Christopher Wood

(British, 1901-1930)

The Barber's Family 37.5 x 45.8 cm. (14 3/4 x 18 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With The Redfern Gallery, London, March 1936, where acquired by the family of the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The Redfern Gallery, Christopher Wood, 5-28 March 1936, cat.no.36
London, The Redfern Gallery, Christopher Wood, Exhibition of Complete Works, 3 March-2 April 1938, cat.no.244

Literature
Eric Newton, Christopher Wood 1901-1930, The Redfern Gallery, London, 1938, p.70, cat.no.244

The Barber's Family was painted in 1927, an important year for Christopher Wood who made his first appearance as part of the cutting edge Seven & Five Society, which was chaired by his close friend Ben Nicholson. The reviews of the exhibition from January this year were positive with Wood singled out for his four paintings by G.S. Sandilands of the Daily Herald and Frank Rutter of the Sunday Times. In his column, Sandilands comments, 'Mr. Christopher Wood has already had a remarkable career. He was a nineteen-year old clerk in a fruit store when Augustus John spoke the encouraging word that made the lad an artist. He is now 26 and shows quite extraordinary ability in a wide range of styles' (Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood, An English Painter, Allison & Busby, London, 1995, p.146).

Wood was not in London for the exhibition as he had recently moved into a new flat in the Passy area of Paris where he had a small room from which to paint. At this point the artist's primary focus was the 'life and death struggle' (Op.cit, p.154) to paint pictures from the imagination and driven by the requirement for money to fund his opium addiction, a number of works were sent back to London to be exhibited alongside Ben and Winifred Nicholson at the Beaux Arts Gallery in April. The Barber's Family was part of this group which along with others such as A Street in Passy and The Letter showed great illustrative instinct and the imagination that he strove to visualise. There is a considerable degree of charm and even humour about the present work which likely draws on a mixture of life, memory and imagination to create a wholly original composition.

We are grateful to Robert Upstone for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot, to be including in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Christopher Wood's paintings.