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Lot Essay
As early as 1906, Edward Wadsworth’s cosmopolitan outlook was stirred when he left England to study engineering in Munich. By the time he went to the Slade School of Art and married Fanny Eveleigh in 1912, Wadsworth was eager to spend his honeymoon on the Canary Islands. Afterwards he travelled through France and Spain, before posing for a photograph in the summer of 1914 at Dordrecht, with a mechanised vessel floating in the water behind him. Ezra Pound praised Wadsworth for having ‘a very natural and personal’ feeling ‘for ports and machines.’
His decision to make a painting called Cape of Good Hope, which was illustrated in the first issue of BLAST, suggests that Wadsworth was keen to travel even further. The canvas is now lost, but a very impressive Study for Cape of Good Hope survives to provide us with a vivid understanding of why Wadsworth tackled this subject. He may well have contributed an eloquent passage to BLAST’s introductory manifestos, where the delights of ports and harbours are listed with great enthusiasm: ‘scooped out basins, heavy insect dredgers, monotonous cranes, stations, lighthouses blazing through the frosty starlight, cutting the storm like a cake, beaks of infant boats, side by side, heavy chaos of wharves.’
When Wadsworth exhibited his painting of Cape of Good Hope, in the 1914 AAA Salon, it impressed Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who wrote about the ‘pleasure’ it gave him ‘on account of the warmer pigments and the construction: growing in a corner and balanced at the other by a short mass.’ Wadsworth visited Rotterdam in July 1914, and felt so excited by its maritime setting that he produced another lost painting described at the time as ‘a Vorticist conception of the harbour of Rotterdam, with brilliant coloured funnels of moored ships, depicted in the abstract, in strong blues, red and black and white.’ Wadsworth never lost his fascination with ports and shipping. It continued throughout his life, and Study for Cape of Good Hope shows just how much pleasure he derived from defining the crisply incisive forms it contains.
Although they border on abstraction, Wadsworth must have regarded them essentially as the product of an aerial view, looking down on ships in their harbour. They may be moored, but their thrusting shapes celebrate the vigour which lies at the very centre of Vorticism’s vision. There is an almost explosive force about these vessels as they fan outwards from their shelter. Ready to shoot off to sea with as much speed as possible, they are defined by Wadsworth with the utmost eclat. He heightens their linear energy by deploying eloquent colours, brushed in with a combination of watercolour and gouache.
Wadsworth also conveys his own excitement at viewing this subject from such a lofty vantage. Many artists of his generation were fascinated when their eyes were presented with the fresh, alternative vision supplied by aircraft, which revolutionised humanity’s way of looking at the world. He even painted a picture in 1914 called A Short Flight, which Gaudier-Brzeska praised as ‘a composition of cool tones marvellously embodied in revolving surfaces and masses.’ Wadsworth invites us, in Study for Cape of Good Hope, to see the interaction between land and water in a refreshing new way.
Richard Cork
We are very grateful to Dr Jonathan Black for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
His decision to make a painting called Cape of Good Hope, which was illustrated in the first issue of BLAST, suggests that Wadsworth was keen to travel even further. The canvas is now lost, but a very impressive Study for Cape of Good Hope survives to provide us with a vivid understanding of why Wadsworth tackled this subject. He may well have contributed an eloquent passage to BLAST’s introductory manifestos, where the delights of ports and harbours are listed with great enthusiasm: ‘scooped out basins, heavy insect dredgers, monotonous cranes, stations, lighthouses blazing through the frosty starlight, cutting the storm like a cake, beaks of infant boats, side by side, heavy chaos of wharves.’
When Wadsworth exhibited his painting of Cape of Good Hope, in the 1914 AAA Salon, it impressed Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who wrote about the ‘pleasure’ it gave him ‘on account of the warmer pigments and the construction: growing in a corner and balanced at the other by a short mass.’ Wadsworth visited Rotterdam in July 1914, and felt so excited by its maritime setting that he produced another lost painting described at the time as ‘a Vorticist conception of the harbour of Rotterdam, with brilliant coloured funnels of moored ships, depicted in the abstract, in strong blues, red and black and white.’ Wadsworth never lost his fascination with ports and shipping. It continued throughout his life, and Study for Cape of Good Hope shows just how much pleasure he derived from defining the crisply incisive forms it contains.
Although they border on abstraction, Wadsworth must have regarded them essentially as the product of an aerial view, looking down on ships in their harbour. They may be moored, but their thrusting shapes celebrate the vigour which lies at the very centre of Vorticism’s vision. There is an almost explosive force about these vessels as they fan outwards from their shelter. Ready to shoot off to sea with as much speed as possible, they are defined by Wadsworth with the utmost eclat. He heightens their linear energy by deploying eloquent colours, brushed in with a combination of watercolour and gouache.
Wadsworth also conveys his own excitement at viewing this subject from such a lofty vantage. Many artists of his generation were fascinated when their eyes were presented with the fresh, alternative vision supplied by aircraft, which revolutionised humanity’s way of looking at the world. He even painted a picture in 1914 called A Short Flight, which Gaudier-Brzeska praised as ‘a composition of cool tones marvellously embodied in revolving surfaces and masses.’ Wadsworth invites us, in Study for Cape of Good Hope, to see the interaction between land and water in a refreshing new way.
Richard Cork
We are very grateful to Dr Jonathan Black for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.