Ceri Richards

Acquired directly from the Artist and thence by descent to the previous owner
Their sale, Christie's South Kensington, 21st March 2013, lot 80, where acquired by the present owner

Unexamined out of frame. The canvas has been relined. There is craquelure throughout the composition, including in the form of stretcher bar marks down the right hand edge and along the bottom edge. This excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals areas of fluorescence and retouching to the extreme edges, most probably in line with a previous frame abrasion; to the pale blue pigment in the lower left hand quadrant and in the form of an 'H' shape to the centre of the left hand edge which may be an old repair, with further minor traces visible elsewhere. These have all been executed in a very sympathetic manner. Housed behind glass in a thick white wooden frame, set within a grey mount. Unexamined out of frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Like all artists who forged their identities in the 1920s, Ceri Richards found inspiration in the literary and artistic scene of Paris, mainly vicariously through publications, such as Minotaure, which he took from its very first issue, with a Picasso collage on the cover.

As such, he was familiar with Surrealism, long before Roland Penrose engineered bringing the International Surrealist Exhibition to London in 1936 and long before Richards himself acquired Max Ernst's The Bride of the Wind, which he owned from 1938 to 1953. It is often said that the British never really took to Surrealism – the phosphorent effect of the 1936 exhibition foundering on our native philistinism, before being finally snuffed out by the War. In many ways, however, Surrealism did have a profound effect on British art over the next decade,  albeit re-cast in the native, vernacular form that came to be known as ‘Neo-Romanticism’,  a deeply  poetic take on the English landscape that gave nature a shape-shifting quality, a Surreal metamorphosis into something alive with human intent.   

In Richards’s work, this spirit of transformation is allied to his love of the poetry of Dylan Thomas, whose work weaves around the magical in the everyday (long-before ‘magic realism’ appeared as a literary genre). The blurring of lines between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the magical is pure Thomas, whose work was a revelation to Richards, already searching for a language of deep psychological presence. As Mel Gooding writes 'The figure in dynamic metamorphosis – becoming rock or plant, hidden in the elemental, emergent from chaos – was to become an essential motif in Richards’s great paintings of 1944-45’ (Mel Gooding, Ceri Richards, Cameron & Hollis, 2002, p.65). Here, in The Sculptor’s Landscape, the artist / poet / dreamer becomes as one with the landscape – the physical world that is more than just a muse, but something connected, that breathes life into his work and into his very being.