Footnotes

Provenance
With Lefevre Gallery, London, 1947
With Whitford Fine Art, London, 2002

Exhibited
London, Lefevre Gallery, John Tunnard: New Paintings, November-December 1947, cat.no.8
London, Tate Gallery, Pictures for School: SEA Exhibition, 18 June-8 July 1948 (catalogue untraced)

Literature
Alan Peat and Brian A. Whitton, John Tunnard: His Life and Work, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1997, p.174, cat.no.471 (where dated September 1946)

During spring 1937, the Artists' International Association (AIA) presented a large, competitive exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery in London, Unity of Artists for Peace, for Democracy, for Cultural Progress. This materialised during a period of artistic support in Britain for the Republican cause, particularly regarding the outbreak of war in Spain. At the same time, the First British Artists' Congress was established which aimed to outline the terms of an art policy in Britain, including the formation of artists' trade unions. Surrealists played a noticeable role in these events, and the Grosvenor Gallery show devoted a jury specifically for this increasingly significant body of artists. It is here that Tunnard's name first becomes associated with Surrealism. Over one hundred works were Surrealist in nature with an astonishing forty-three British artists represented, including John Tunnard.

Writing in The Saturday Book–25 in 1965, Sir Herbert Read commented, 'Tunnard is, of course, a surrealist if that word has any precise meaning. He has not actively participated in the Surrealist Movement as such, but if surrealism is to be defined, in the phrase of André Breton, as "pure psychic automatism", then I know no artist who has more consistently practised surrealism.'

Angler Fish, painted shortly after World War II ended, displays the artist's deep connection with the natural world and his fascination with submarine life, an unknown world to many humans. A variety of paintings from this period continue his idiosyncratic style developed during the war as an auxiliary coastguard and conscientious objector, located at Cadgwith in Cornwall; Fishes' Window (1944), Surreal Seascape (1945), Portuguese Man O'War (1945) and Seabed (1947) all explore the colourful and bizarre life which flourishes under the water. The organic forms lent themselves well to Tunnard's surrealist tendencies. In the present work, this mysterious fish twists and turns in the water and through the vegetation with its luminescent fin ray acting as a lure to other creatures. All around loom abstract rhythmic forms which allude to infinite space and invite the viewer to engage. Sir Herbert Read likened this vision of Tunnard's to André Masson's 'dream of the future desert'.

We are grateful to Professor Brian Whitton for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.