WILLIAM MCCANCE (SCOTTISH 1894-1970) §
RHYTHMICAL FIGURE - 1935
£693
Auction: 25 June 2025 from 10:00 BST
Description
Signed and indistinctly dated to lower back edge, fire clay sculpture
Dimensions
19cm x 27cm x 21cm (7.5in x 10.5in x 8in)
Provenance
From the Estate of William McCance.
Hand-written label affixed to the base lists title, date and medium of the sculpture, noting inclusion in the Reading exhibition, and further inscribed ‘Foyle’s 15.'
Exhibited: Reading Museum and Art Gallery, Reading, Works by William McCance, 11 June-02 July 1960, cat.no.189.
Footnote
Literature: Patrick Elliott, Wiliam McCance, 1894-1970, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1990, fig.11.
This sculpture of a seated figure dates to 1935, when McCance was living in a converted windmill near Wolverhampton with his wife, the artist Agnes Miller Parker. McCance worked with gritty red clay which he fired at a local brickworks. His figurative sculptures from this period are stocky and curvaceous, and exhibit an affinity with the contemporary output of Henry Moore and Frank Dobson.
Rhythmical Figure’s form is entirely smooth, except for the rough textured skirt and the fine incisions articulating the hands, body and facial features. McCance often depicted his own sculptures within his paintings and drawings, a practice of inter-media dialogue he had developed in the early 1920s. He evidently retained Rhythmical Figure as a studio prop long after it was fired, as it features in his 1945 watercolours Lucifer Nos. 1 & 3 (lots 1 & 32) and his 1946 oil painting Seated Figure with Fruit (lot 3).