Edward Wadsworth A.R.A.

Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
The Royal Watercolour Society, London
Mayor Gallery, London
Private Collection

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Edward Wadsworth, April - May 1938, cat. no.19 (as Aubade);
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, International Exhibition of Paintings, October - December 1938, cat. no.159;
London, The Royal Watercolour Society, Tempera Painting, May - June 1946 (details untraced).

Barbara Wadsworth, Edward Wadsworth, A Painter's Life, Michael Russell, Salisbury, 1989, cat. no.W/A 174;
Jonathan Black, Edward Wadsworth, Form, Feeling and Calculation, The Complete Paintings and Drawings, Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2005, cat. no.337, p.192, illustrated.

Stable board. There are areas of very slight frame abrasion to the extreme edges in line with the framing of the work, which is partly visible along the top edge. There is very minor surface dirt, with a very fine hairline of craquelure appearing to the extreme left hand edge, 11in. from the top, and encroaching c.7in. in towards the centre of the composition, only visible upon very close inspection. This excepting the work appears in very good overall condition, with bright, vivid colours throughout. Ultraviolet light reveals very minor areas of fluorescence to the isolated spots of the extreme edges, but these appear in keeping with the nature of the materials, and do not suggest retouching. Housed behind glass in a thick, silver and gold painted frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to Jonathan Black for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

An aubade is a word derived from Provencal French meaning a song or poem appropriate to, or greeting, the dawn. It does not therefore take a great leap of imagination to see that this rather obscure word does seem especially appropriate for Wadsworth to include it in the title of his painting.

The early mist lifting above the emerald sea, the sharp strong shadows cast across the foreground, that sense of everything warming up as a prelude to a beautiful day, all these are combined with the apparently random objects in the painting to create an air of both strangeness and familiarity. Everything evokes the sea and a sense of leisure. Boating, fishing, games, a walk along the beach - as an album of photographs might prompt the memories of a journey, so Wadsworth offers us an image that feels filled with the halcyon promise of remembered days.

The paintings generally known under the collective title of the ‘marine still-lives’ are perhaps one of the most striking group of images not only in Wadsworth’s oeuvre but also in British painting of the period. Drawing upon trips to St.Tropez and Marseilles in the mid-1920s, they offer a continental sophistication with the tang of the Mediterranean.  Wadsworth was always familiar with European currents, and certainly by the late-1920s knew the work of de Chirico, Jean Metzinger and Pierre Roy through his connection to the Parisian circles of the dealer Léonce Rosenberg. However, into the 1930s Wadsworth takes his subjects outside, making them much more part of their environment and in doing so he manages to imbue them with that special air that makes them so memorable. One cannot really hope to successfully evoke the sea without offering a sense of space and thus in paintings such as Marine Set (2) Aubade or Offing (City Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol) we are presented with just that. Using a trompe l’oeil wooden framework Wadsworth suspends a variety of maritime curiosities in a manner that the artist’s friend Moholy-Nagy felt reminded him of the mobiles of Alexander Calder, or which one might suggest delve even back further to the early baroque Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán. These play with the ideas of lightness and weight (the darts fly, the shuttlecocks float, the pulley lifts) as well as making for a rather pleasing composition which can hardly fail to draw from our memory days by the sea, where maybe we too greeted such a morning.