John Tunnard 1900-1971

Lefevre Gallery, London, whence acquired by the family of the present owners, 29^th August 1946 for 20gns

Alan Peat and Brian A Whitton, John Tunnard: His Life and Work, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1997, no.393.

Like many British artists of the mid-century, Tunnard seems tantalisingly close to an adherence to the major movements of the time, yet he somehow always manages to retain an individualism that marks his works as something out of the mainstream.

Although for many of his contemporaries WWII caused a hiatus in their work, for Tunnard it was the period when his very particular blend of modernism, surrealism and a futuristically poetic vision of landscape came together to create a body of works that still fascinate and amaze. Always technically innovative, Tunnard perfected his manner of painting in the early 1940s, and much of what he established in these years was to remain at the core of his painting for the rest of his career.

Painting 1944 is a prime example of how this synthesis of subject and technique came together to create works that over sixty years later appear fresh and powerfully mesmeric. Using a roughly applied gesso base, this was then carved, scored, stained, rubbed back and painted, the resulting images having a three-dimensional quality it is often difficult to believe they do not actually possess. In Painting 1944, interleaving abstract shapes, some solid, some spectrally translucent, hover over an empty landscape, drawing the eye of the viewer to a white circular form that seems to rest on the horizon. Connected to the abstract forms by lines of perspective, this gently curving horizon seems oddly prescient of the images of the moon that would only become familiar a quarter of a century later. Framed on the left by a solid red border, one is left with the vaguely disquieting feeling of looking from a window onto the alien and empty landscape of another world.