Lot 1662
WYNFORD DEWHURST (1864-1941)
FRENCH LANDSCAPE BY THE SEINE
Signed and dated 1895, oil on canvas board
55.5 x 75.5cm.
Provenance: Purchased by the vendor's grandfather at auction in Bradford, 1970's.
Exhibited: Manchester Art Gallery, Wynford Dewhurst - Manchester's Monet, December 2016-April 2017
Wynford Dewhurst was colourful and controversial character on the Anglo-French art scene at the turn of the twentieth century. Born in Manchester in 1864, he embarked initially on a legal training, but, at the age of 27, he went to Paris to study art and was immediately attracted to Impressionism. In 1904 he published a book, dedicated to Claude Monet, Impressionist Painting: its Genesis and Development, which was the first important study of the French Impressionists to be published in English. Dewhurst's thesis was that the English landscape tradition, especially the work of Constable and Turner, was at the root of modern French painting and he wrote that, ".….It cannot be too clearly understood that the Impressionistic idea is of English birth"
French Landscape, painted in the Seine Valley within a year of leaving the Paris art schools, is remarkable in that it shows how quickly Dewhurst has embraced the Impressionist principle of representing the visual world by the optical mixing of small dabs of colour, and that he has already adopted a colour palette befitting a follower of Claude Monet.
A smaller variant of this painting, completed at the same time, is in the collection of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.
We are grateful to Roger Brown, who wrote the book Wynford Dewhurst: Manchester's Monet to accompany the recent Manchester exhibition of Dewhurst's work, for his help in cataloguing this lot and the following lot.
