John Wells

Estate of the Artist
Jonathan Clark & Co., London, where acquired by the present owner

London, Waddington Galleries, 1960, cat. no.37;
Tate St Ives, John Wells: The Fragile Cell, 2nd May - 1st November 1998, cat. no. 21, illustrated p.38;
London, Jonathan Clark & Co., John Wells: Reaching Beyond the World's Edge, 15th October - 7th November 2003, cat. no.11, illustrated.

Original canvas, float-mounted to reveal the extreme edges. Pin hole marks are apparent in the bottom right and left hand corners. There is a fine cracking throughout the grey/blue pigment, most noticeable in four or five fine lines in the upper left hand quadrant, as well as further areas to the top right corner, the centre of the composition and the bottom left hand quadrant. There are further small areas of fine craquelure to one or two places on the surface. Ultraviolet light reveals two very minor flecks of fluorescence and probable retouching to the extreme edges of the top left and bottom right hand corners, most probably in line with a previous framing. There are one or two isolated and very minor flecks of fluorescence and probable retouching elsewhere to the surface. Housed behind glass, and float-mounted in a thick white-washed wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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In 1945 John Wells abandoned his medical career to become an artist, and the body of work that followed reveals his own distinct contribution to the post-war British artistic landscape; one that combines his own particular interests, a methodical approach which owes much to his medical background and a sensitive response to the theories of Constructivist art encountered through his friendships with Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth during the war years.

This important work belongs to the key period when Wells had made the commitment to paint full time and was establishing himself as a promoter of modern art in St Ives, becoming a founding member of the Crypt Group in 1946 and exhibiting alongside Nicholson, Hepworth and Lanyon in 1947. The debt to Gabo and the exploration of constructive principles, concerned as much with illuminating the interior structures of a sculpture as the exterior, is clearly evident in Structure in Oval, 1947. The oval, which Wells termed his ‘pebble form’, exposes a constructive angular armature which reveals the interior properties that define its contours. Wells employed the pebble form in several paintings, seen at its purest in Blue Oval, 1946 (Private Collection, France). Gabo shared a similar enthusiasm for this shape with its ‘infinite potential for variation’, and he collected pebbles as subjects for his own work from the beaches around St Ives. Wells reveals the mystery of this organic form in a letter to Sven Berlin in 1945:

‘All around are rocks and stones, sea weed, cuttle bones, corks, driftwood, salty pools and air and light. Each stone when you consider it is shaped by elemental forces acting over countless ages on the inherent structure which was perhaps laid down when the earth first crystallised from flaming gasses, so I do not despise the smallest stone’ (quoted in Matthew Rowe, John Wells: The Fragile Cell, 1998, exhibition catalogue, p.14).

This emotional and intuitive response to nature is embodied in Structure in Oval, 1947, which also reveals to a remarkable degree the character and principles that defined Wells’ artistic outlook.