WILLIAM MCCANCE (SCOTTISH 1894-1970) §
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
£441
Auction: 25 June 2025 from 10:00 BST
Description
Signed with initials to lower back edge, red clay sculpture
Dimensions
28cm x 30cm x 15cm (11in x 12in x 6in)
Provenance
From the Estate of William McCance.
Footnote
This may be the same 1935 sculpture that was included in William McCance's 1960 exhibition at Reading Museum and Art Gallery (11 June-03 July), titled Two Embracing Figures (cat.no.187), with the medium listed as ‘building-brick clay'.
Forbidden Fruit (lot 30) features in a 1946 oil painting of the same title (lot 31).
McCance depicted his own sculptures in his paintings from as early as 1920. The first known example of this productive inter-media dialogue is believed to be the 1921-22 sculpture Cat (National Galleries of Scotland, GMA 5160) which features within his 1922 painting Primeval Movement (private collection). Sculpture could be easily manipulated in the studio to test various configurations, and proved conducive to the vorticist style McCance propounded in the 1920s, which promoted underlying geometric volumes.
McCance ceased sculpting and painting in the early 1930s, owing to the significant workload at the Gregynog Press. It was not until 1933, having departed the Press and relocated to Wolverhampton, that he began to work on figurative red clay compositions which he fired at a local brickworks. Their curvature and solidity exhibit an affinity with the contemporary output of Henry Moore and Frank Dobson. These sculptures feature repeatedly throughout McCance’s still life paintings of the 1940s, and while McCance’s style had by this point changed substantially, his use of sculptural studio props endured.