At the young age of 20, Christopher Wood left his home in rural Northern England for Paris, undoubtedly the cultural capital of the avant garde of early twentieth century Europe. A metropolis of artists, writers, intellectuals and in many cases émigrés, Wood fully immersed himself in this thriving creative centre and it would have a lasting impact on his artistic production for the rest of his life. Though Wood immersed himself in the hedonism of Paris, he remained nonetheless susceptible to the allure of the rural idyll. In part inspired by fellow artists before him such as Paul Gauguin, he was equally attracted to the secluded and seemingly authentic way of life found in the remote and isolated regions, largely untouched by modernity. The two divergent strands of Wood’s life – the artist at the heart of the avant-garde social and artistic circles of sophisticated Paris and the thoughtful recluse who longed for the simplicity and peace of the rustic life – synthesized when Wood discovered Tréboul in Brittany in the summer of 1929 and to where he returned the following summer.
‘I sit on the green grass banks above the sea each evening which becomes like a lake, pale blue like milk and lovely ivory-coloured sailing ships go past very slowly…I can’t tell you the beauty of this place with dark fir trees and the little white houses like jewels, the curious faces of the people like Holbein’s drawings, there is such dignity and compactness about everything.’
Wood was profoundly inspired by the wild, romantic landscape of cliffs and surging seas, the rituals and rites of Breton Catholicism and culture and the perilous, noble existence of the local fishermen. He produced during this period some of his most important works, including Building the Boat, Tréboul (Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge), Sleeping Fisherman, Ploaré, Brittany (Laing Art Gallery), and Nude Boy in a Bedroom (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), as well as the present work.
'This is a nice place, you would like the boats, for they only sail here and the big ones are wonderful with their brown sails... The place is very like St Ives. In fact everything here looks like Cornwall, which makes me want to be back there again with you'
White Yacht off the Breton Coast was produced just as Wood was reaching artistic maturity, a distillation of everything he had been exposed to throughout his travels. Wood’s untimely death aged 30, the year after the present work was painted, has made him one of the most enigmatic and heroic figures of 20th Century British art, a tragic and romantic talent, who killed himself whilst in the midst of an opium addiction just as the wider world was taking note of his artistic gifts. Commentary on Wood’s legacy has encompassed both the salacious, notably as one subject of Sebastian Faulks’s The Fatal Englishman, and serious academic and commercial appreciation, including a major retrospective at Pallant House Gallery in 2016.