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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen-Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings & Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  29 Nov 2017 ~ 6.30pm (New Zealand Daylight Time)
• Lot #:
  2
• Lot Description:
  A. Lois White
  Rainy Day
  varnished watercolour
  260mm x 200mm
  signed A. Lois White and inscribed "Rainy Day" in graphite on original matt board affixed verso
• Notes:
  During the 1930s and 1940s, A. Lois White earned a reputation for images from "modern life", alongside her more allegorical pictures.They included paintings inspired by her socialist and pacifist views, as well as more whimsical, light-hearted subjects, such as Rainy Day. Like Gay Ladies, Rainy Day is a varnished watercolour; this is a medium that White adopted in the late 1930s to combat a wartime shortage of oil paints. A charming, engaging work, it demonstates her ability to transform an everyday scene -- a family scurrying through the rain -- into a memorable image. White adopts a high viewpoint and crops the scene tightly so that our attention is drawn to the circular patterns of the massed umbrellas. Every detail contributes to the sense of movement: the strong diagonal lines of the footpath, the urgent strides of the children and the scarf blown back, echoing the rippling forms of the windwept trees. The pale legs of the children are luminous against the sombre colour scheme "“ a range of dark blues and greens that reinforce the brooding atmosphere. Rainy Day recalls the subjects favoured by the influential English modernist Claude Flight. Teaching at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London in the late 1920s, Flight championed the colour linocut in images that featured rhythmic line, bold geometric shapes and decorative colour. He urged his students to tackle subjects that reflected the dynamism of contemporary life: "buses coming down a street, waves breaking on the shore or carrying a ship on the sea, dancing, or the movement in a crowd, swings, or the eddies of the wind and rain: all these have their particular significant rhythm"1 Several Australian women, including Ethel Spowers, Eveline Syme and Dorrit Black, studied with Flight at the Grosvenor and they all returned home to promote the modern linocut movement. White would certainly have been aware of their work; she was interested in the linocut as a modern art form and experimented with several images in the late 1930s. Rainy Day has much in common with Spowers' Wet Afternoon (1930), illustrated above, in its vigorous design, crisp linear forms and humorous observation of everyday life. Jill Trevelyan. 1. Claude Flight quoted by Miya Itabashi in "British colour linocuts in the 1920s and 1930s and ukiyo-e prints"; see http://www.bigakukai.jp/aesthetics_online/ aesthetics_19/text19/text19_itabashimiya.pdf
• Estimate:
  NZ$20,000 - 30,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.