Footnotes

• Still life with flowers, fruit and a clay pipe incorporates a number of elements which Wood painted throughout his career. However, it is the clay pipe, presented on the bottom left hand edge of the work which tells us most about the artist. This little object, which played such a pivotal role in Wood's life appears in a number of other superb oils by the artist; perhaps most famously in his masterpiece of 1927, Self-Portrait (Kettles Yard, University of Cambridge) where it rests on the table beside his paint box, but also in the stunning Flowers on a Chair with Pipe and Paper (formerly the Collection of Lord and Lady Attenborough) where it is supplemented by a newspaper and packet of cigarettes. It was the means with which the artist smoked opmium, the drug which had been made illegal in Britain in 1920 with the Dangerous Drugs Act, but which Wood would have had access to in Paris owing to his friendship with the artist Jean Cocteau. Whilst Wood had been using the drug prior to his meeting with Cocteau in 1924, perhaps with his Chilean diplomat friend Antonio Gandarillas in Smyrna as treatment for suspected Malaria, it was Cocteau who persuaded Christopher Wood that the drug aided and developed creative thought. Wood took the drug on and off throughout the rest of his life and, whilst it may indeed have benefitted him during the time it was being used under controlled conditions to produce works of brilliance, it has been argued it was the artist's withdrawal from the substance that finally prompted him to commit suicide at Salisbury station in 1930.
  
  Showing a firm understanding of the works by Georges Braque (1882-1963), which Wood would have familiarized himself with in Paris, the pipe and fruit have been completely flattened and their form simplified in contrast to the intricate work of the pink and white flower heads with their thicker impasto. Areas of the fruit, leaves and pipe have been left transparent, allowing the ledge the objects are resting on and the drapery of the background to become an integral part of the subject matter, a key tool Braque employed to create ambiguities with space and perspective.
  
  Although the present lot is not a large work, many of Wood's still lifes were even smaller in fact, it is a painting which possesses immense charm and beauty and demonstrates how the artist took pleasure in observing and documenting the objects which were to hand at that moment in time.

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Category: Fine Art / Modern British and Irish Art

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