JOHN MAXWELL R.S.A (SCOTTISH 1905-1962) §
HUNTSMAN 11
£8,500
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: 04 December 2020 at 18:00 GMT
Description
Signed and dated 1940, inscribed and dated 'C.Y.K. for D.P. 11th Dec 1941', pen and ink and watercolour
Dimensions
44.5cm x 49cm (17.5in x 19.25in)
Footnote
Provenance: Mrs W. Burroughs.
Exhibited: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 'John Maxwell Memorial Exhibition' 1963, no.66, Arts Council of Great Britain, Ill.pl.5
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 'John Maxwell' 1999, no.38
Literature: David McClure, John Maxwell 1976, Ill.10.
Note: Maxwell was not a prolific artist. Only 200 known works (including the example offered here) were exhibited at his memorial show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He was also a great destroyer of work that he considered unsuccessful. It is always a great pleasure, then, when one spots his work in a collection; their scarcity lending to the already slightly mysterious qualities of his paintings themselves. They have a tendency to draw the eye and spring out at you from their hanging spot, strangely potent despite the fact his work is at all times gentle and poetic.
Maxwell was born and lived most of his life in Dalbeattie, Galloway, and his oeuvre is deeply rooted in that gently undulating landscape with its layers of Pictish and Medieval history. His paintings and drawings are without exception concerned with nature; not in a purely representational way, but rather seeking to capture the genius loci of the place. His work often conjures a sense of the nocturnal and liminal; the light evoked invariably lunar or the strange day/night of a solar eclipse. The overall effect is lyrical and dream-like, and comparisons to Symbolists like Odilon Redon and Marc Chagall are well-founded.
His artistic voice was individual and consistent, and few phases of notable development or experimentation are detectable over the course of the decades. Having studied initially at the Edinburgh College of Art and later under Leger and Ozenfant at the Academie Moderne in Paris, he remained remarkably true to his own voice and resistant to overt influence, which drew the admiration of artistic contemporaries and patrons alike.
As with poetry, there is a sense that each work evolved organically during its making; a process articulated excellently by the artist David McClure in his preface to Maxwell’s monograph of 1976, when referring to work offered here for sale: “Often his pictures seem to begin from an observed reality, but during the process of painting, this reality becomes transfigured by his own particular alchemy…. What started out as a drawing of a Staffordshire figure becomes, as in the watercolour The Hunstsman II, a pastorale. The hunter, the slain deer hanging from his shoulder, stands in a mysterious wild garden full of out-size flowers.”