Lot 2061
‡A BOX OF 21 ASSORTED PRINTED BOOKS
by Virgil, Goethe, H. James, M, Proust, A. Swinburne, R. Southey etc, mainly 20th Century editions, all but one with an original crayon or pencil sketch by James Wood on the flyleaf (figures studies, portraits, town scenes etc), many of the volumes signed and/or annotated by him (21 vols)
* James Wood (1889-1975), or Jas as he was always known, was a painter and writer, an aesthete who read history at Cambridge before studying painting in Paris and Munich. A remarkable man of wide-ranging interests, he co-wrote The Foundations of Aesthetics with C K Ogden and I A Richards, and the autobiographical New World Vistas (1926). In the 1930s he made a detailed study of Persian art, learnt Persian and became art adviser to the Persian government. He was fascinated by colour harmony and much influenced by Kandinsky, but was no mere theoretician, as the works gathered here amply demonstrate. A hugely inventive painter, he took everyday subjects and investigated them in terms of light and colour while ensuring they retained their identity as real things. He painted landscape, portraits, the urban scene, and was a key member of the Carline circle of artists to which Stanley and Gilbert Spencer belonged. (Stanley painted Jas lying on a tomb in The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924-7.) He exhibited infrequently, but had solo exhibitions at Zwemmer, the Leicester Galleries and Blond Fine Art. Far less known than he deserves, this is a rare opportunity to acquire a fine example of his work.
Andrew Lambirth
These pictures have been consigned for sale by the artist's family.
