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Christopher Wood

Before going to  the Chichester Festival Theatre to see Half a Sixpence we visited the Pallant Gallery to view the Christopher Wood exhibition. Wood is an artist whose life is more interesting than his work. Born in 1901 in Knowsley he went to Marlborough School where he sustained a blood infection and was sent home to recover to receive art lessons from his mother.  An art dealer took him to Paris in the twenties, the art world of Picasso and Cocteau, where Wood became an acclaimed artist. Later he moved to Cornwall and became close friends with Ben and Winifred Nicholson. He became part of the Newlyn School and admired the naive paintings of fisherman Alfred Walis. He thus knew well two art movements and fused their work into his pictures. In 1930 after meeting his mother at Salisbury station he fell in front of a train and died. It is not certain whether he committed suicide but we do know he suffered from opium addiction. Like many who died young there is speculation what he would have gone onto achieve some believing he would have become one of the shining lights of British art.

His  work is variable in quality. He did a startling self-portrait which I often studied when I was at New Hall College Cambridge as it hung in Jim Ede’s Kettles Yard Gallery not far from my college. The seascapes of the naïf period suffered in my view from a lack of draughtmanship. I cannot see him as a Nicholson, Sutherland, Sickert or the successful more popular artists like Munnings, Lowry and Seago.  His work lacks originality. There is a picture of card players but not as fine as Cezanne’s.

I was advising  a collector a year or so  ago whether to buy a Wood water colour of Brighton. I was put off by the price and as a water colour it requires more careful preservation in sunlight. The collector told me that he had seen a Wood sell for £800,000 but it was of greater quality.

Chichester is sleepy Sussex city but it has fine cathedral, theatre and modern art gallery all of which emphasise that London is not the cultural epicentre of the United Kingdom.

 

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About Alice Mansfield

A graduate of the Slade, Alice has painted and written about art all her life. With her children now having now grown up and departed the nest, she recently took up sculpture. More Posts