Percy Wyndham Lewis

The Redfern Gallery, London, where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill June 1949 for £105.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, Leicester Galleries, Paintings and Drawings by Wyndham-Lewis, December 1937, cat. no.40;
London, Redfern Gallery, Wyndham Lewis, May 1949, cat. no.121;
London, The Tate Gallery, Contemporary Art Society, The Private Collector, 23rd March - 23rd April 1950, cat. no.141;
London, The Tate Gallery, Wyndham Lewis & Vorticism, 6th July - 19th August 1956, cat. no.123;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part I- section I) cat. no.1;
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.100;
Manchester, The Manchester Art Gallery, Wyndham Lewis, 1st October - 15th November 1980, cat. no.119, pp.106-7, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, with tour to National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and City Art Centre, Edinburgh.

 

The Studio, January 1949, vol.137, p.8;
Charles Handley-Read (ed.), The Art of Wyndham Lewis, Faber and Faber, London, 1951, p.64;
Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis, Paintings and Drawings, Thames and Hudson, London, 1971, cat. no.P48, p.340, 440, illustrated pl.108;
Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000, p.410, illustrated p.413. 

The canvas has been relined. The surface has recently been cleaned. Generally the work is in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a horizontal line of retouching between the central figure and the two figures on the left. There are a few isolated spots of retouching to the edges, a tiny spot to the neck of one of the figures upper right, and one or two other tiny flecked retouchings to isolated areas of the composition. Held in a painted plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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From 1923 to 1933, the majority of Lewis' work was done in ink, watercolour or pencil on paper as he devoted himself mostly to his writing. By 1933 however, the year of the present work, Lewis decided to re-establish himself as a painter in oils: 'No-one – aside from a handful of people – has seen any work of mine, really, which represents what I am able to do in the matter of paintings,' he wrote to Sidney Schiff. The result was a body of work which he eventually exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1937, the show having been delayed by a number of years through illness. In Rude Assignment (1950), Lewis wrote that the paintings 'varied between realist fantasies and semi-abstraction.'

The imagery is certainly remarkable. Along with paintings in the series such as One of the Stations of the Dead (City of Aberdeen Art Gallery), Red Scene (Tate Collection, London) and Inferno (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), Group of Suppliants connects to his metaphysical and religious-themed ideas. The content can be broadly linked to the narrative of his novel about the afterlife, The Childermass (1928), which he followed up after 1945 with two more volumes that together formed his trilogy The Human Age, published in the 1950s a few years before his death. Drawing upon such themes, the huddled gathering of surreal characters in Group of Suppliants evokes the shadowy, mysterious realm of the underworld. It appears to depict the newly dead on their arrival at the River Styx, their faces expresions of bewliderment and fear. The eerie atmosphere is heightened by the dark, subterranean colours which contrast with the sharp highlights.

In the Preface to the catalogue of his 1956 Tate Retrospective, Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, Lewis wrote about his ambitions for these paintings: 'I had at all times the desire to project a race of visually logical beings...My creatures of that kind served a visual purpose. They were not created as we create characters in a book, but with some purely visual end in view. If I had given them a name it would have been monads.'

We are grateful to the Wyndham Lewis Society for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.