Footnotes

Provenance
With Redfern Gallery, London, 24 December 1965, where purchased by
Alistair McAlpine
With Abbott & Holder, London, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Having been awarded his first one-man exhibition in 1952 at London's Redfern Gallery, with similar such shows staged in both the subsequent two years, as well as several international group exhibitions across the same period and a solo show at New York's Durlacher Gallery, by the middle of the decade the young Alan Reynolds held the title of British Painting's 'golden boy'. Celebrated by both collectors and critics alike, sales of his structured English landscapes were voracious with notable acquisitions made by Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sir Kenneth Clark for the National Gallery of South Australia, and Sir John Rothenstein for the Tate.

Riding the crest of this wave in March of 1956 Reynolds returned to the Redfern Gallery for an ambitious exhibition entitled The Four Seasons. Comprising of a large oil for each of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter alongside several gouaches, these works marked a development in his style. Whilst they retain the highly organized compositional approach indebted to Paul Klee, the handling is more naturalistic and the palette, naturally varying season to season, has a greater overall vibrancy. Again, the works were met with approval with the four large oils entering prestigious collections (Tate Gallery, The National Gallery of Victoria, The Fleischmann Collection Pittsburgh and The Richard Attenborough Collection).

Following The Four Seasons, Reynolds painted two further works in a similar vein; Sunrise – The Hillside (given by Reynolds to the critic Robert Melville) and the present example Dark Landscape (which is the largest picture hitherto mentioned). Each oil depicts the same hillside topped with a duo of copses beyond a cultivated field with a stem compositionally uniting land and sky. Sunrise – The Hillside shows the moments after dawn break, whilst Dark Landscape displays the land cloaked under night. This is Reynolds at his most neo-romantic, utterly Palmeresque, they are paintings of an almost biblical foreboding. Yet they remain rigorously designed. The horizon line is set precisely a quarter of the way up the composition, whilst the vertical stem is precisely a quarter of the way in (a mathematical underpinning which was to become increasing important to Reynolds). The diagonal created by the intersection of these two lines and the lower right-hand corner is echoed by the diagonal positioning of the seed husk. These diagonals point, to entice the viewer's gaze, deep into the core of the brooding scene. Dark Landscape and its counterpoint work represent the crescendo of Reynold's representational phase. The following year his output formed mainly botanical watercolours and gouaches, before his departure into abstraction at the end of the decade.