Christopher Wood

Sale, Sotheby's London, 22nd June 1994, lot 88, where acquired by the present owner

Manchester, City Art Gallery, Stock no.15598/34;
Penzance, Newlyn Art Gallery, Christopher Wood: The Last Years, 1989, cat. no.36 (as The House in the Graden, Treboul);
London, The Fine Art Society, An Exhibition to Mark the Publication of 'Christopher Wood An English Painter' by Richard Ingleby, 22nd May - 30th June 1995, cat. no.19. 

Christopher Wood 1901-1930, Redfern Gallery, London, (exhib.cat)1938, p.74;
Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood: An English Painter, Allison & Busby, 1995, illustrated pl.31.

The board is sound. There are two small spots of paint loss in the upper left corner and a few further minor spots and surface scratches in the sky around the upper left corner. There is a small area above the tree on the right-hand side where the surface may be have been worn away by the artist or is old but stable paint loss. There is another small spot of paint loss to the left of the top edge of the door frame. There are some minor areas of paint separation in the roof, window and entrance to the house, and also in the green pigments of the tree. Otherwise the work appears in good overall condition with some strong areas of impasto. Under ultraviolet some areas of pigment fluoresce in the grass near the lower right corner but these appear to be the hand of the artist; there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held under glass in a dark stained plaster frame with gilt borders; unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0)20 7293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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The Artist's Cottage, Paris depicts the small house and garden at 36 Rue Singer, on the edge of the Bois du Boulogne, where Wood briefly stayed to live and work in the run up to his exhibition at Georges Bernheim's gallery in May 1930. Having not enough paintings to fill the exhibition, Wood had agreed to share it with Ben Nicholson and in April of that year the two had travelled to Paris to make arrangements with Bernheim. 

This was a period when Wood's behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic, which is now well ascribed to his habitual use of 'dirty' opium. The effects were evident to his friends and Nicholson, concerned for his welfare, wrote to Winifred while in Paris, 'Kit needs our help...I am doing all I can to make Kit stay in Paris and chuck London and that awful life he was living there'. Bernheim seemed to agree, albeit for more commercially orientated reasons, and the house at 36 Rue Singer was found as a result. During his month there Wood painted the house twice, once by night, Little House By Night (see fig. 1), and once by day. The duality of these two pictures seems indicative of Wood's life at this time, in which his persona jostled between the sociable and carefree to the passionate and tormented. Boris Kochno, then head of the Ballet Russes with whom Wood had collaborated, wrote insightfully and poetically of Wood as a solitary artist: 'To paint he isolates himself from his friends who suspect nothing of his creative anguish, or his escape into the world of dreams' (Boris Kochno, 'A Memoir of Luna Park' in William Mason, Christopher Wood, 1979, p.32).

The use of 'dreams' evokes the mantra of the Surrealists and, certainly, much of Wood's work at this time exhibits a sense of the imagined and the mysterious such as, The Yellow Man (1930, Collection of Sir Binsley Ford) and Zebra and Parachute (1930, Private Collection) – Wood's last painting. No doubt fuelled by his use of opium, these paintings have a change of tone and suggest a new direction. Within these developments The Artist's Cottage, Paris and Little House By Night are intriguing works, which although depicting near identical viewpoints have a distinctly contrasting feel. The darkness of the latter evokes a more troubling atmosphere, which stems equally from the cards and bottle of wine upon the table and the mysterious figure in the house. In The Artist's Cottage, Paris, these are replaced by the more wholesome company of a selection of vegetables, a mug and a jug and with the return of light, one senses the return of the stable, affable Wood. The figure in the house is now a woman and one might presume this to be his friend Frosca Munster, who had begun to reappear in Wood's life at this time and was a stabilising influence.

Stylistically, the naïve elements of Wood's paintings remain delightfully present, and the still-life on the upturned table recalls the influence of Nicholson's work of the 1920s. The scratching of the picture surface was a new technique which emerged in his paintings of 1930 and gives them a distinct tone and texture.

It was not long after these two paintings that Wood moved from the house to a new location in Paris, followed by the opening of his May exhibition. His patron Lucy Wertheim bought several of his paintings, including Little House By Night. It is likely that its companion piece offered here was also on display and as such, executed in the last months before his death, it is a highly important painting within Wood's oeuvre. A wonderfully engaging work, it displays the hallmark elements of Wood's formal techniques, yet in conjunction with Little House By Night, also hints at the darker psychological tensions which were to eventually climax in his tragic death in August 1930.