Lot 35: Edward Wadsworth, A.R.A. , Composition on a Pink Ground (Cones and Spiral) Tempera, Pencil

pencil and tempera on board

40.5 by 34cm.; 16 by 13½in.

Andre de Ridder, Sélection: Chronique de la vie artistique : XIII Edward Wadsworth, Éditions Sélection, Antwerp 1933, p.60, illustrated;
Barbara Wadsworth, Edward Wadsworth: A Painter?s Life, Michael Russell Ltd., Salisbury 1989, no. W/A117;
Jonathan Black, Edward Wadsworth: Form, Feeling and Calculation, Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2005, no.265, pp. 151 & 183, illustrated.

Kathleen Dillon

Painted in 1933. Wadsworth?s paintings throughout much of the 1920?s had dealt almost exclusively with maritime subjects, and his ?nautical? still life work had built up a substantial following. However the possibilities of abstraction for extending the pictorial language available to the artist was not lost on Wadsworth, and in around 1929 his work began to demonstrate increasingly abstract elements.

Paintings such as Composition on a Pink Ground, Cones and Spirals drew their source material from everyday objects, and here we see the curls of wood shavings, a plumbline and truncated cones placed against a background of pure forms and colours and transformed into a composition of great style and subtlety. Other paintings of the period employed similar objects, and comparable works include Composition, Cones and Spirals (Collection V & A Museum, London) and Composition, Cones & Spirals II (New York, Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art), the second of which uses a slightly expanded version of the present composition but is placed on a horizontal format support and thus rather lessens the vertical tensions present in Composition on a Pink Ground, Cones and Spirals.

This painting originally belonged to the dancer Kathleen Dillon. Remembered by the artist?s daughter as ?an excessively golden-blonde? with ?an authentic Botticelli-Ghirlandaio air? (Barbara Wadsworth, op.cit., p.171) her affair with Wadsworth in the 1929-30 period brought his marriage perilously close to collapse.