
Ingram Reid
Director
This auction has ended. View lot details




Sold for £44,800 inc. premium
Our Modern British & Irish Art specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialist
Director

Head of UK and Ireland

Head of Department

Associate Specialist
Provenance
Private Collection, Ireland, since the 1960s
Minton's Hop-Pickers is a superb example of the wave of Neo-Romanticism that came with force in the 1940s, and illustrates well how this new generation built on – and broke away from – the foremost initial influence, Graham Sutherland. Executed in 1945, on the eve of a bitterly longed-for peace in Europe, it captures Minton's quite particular atmospheric style of a bitter-sweet appreciation of the ephemerality of nature and of beauty. The harvest is an especially suitable motif in this regard: the brief flowering, the yielding of fruit to be worked for and savoured, before the retreat into winter.
Hop-Pickers came with a twin, currently in The Ingram Collection, The Hop Pickers (1945). Of the same size and medium, where the present work depicts three women seated, finely separating the bunches of hops, the sister picture depicts the previous stage; three men, one up a ladder, removing the bunches from the plant itself. Both employ an engaging dynamic between a somewhat flattened picture plane given depth by the loosely implied, receding vines. The vines are particularly archetypal in brushwork of Neo-Romanticism, but the flat blocks that layer the ground signify a departure from Minton's influences.
Living with Glasgow born Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun at this point, Minton would move in with Keith Vaughan the following year, and they would have a mutual impact on each other's artistic development. The harvest was a subject that Vaughan would replicate several times in the next two or three years, notably in Climbing Figures (1946, Private Collection), perhaps the most reminiscent of the present work in it's general arrangement and depiction of the human figure, In the Orchard (1946, Private Collection) and Man Gathering Fruit (1948, Private Collection).