Ian Fairweather

The Redfern Gallery, London, where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill 27th October 1948 for £21.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, The Redfern Gallery, Patrick Heron - Ian Fairweather, 28th October - 20th November 1948, cat. no.29;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part IV- section 4) cat. no.5;
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.32.

 

The sheet is sound, is undulating and has not been laid down. There are scattered small isolated areas of craquelure to the thicker paint in all four quadrants. In some cases the paint has begun to lift (near the centre in the lower left quadrant). In other cases, for example, to the off pigment just left of the lifting, the paint appears to have flaked and has been repainted. Held under glass in a painted wood frame with a white mount. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Fairweather first visited Shanghai in 1929 and remained in the area until 1932, visiting the Lake Country – Hangzhou (Hangchow), Huzhou (Huchow) and Suzhou (Suchow) – before heading north to Peking in 1933. It was the beginning of an extensive taste for travelling – through East Asia, Indonesia, India and Australia, where he was to principally settle – that defined both his life and art. He developed a fascination for the culture and art of these countries, and the result was a remarkably broad and independent body of work, which expressed these new found influences coupled with hints of Post-Impressionism and Cubism  from his European heritage.

Fairweather's first visit to China was to be his longest period there. It was an important consolidative experience and he wrote of the Chinese: 'everything about them, their customs, their personalities, seemed to me to be worth absorbing.' Drawing upon these memories in the mid-1930s, Fairweather translated the sights of the crowds in the markets, the tea-houses, China's canals and mountains, its villages, temples and bridges onto canvas in vibrant, evocative paintings.

Located on the West Lake, the legendary pink city of Hangzhou, with its cluster of courtyards, walls and temples left a lasting impression upon Fairweather. In Hangchow Canal, he evokes the scene in swift, swirling brushstrokes and brilliant flashes of colour which pays homage to the Chinese proverb: 'In heaven there is paradise, on earth Suchow and Hangchow.' After increasing tensions between China and Japan, in 1933 Fairweather fixed his eyes upon Australia as his next destination, in part because of an 'intimation never to go back on the way I have come.' The influence of the country was to remain however, as Murray Bail wrote, 'China established itself as the source of a great nostalgia that Fairweather was to translate and investigate in his art for the remainder of his long life.'