Lot 36: May Guinness (1863-1955) STILL LIFE WITH GREEN BOTTLE oil on canvas 64 by 51cm., 25 by 20in. Provenance: Christie's, Twentieth Century British

May Guinness (1863-1955) STILL LIFE WITH GREEN BOTTLE oil on canvas 64 by 51cm., 25 by 20in. Provenance: Christie's, Twentieth Century British Art, 16 October 2003, lot 481, Private collection Exhibited: Probably exhibited as La Bouteille Verte, 'May Guinness', Galerie Visconti, Paris, January 1925; the exhibition later travelled in the same year to the Mayor Gallery, London May Guinness was a pioneer in the history of Irish painting, being one of the first artists to look seriously at French Post-Impressionism and adopt it for her own means From fairly conservative beginnings, studying in the 1890s alongside Mildred Anne Butler at Norman Garstin's painting school in Newlyn, she moved rapidly through a succession of painting masters in Paris: the American Edwin Scott, the Spaniard Hermen Anglada, the Dutchman Kees van Dongen, and finally the French cubist Andre Lhote. Whilst learning from each, she resisted falling into mere imitation of any one master. Hence in the present work the rich colouring of Anglada is combined with the fractured space of Lhote. She was also much inspired by Matisse and during the 1920s developed a decorative form of stylisation similar to that of the French artist, reducing forms to flat areas of colour and alternating these with sinuous, rhythmic lines. As James White would later write in the forward to her memorial exhibition in 1956, "the subject only mattered in so far as it invoked a colour, a texture, a line, all of which synthesised feeling and assisted in the communication of the artist's inner compulsion towards self expression".