hard edged one. The daughter of a commercial London printer, Riley spent her childhood in Lincolnshire and north Cornwall. She went on to London’s Goldsmiths College, where the draughtsman Sam Rabin instilled what Tate director John Rothenstein described in 1974 as a, “precise, linear, almost impersonal quality.”1 Inspired by the classicism of Ingres, Riley would develop her abstract language as a precise hard edged concept. The fame that attended her flickering black and white ‘Op Art’ canvases of the 1960s was belied by the struggles to find her own voice during the previous decade; an unhappy interlude at the Royal College was followed by the revelation of Harry Thubron’s Basic Design course at a Norfolk summer school and it was from these precepts that she found her formal feet. The magical optical movements of the sixties work was followed by visually inert, yet changing chromatic patterning where the English Vasarely found the vitality of colour as a primary expressive vehicle. As Bryan Robertson, her critical champion, noted in the catalogue for Riley’s 1971 Hayward Gallery retrospective, “Riley’s true space is not confined to the picture plane; it is the distance between the spectator and the canvas.”1 PD 1. Modern English Painters. John Rothenstein. p.214. Macdonald and Jane’s 1974.

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Skaters, 1932

Linocut 19.8 x 31.6 cm (7¾ x 12½ in)

Cyril Power (1872-1951)

First Study for Fleeting Moment, 1986

Gouache on paper 66.7 x 64 cm (26¼ x 25¼ in)

Bridget Riley (b. 1931)

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Mme Yseult Piopelle

Signed & dated lower right Provenance: Private collection, Portugal 1965 was a pure gouache year for Vaughan; he abandoned oil painting altogether and did not produce any paintings on canvas. The year started with one of his ‘gouache marathons’, as he called them. He worked in a frenzy, painting sometimes from morning to late evening:

July 26: 1965: The routine continues. I start the day with gouache. I have no particular idea in mind, but there is nothing else to do. After breakfast, I get out the pots and jars and rags and paper. It is quite systematized now. I have been doing it since last November. Like everything else - compulsive. And it adds up to agonised futility. Yet the effect of it is no more futile than other people’s routine. But mine is solitary. It involves no one else. I have done more gouaches that ever can be shown or sold. Yet I continue to do them because there is nothing else I can do.

By June he had painted sixty-one works and, by the end of the year, he had completed around one hundred and thirty gouaches. In April Vaughan visited Morocco with his doctor and friend, Patrick Woodcock and their trip had a profound influence on his picture making. His subject matter changed dramatically after visiting the colourful, exotic markets in Marrakesh, Taroudant and Casablanca and then driving through the Atlas mountains. Acrobats, snake charmers and horsemen were added to his list of subjects. Having witnessed women drawing water from wells, washing their clothes in rivers, Arab figures in flowing djelabas and thawbs and groups of camel drivers in cinnamon-sandy desert terrain, Vaughan immediately connected this visual vocabulary with the Biblical narratives of his childhood. On his return Vaughan painted a series of gouaches loosely based on subjects such as Cain and Abel, Tobias and the Angel, the Story of Jacob, the Golden Calf and the History of Joseph, from which this work comes. Although not a religious man, he was struck by how these narratives afforded opportunities to create for male figure groupings, landscape settings and emotionally dramatic subjects. This is the second in the series of five gouaches which make up Vaughan’s ‘History of Joseph’ series: Joseph and his Brethren, The Judgement, Holding Back, The Departure, and The Descent into the Well. It was not just his subject matter that was transformed by his Moroccan sojourn, but Vaughan’s pictorial forms also took on new configurations, all of which can be seen in Joseph and his Brethren

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Untitled, 1958

Oil on Canvas 71 x 91 cm (28 x 35¾ in)

Jean-Paul Riopelle

Joseph & his Brethren, no.2, 1965

Watercolour and gouache on paper 46 x 44.5 cm (18 x 17½ in)

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

figure and environment). His use of paint is also more fluid and eloquent. By now he was habitually using oil pastel in conjunction with Indian ink and gouache. Vigorous scumbling applied with a half-dry brush and speckled deposits of watery ink on top of oil-based pastel add to his pictorial inventions, along with translucent veils of pallid pigment. Vaughan’s economical and harmonious use of colour intensifies and concentrates the visual impact. The resulting effect is quilt-like and the tight composition is embroidered together with wandering brush-tracks. Vaughan’s Joseph and his Brethren series of gouaches were first exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in late 1965. Just after the exhibition closed he wrote in his journal:

October 3. Saturday: Show of gouache a complete failure. Disagreeable. Sold 6 out of 70. My first taste of failure…. In fact I almost decided to give up. Subjective meanderings are no good at all. Problem of what to do instead. Very hard to find any stimulus to start painting when some 64 works are about to come home to be stored somewhere.

