WINSLOW HOMER

In England, after a decade of painting scenes of American idyll, Homer lost his innocence. The spontaneous, bright, and almost doll house quality of his early work, one preoccupied with a vision of his country and its beauty, dissipated and in its place came something more universal, touching a higher plane. It was this return from his 2 years away, that he moved to a small house some seventy feet from the sea in Maine and his subject matter became informed by the swell, the danger and the shimmering beauty of the water that he saw from his window each day. ‘Summer Night’ is a study of restraint, revealing just enough to create a sense of longing, but not so much that we can’t see ourselves in the scene. The soft focus of two dancers, watched by a group in shadows as the light glistens from the stormy sea behind them, captures a poignant romance that each of us can understand.

MAURICE PRENDERGAST

“Genius is the power of assimilation”, said Prendergast, and if so, ‘The Beach’ is the crowning achievement of his genius. Reworking an existing composition of his, of a subject he returned to regularly in his career, Prendergast seems to fill this painting with every imaginable influence, borrowing techniques, styles and images in equal measure from Medieval and Renaissance art, as well as modernist works of Pointillism and Impressionism and, even more directly, making over nods to Cezanne, Signac and Renoir. The painting becomes a work of fragments, a sort of jigsaw puzzle for the art historian who can spot Cezanne’s mountains in the background, poses from Northern Renaissance etchings and colour fields from the titans of French avant-garde. Yet all this is not to condemn the painting, nor make any judgement against its quality – Prendergrast for all of his influence is not derivative, instead he absorbs influence and translates them in multi-lingual beauty. He is able to see the scope of history and turn it into a definitively contemporary work.

GORDON ONSLOW FORD

Gordon Onslow Ford was the last of his kind – the final surviving surrealist who saw the world change in the image he had helped imagine. One of the few significant members of Breton’s group of surrealists and amongst the only native English speak, Onslow Ford abandoned a regimented and expected career in the Navy to live in Paris and fulfil his passion and purpose. Regularly attending the movements exclusive meetings at Cafè deux Magots in Paris, he ingratiated himself with every important member of the group, hosting them for summers at a chateau near Switzerland. Yet of all the group, it was his friendship with the architect Roberto Matta that most informed his work. Together, they studied the mathematical and the metaphysical, and from Matta’s architectural drawings he learned his own understanding of perspective. He combined the cosmic and the rational, bringing mystic and surrealist ideas into a mathematical framework to speak to an ordered chaos of reality.