Paintings »
Cornish Harbour Scene by William Todd Brown (1875-1952)
Ref: 3312
Cornish painters from an early period took a story teller's perspective to the fisherman's harbour scene one perpetuated on biscuit tins, fish food packaging and modern tourist art, a conceptual view in which fishermen tend to be bearded worthies smoking clay pipes and the sea and sky are always blue.
Adrian Stokes who lived in Carbis Bay and St Ives around the same time as William Todd Brown lived there remarked that the view from Carbis Bay cliff in the morning could be distinctly "Samoan" and the sea was often "pure green".
Stokes and Brown were avant-gardists attuned to the poetry of sensation, light, colour, impressions, things "as they really are" or at least as they appeared to them - material to strive to make order from, not to bend too easily to the shapes of wish fulfillment and received ideas, carving not modelling.
Brown was a star student in the 1910s at the Slade under the tutelage of our foremost Impressionist - another recorder of seaside epiphanies - Philip Wilson Steer. Here, in this evidently mature work, an oil on board from the 1930s or 40s, we see Brown has moved on to absorb the even more radical lessons of French Impressionism - Matisse's "La Raie Verte" portrait of Madame Matisse, for example, a touchstone for understanding the Fauve use of colour as tone ie. the observed not mere colour expression. Chiefly though one notes the influence of Monet, both Argenteuil and Giverny, the lightly buoyant water takes centre stage, hulls, sails and distant objects bunch up top and are near abstract shapes, water surface & shadows are pleasing chunks and slivers of colour as if detached from the solid but cohering in an unforced harmony of protean greens from sage to aqua and in the foreground delightful mauve between snake-like ripples evokes late lily pads.
This is a most accomplished translation of French painterly vision to the English scene, Brown was not a great gallery exhibitor, making his living as an educator, and it would be no surprise to see his works newly discovered.
English c.1930s
H: 46cm (18.1in)
W: 53cm (20.9in)
D: 2cm (0.8in)
SOLD
Print Back