Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

Leicester Galleries, London, where acquired by Miss Linden Travers, 1952
Paisnel Gallery, London, where acquried by the present owner in 2003

London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Works by Terry Frost, October 1952, cat. no.34.

The board bows very slightly. There are pin holes visible in the bottom corners and to the centre of the right hand edge. There is very minor surface dirt and possible studio detritus, with slight rubbing to some of the thicker, raised globules of impasto. There is some very minor reticulation to the black block in the bottom right hand corner, with some tiny flecks of very minor loss visible to the white impasto in the white block in the upper right hand quadrant, and the very bottom white form. This is only visible upon extremely close inspection. There is a tiny frame abrasion to the bottom left hand edge. This excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a small area of fluorescence and probable retouching to the upper left corner, with further traces of fluorescence to the black central area, and to the black bottom right corner. Housed in a thick white-painted wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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Walk along the Quay IV belongs to a body of works which marked a fundamental shift in Frost’s artistic production and established Frost as a major figure in Post-War British abstraction. Following on from Frost’s first mature abstract painting Madrigal, this series can be seen as the first fully resolved statement of the approach to painting that Frost would adhere to for the rest of his career.

On Adrian Heath’s recommendation, Frost moved to St Ives, where he met and was influenced by leading figures such as Ben Nicholson and in particular Peter Lanyon who were developing landscape-inspired abstraction. Lanyon’s physical involvement in the landscape was to be a key influence on Frost’s work:

‘Peter would drive me all over the place … he taught me to experience landscape … so that you knew what was above and below you, and what was above and below the forms you were going to draw…’ (the Artist, Interview with David Lewis, December and October 1991).

Frost was simultaneously studying at Camberwell School of Art (visiting his family in Cornwall as much as possible). Here, he was exposed to another artistic strand of thought, influenced by Victor Pasmore and Heath, who introduced him to constructivist art and the theories surrounding the Golden Section. This simultaneous exposure to, and friendships within, the two major emerging strands of British abstraction were key to establishing the unique position that is held by Frost’s art.

In Walk Along the Quay IV, Frost has successfully brought together these two distinct approaches to abstraction. Inspired by early morning walks along Smeaton's Pier, he has expressed in this work, the sense of space and movement found in the harbour by using sophisticated geometrical relationships to suggest the familiar forms and shapes of the rocking boats, whilst never actually offering us pictorially identifiable references. The appearances of semi-circles in this work which echo the shapes of the boats, curves of ropes, and the gentle waves of the harbour were to become the standard vocabulary of Frost’s later works. He described the genesis of the series:

‘… Walk Along the Quay was a genuine discovery. How was I to paint the experiences I was having in this locked harbour?... Really I just enjoyed the scene at first, then I could not help "seeing" all that was going on … my feet felt and saw all the shapes of the boats tied up … Everything was happening below me so I think for the first time I managed to paint up the canvas or along the canvas, like I walked along the quay, in fact I just walked up the canvas with paint’ (from Terry Frost’s notes on the St Ives years, reprinted in David Lewis, Terry Frost, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1994, p.49).

This work, therefore, sits at the center of the debate between the experience-influenced abstracted images of the St Ives painters and the geometric work of the Constructivists. By 1955 artists from both camps were exhibiting alongside each other at the Redfern Gallery in 9 Abstract Artists, in which we can see the rigorously non-representational work of Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin and Anthony Hill alongside the more allusive painting of Frost, Roger Hilton and William Scott.

The first owner of this work was Linden Travers (1913-2001), an actress, most well-known for staring in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1939); she was also a passionate painter and after retiring from acting she settled in Cornwall.