Footnotes

Provenance
Rex Nan Kivell
With The Redfern Gallery, London, March 1942
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The New Burlington Galleries, Christopher Wood: Exhibition of Complete Works, 3 March-2 April 1938, cat.no.307

Literature
Eric Newton, Christopher Wood 1901-1930, The Redfern Gallery, London, 1938, p.73, cat.no.331

Painted in 1928, Spring Flowers in a Jug, belongs to a time when Christopher Wood was working closely with both Ben and Winifred Nicholson. The three had become increasingly close friends and spent much time together in London with Wood exhibiting alongside Winifred at the Seven & Five exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery during February of that year. As Spring dawned, an invitation to visit Bankshead, their farmhouse near Brampton in Cumbria, arrived and offered with it the opportunity to accelerate his learning and rejuvenate in the country. Writing to his mother, Wood noted that 'This is a dear old farmhouse. My room is lovely with great beams going up into the roof and across the room, all whitewashed and a huge window across the end, a box bed with a pretty blue cover, a table, a row of pots of tulips and little hyacinths and outside some ducks and a little farmyard like Beatrix Potter things' (Christopher Wood quoted in Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood, An English Painter, Allison & Busby, London, 1995, p.181). The stay was to have a crucial impact on his hosts too with Winifred describing how 'he came in March, his arrival was like a meteor' (ibid, p.181).

The work they produced during this time has been described as sharing the same spirit with a multitude of ideas flowing back and forth. Ben Nicholson and Wood explored the necessity of elimination in their drawing, a lesson which the latter had started to learn whilst in Rome in 1925 and taught by Jean Cocteau and Picasso. Many of these works, incorporating box shaped farm buildings and an assortment of trees and animals, are almost impossible to differentiate and reflect the intimacy of the working relationship. However, it was to Winifred that the artist appears to have been closest and they shared a deep appreciation of colour along with a spiritual connection that would extend beyond his untimely death. It is through their respective depictions of flowers that the influence of one another is most evident, the present work being a striking example.

Whilst both artists were well versed in more formal still life arrangements, they were most successful when working with bunches of wild flowers placed informally within a mug, jug or glass as can be seen in the present composition. Although Wood is not known to have painted any floral pictures at Bankshead itself, he spent much time observing Winifred and upon his return to Paris in April, he was focused on exploring the subject, requesting she send him bunches of spring flowers in the post. Several pictures, including Still Life, Bankshead (Private Collection), which depicts colourful flowers sent in one such package by Winifred emerged from the French capital. Placed in a blue glass to Winifred's influence, they are set within a composition drawn from Ben Nicholson's Walton Wood Cottage No 1 (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) with the wood itself and cottage almost identical but a heightened sense of colour throughout to give a unique identity. Spring Flowers in a Jug combines the strong influence of both Ben and Winifred from this important moment and is a visual record of the significant relationship between the three artists. The patterned complexity of the soft and muted background echoes the compositions of Ben whilst the flowers radiate in Winifred's own words as 'sparks of light, built of and thrown out into the air as rainbows are thrown, in an arc', set to Wood's own painterly gestures (Winifred Nicholson, quoted in Jovan Nicholson, Art and Life 1920-31, exh.cat., Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2013, p.33).

We are grateful to Robert Upstone for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. He is currently preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any work by the artist so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to Robert Upstone, c/o Bonhams, Modern British Art Department, 101 New Bond Street, London, W1S 1SR, or email britart@bonhams.com