Lot 160
Estimate: £3,000 - £5,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 103-196 | Thursday 05 December from 6pm
Signed, coloured pencil on paper, mounted on cardboard
30.5cm x 23cm (12in x 9in)
Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York;
Sotheby's Hopetoun House, Scottish Pictures 18th April 2005, lot 120 where incorrectly catalogued as John Duncan Fergusson;
Private Collection, Scotland.
Exhibited:
Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, The Expressive Fauvism of Anne Estelle Rice, 29 April - 26 July 1997, cat.no. 31 (as ‘Untitled Landscape with Trees’), repr.col.p.42, pl.12
This work has been dated c.1918-20.
Groves of trees, particularly those with rhythmically undulating and expressive trunks, feature in several of Anne Estelle Rice’s sketchbooks and paintings. Sinuous tree trunks appear as framing devices in early frieze-like compositions such as Station of Montgeron of 1908-09 but in the drawings and paintings made in Cassis in the South of France and in Corsica, both first visited in 1913, their repeating, muscular forms animate the composition like figures in a landscape. Rice would have been familiar with the comparably undulant trees of André Derain and his Fauve contemporaries, as well as those of Vincent van Gogh who inspired them.
In this rare large-scale coloured drawing, the forms of trees are stylized further into repeating patterns of supple verticals, mounded canopies and fan-shaped ferns or shrubs, and the palette restricted to blue, yellow and green. The sheet was executed after World War One when Rice was based in London - she had married the British critic O. Raymond Drey in 1913. From early April to mid-July in 1918, she was working around Looe in Cornwall, where the artist, now pregnant, was joined by Katherine Mansfield and painted the writer’s portrait. Later in the summer, she moved on to Cromer and Wroxham on the Norfolk Broads. There were no funds for a studio during her challenging war and early post-war years. Rice did what she could during spring and summer trips, concentrating on small scale works on paper – drawings and watercolours – that could be made on the kitchen table, and often re-using motifs from earlier sketches.