
Ella Jerman-Riddell
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Provenance
With Redfern Gallery, London
Exhibited
London, Redfern Gallery, Basil Jonzen, Michael Ayrton, Hugo Dachinger, also French paintings, July 1943 (as The Harlot)
Ayrton's brief and unhappy time in the RAF ended abruptly in discharge on health ground; back in civilian life he became involved in a variety of projects, but his most substantial artistic work involved a series of images of St Anthony tempted in the desert, of which this painting is one. In wartime London the Victorian fascination with the occult had revived in the shadow of the Blitz, especially among creative artists, and much of Ayrton's work at the time has a sinister quality described by the art critic of Apollo as apocalyptic ruminations provoked by the war ... torment strikingly symbolised.
The fourteen gouaches and drawings shown at the Redfern were all studies for the oil painting, also exhibited at the time, now in possession of the Tate Gallery, and a key reference work in histories of the short-lived but fertile Neo-Romantic movement in British art of the 1940s. In the painting the Woman/Harlot of the gouache is clearly recognisable; a key figure not only in the imagined temptation of the saint, but in the composition as a
whole.
We are grateful to Justine Hopkins for her assistance in cataloguing this work.