Edward Wadsworth

Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
Peyton Skipwith Esq.
Belgrave Gallery, London
The Mayor Gallery, London
Ivor Braka, London, from whom acquired by David Bowie, 12th October 1993

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, An Exhibition of Tempera Paintings by Edward Wadsworth, 23rd May - 8th June 1929, cat. no.23;
London, Belgrave Gallery, Masters of Modern British Painting 1890 - 1945, 8th - 30th September 1977, cat. no.12, illustrated n.p. (as Drill, Shell and Book by Sea);
London, Albemarle Gallery, Post Vorticism, March - April 1992, cat. no.61 (details untraced).

Barbara Wadsworth, Edward Wadsworth, Michael Russell Publishing, Salisbury, 1989, no.W/A 110;
Jonathan Black, Edward Wadsworth: Form, Feeling and Calculation, Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2005, cat. no.258, illustrated p.182.

Not viewed out of the frame. There are several small losses around the extreme outer edges of the panel, most likely as a result of frame abrasion, most apparent along the left and upper edges. There is a fine vertical line of cracking at the centre of the lower horizontal edge, and there is an area of uneveness to the board in the lower left corner, and also several extremely fine lines of craquelure. There is some light surface dirt and some speckles of matter. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some scattered retouching around the edges of the work with a few scattered flecks elsewhere. The work is presented in a gilt wooden frame, held under glass. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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From the early 1920s Edward Wadsworth developed his mature style by mixing his own colours in tempera, and Au Revoir is a prime example of his mastery of the medium. It allowed him to create starkly lit and precisely painted marine landscapes and maritime still lives within a Surrealist vein, much as Giorgio de Chirico, with whom Wadsworth corresponded over technique, used tempera for similar effect to create his eerie metaphysical Italianate cityscapes.  

Wadsworth’s enthusiasm for maritime subjects was prevalent even while he was working within the context of Vorticism, with his ‘dazzle’ pattern camouflage being applied to over 2,000 ships during the First World War and the virtues of ports and shipping were excitedly proclaimed in Blast and woodcuts such as The Port (Tate, London). However in applying these motifs to enigmatic and mysterious still lives such as Au Revoir, Marine Set (2) Aubade (sold in these rooms, 11th July 2013, lot 2) and Regalia (Tate, London) Wadsworth was able to develop an entirely new pictorial vocabulary which rivalled the work of the leading continental exponents of this Surrealist style, Pierre Roy and De Chirico.

Wadsworth had a collection of maritime ephemera, ranging from objects of natural history to modern nautical machinery, which he would paint from life in his studio. After being invalided out of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during the First World War, Wadsworth put his newly inherited wealth to use by travelling to France and Italy where the landscape and scenery, particularly of St. Tropez and Marseilles, were of great inspiration. Indeed it was in Tuscany in 1921, inspired by the cool palette of the Italian Primitives, that he first experimented with tempera. Au Revoir is a notable example for the combination of both still life and landscape elements, with the beam of the lighthouse illuminating a steamship in broad daylight in a manner reminiscent of René Magritte.

Wadsworth was an important and central figure to British art in the early 20^th century, who maintained strong links to the key figures and trends on the continent, many through the Parisian dealer Léonce Rosenburg. His connections ranged from Roger Fry and the Omega workshops to Wyndham Lewis and the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, as well as Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, Ossip Zadkine and the Cubist Jean Metzinger, while after the war he contributed to the Parisian journal Abstraction-Création and, although he was not associated with the British Surrealists, was a founder-member of the avant-garde British group Unit One.