Gerard Hastings

Signed lower right Provenance: Gordon Hargreaves Collection, UK Private Collection, UK Literature: Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings, ‘Keith Vaughan’ Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012 p.27 no.21 (illus) Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, ‘Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77’, Sanson & Co Bristol, 2012 p.54 no.AH563 (illus) Though not as common as the subject of the female bather, the genre of the male bather, nevertheless, has a long and healthy tradition in western art stretching back to antiquity. During the Renaissance, Michelangelo’s Bathers at Cascina (1504-6) was a landmark work in terms of the heroic representation of the male nude and functioned as a catalogue of poses for other creative artists to select from. In the late Nineteenth century male bathers inspired an army of painters in France, (Bazille, Cross, Cézanne, Seurat and Dufy), in America (Eakins), in Britain (Scott Tuke and Grant) and in Norway (Munch). Working within this tradition, Keith Vaughan made numerous paintings of male bathers from the time he visited the Ile de Ré and La Rochelle in 1948. In 1972 Vaughan painted six oil paintings and a number of gouaches representing bathers. The subject afforded him the opportunity to represent man and nature simultaneously, whereby the human form could be distilled and woven into the fabric of the surrounding landscape. He confined anatomical details to their essences: heads, shoulders, torsos and limbs. His anonymous, unidentified figures are therefore universalised and represent mankind (as opposed to particular individuals), naked in a natural environment. The absence of any visual clues concerning city life or urbanisation obliges the viewer to consider the human form on its own merits, disassociated from narrative and removed from social contexts. Vaughan painted many small oil panels, such as this, in his studio at Harrow Hill Cottage in Essex. During the 1960s and 70s he cultivated a garden there and dug out a secluded pond in which he and his friends regularly swam. Peter Adam recalls visiting, during the summer months of the early 1970s, to swim and have lunch. “How we all laughed and dived into that pool. Patrick Procktor and even David Hockney swam there, both of whom I drove up for visits. How free we were. We splashed about in that little natural pool and it amused Keith greatly.” Vaughan frequently took photographs of his friends in his garden and some exist of his close companions John McGuinness, Ramsay McClure and Johnny Walsh swimming and sunbathing. These date from 1972, the very year Vaughan painted Small Group of Bathers. He wrote in his journal at this time:

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Small Group of Bathers, 1972

Oil on panel 44 x 39.7 cm (17¼ x 15½ in)

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

July 1972: Lovely weather. Swimming in the pond…. I do some painting in the late afternoon…. I go into the pool, which is lovely in this hot weather…. I do nothing, except the few hours painting. Struggling with the problems which I, at least, understand…. Weather continues hot. Much plunging in the pool. Attempt painting for 2-3 hours during the day to keep sane…. What a strange period of life. Much environmental support: weather - garden - pool - food - drink…. have been painting with more conviction.

By this time Vaughan had dispensed with his earlier practice of making drawings and studies prior to tackling a painting. His procedure was more direct and his application of pigment more spontaneous. However this new-found, freer technique did not come without a price:

September 1972: Started new panel. Also new one yesterday. Both developing too quickly so that I was put out of work after about an hour & must wait ‘till they dry…. mostly palette scrapings with a knife then drawing with wet paint onto the rough textured paint.

Vaughan’s wet-in-wet method, particularly clear in Small Group of Bathers, involved dragging saturated colours through previously applied paint, often before it had dried. This produced luscious textures and a succulent consistency of pigment. The sensuous manner in which paint has been employed as an equivalent of male flesh, acts, perhaps, as a counterpart to Freud’s opulent depiction of female flesh. Gerard Hastings

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