Mary Swanzy, H.R.H.A. 1882-1978

(Probably) Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Mary Swanzy, 1925, no.2 (of 14 Samoan scenes, as Jeunes Filles et Bananiers);
London, Pyms Gallery, An Exhibition of Paintings by Mary Swanzy, H.R.H.A., 1882-1978, 1996, no.46, illustrated in colour in the catalogue by Dr Julian Campbell.

Mary Swanzy made her way to Samoa via Eastern Europe, around 1924. She also visited Hawaii, and was generally inspired at this time by both the island exotica that she experienced at first hand, and by the Tahitian ideal famously espoused by Gauguin. Her palette, on return to Grasse in the south of France by 1926, had imbued some of the heat of these climes. It is perhaps difficult, from a current perspective, to give Swanzy credit for the spirit she must have possessed to travel the interwar world so freely as an Irish woman in her early forties.

Paul Gauguin had spent some of his boyhood years in Peru, and also visited Panama and Martinique, before finally settling in Tahiti. It was there that he painted Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), which shows a closely comparable scene to Swanzy’s own Samoan view. Gauguin wrote of Ia Orana Maria to Daniel de Monfried in March 1892:
   ‘I have… made a painting, size 50 canvas. An angel with yellow wings points out Mary and Jesus, both Tahitians, to two Tahitian women, nudes wrapped in pareus, a sort of cotton cloth printed with flowers that can be draped as one likes from the waist. [There is] a very somber [sic] mountainous background and flowering trees, [also] a dark violet path and an emerald green foreground, with bananas on the left – I’m rather happy with it’ (quoted by Colta Ives, The Lure of the Exotic, Gauguin in New York Collections, Metropolitan Museum of Art with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002, p.83).

The elder artist believed very strongly in himself as being ‘different’, a ‘savage’. Once he discovered his painting ability, he was determined that his work would likewise require new forms that this ‘difference’ might be expressed. Swanzy was pushing new and different forms thirty years later. A committee member of the Salon des Independents since 1920 her vehicle of choice was a distinctively lyrical adaptation of synthetic cubism. A frequent guest at Gertrude Stein’s Sunday soirées, Swanzy was directly exposed to works by Cézanne, Picasso and other leading French artists in the early years of the twentieth century. The present work initially appears to have little of the schematic grid structure of her more openly cubist works, appearing to derive its visual impact from the intensity of colour and the scale of the piece overall. However, the foliage, which covers over three-quarters of the rough canvas surface, has been carefully worked. The dense, jagged vegetation interlocks in complicated layers, the emerald banana palms and cobalt and purple shadows fractured into separate planes of colour. Swanzy declared herself "stunned at how many greens there are in the world" (quoted by Julian Campbell, op.cit., p.22) and has used them to create, as one contemporary writer noticed, "a veritable nest of great green leaves" where "soon the remarkable draughtmanship is apparent".

Figures are relatively rare in the Samoan works. Although interested in watching her at work, the local girls were not so keen to pose – time spent modelling could be better spent working, and the offered financial remuneration had no real relevance within the community. It is nonetheless the Polynesian figures, here in their pink and red pareos, who suggest the most direct link with Gauguin. They are also to be seen in the Allied Irish Bank’s Samoan Scene (labelled "magnificent" by Campbell) and in the smaller La Maison Blanche (sold in these rooms, 21^st May 1998, lot 332). The remaining works from this profitable period tend to show landscapes, flowers, or white stuccoed buildings in brilliant sunlight, or shady forest interiors, in scenes that are generally unrelieved by human interest as seen here.