Julian Trevelyan, R.A.

London, Bloomsbury Gallery, Julian Trevelyan and Ursula Darwin, 1934, no.1;
London, Royal College of Art, Julian Trevelyan Retrospective, 1998, no.1, illustrated in the catalogue.

Original canvas. There are two sensitively applied patches to the reverse; a long patch, approx. 5in. long to the right of the central stretcher bar and a small patch to the bottom left of the central stretcher bar. A fine line of retouching approx 2in. long, corresponding to the long patch, is just visible to the light blue form in the centre of the composition and there is a small area of surface craquelure, corresponding to the small patch, to the pink form in the bottom centre. There are some very minor scattered fine line of surface craquelure otherwise in good overall condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under UV light, there is a small line of retouching approx 2in long to the aforementioned area in the centre and a further spot in the bottom centre. Held in a painted wood frame under glass; unexamined out of frame.
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To Break a Butterfly was executed in 1933 whilst Trevelyan was still living in Paris before he returned to London the following year. His autobiography gives a somewhat breathless account to the artistic life of the French capital, but from the mass of anecdote, useful details emerge to illuminate the painting. Early in his time in Paris, Trevelyan met Stanley William Hayter in whose studio, Atelier 17, he seems to have become a kind of studio assistant. Not only was this to have far-reaching effects in terms of Trevelyan's long-term love of the printed medium, but it also gave him access to a studio where during his time there, he would have seen Picasso, Miro, Ernst, Calder, Giacometti and Kokoschka, among others, at work. For an artist in his early twenties, Trevelyan made surprisingly sensible use of these examples and whilst he acknowledges their influence,  the images keep a voice of their own (compare also lot 37).

In the present work, Trevelyan focuses on a variety of energetic forms that are reminiscent of Hayter's abstraction (compare lots 62, 63 and 65) whilst also suggestive of the influence of Henry Moore. However, although the handling is definitively avant-garde, the title, To Break a Butterfly..., stems from Trevelyan's passion for eighteenth and early nineteenth century English literature and more specifically from Alexander Pope's An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot:

Let Sporus tremble - What? That thing of silk
Sporus that mere white Curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
You let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose Buzz, the witty and the Fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys.