INTERIOR, 1939
Oil on board. 36 x 24in. (89.5 x 59.5cm.).
Signed and dated. Inscribed on the reverse.
Provenance
Hove Museum and Art Gallery, purchased with the assistance of the Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund, 1981 from Michael Parkin Fine Art; Accession No: H1981/8.
Exhibited
London, Mayor Gallery, 1939, No 12.
Oxford, The Ashmolean Museum, 1939.
London, The Leicester Galleries, 1940.
Harrogate, Harrogate Gallery, 1941, No 21.
Newlyn, Newlyn Gallery, 1961.
London, Hamet Gallery, 1971, ex catalogue.
London, Leva Gallery, 1974, (as 1938), no 10, Illustrated in b/w on the front of the catalogue
Penzance, Newlyn Orion Gallery, 1976, No. 5.
London, Parkin Gallery, 1977, No. 18.
London, Parkin Gallery 1978 No. 7.
London, Hayward Gallery, Thirties, 1979-80, cat. No. 6.44, p.168.
According to the Parkin Gallery (1977) catalogue, the work was exhibited at the Hamet Gallery, 1971. If so, it was ex-catalogue.
Literature
Illustrated in b/w in the London Bulletin (1939) No. 17, p6.
Illustrated in b/w in Apollo, January 1978 in relation to the Parkin retrospective.
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. b/w, pl. 25.
The interior is unlikely to be that of an actual building. Professor Watkin of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in a letter dated 4/3/03 (pers. comm.) wrote that the room “looks a bit like a decorator’s design of the 1920s, for the proportion of the french windows and their glazing at the far end is not really Georgian or classical, but more 20th Century in flavour.”
The critic of The Times, reviewing the Penrose/Colquhoun exhibition on 19/6/39, wrote: ‘though invention comes first, imagination is not completely suppressed. It is present, for example, in Interior which, with its glazed domes in deliberately false perspective, has the vaguely sinister effect which sensitive persons offer suffer in strange buildings.’
In a letter to Colquhoun on the 28 August 1940 about her works at the Leicester Galleries, Herbert Read wrote ‘I was a little disappointed with the pictures at the Leicester Galleries. The Interior...struck me a being too ‘dry’ – even as academic. I realise that the Interior had its atmosphere, but I doubt if many people would perceive it.’ TGA 929/1/1945. Perhaps Read was the reviewer for The Times.
Reference
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007.