Lot 25 , Edward Wolfe RA, South African/British 1897-1982, 'Afternoon'

§ Edward Wolfe RA (South African/British, 1897-1982)
'Afternoon'
a reclining woman in an interior,
executed circa 1929 in Morocco,
oil on paper laid on canvas,
90cm x 119cm,
in an impressive hand-carved leaf-pattern gilt frame by Lowy of New York, circa 1970 (stamped)

Provenance: With Paul Guillaume and Brandon Davis (Guillaume & Davis, Inc.),
73 Grosvenor Street, Mayair, London;
The collection of Brandon Davis,
Sold via his Estate through Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, ref. 'C. I. No. 98';
The collection of Henry Malkiel, a label verso reading
“E.M. to Henry Malkiel, by Edward Wolfe, Reclining Lady, value 575 dollars”,
His Estate, Brunk Auctions, Ashville, North Carolina, USA, 17th November 2018, lot 1413;
Private collection, London

Exhibited: Possibly London Artist’s Association, Cooling Galleries, Mayfair, London, 1930;
‘Edward Wolfe’, London Artist’s Association, Cooling Galleries, Mayfair, London, 1932;
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

£25,000-35,000

Edward Wolfe RA
Painter and illustrator Edward Wolfe was born into a Jewish family in Johannesburg, South Africa on 29th May 1897. In 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, he moved to Britain to study art, initially at Regent Street Polytechnic, and then, from 1916-18, at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he met Nina Hamnett, who introduced him to Roger Fry.
Wolfe became associated with the Bloomsbury Group, first exhibiting at Fry’s Omega Workshops, and sitting for a portrait by Duncan Grant, c. 1921. He also exhibited at the London Group in 1918 (elected 1923), holding his first solo exhibition in Johannesburg in 1920, and his first solo UK exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, London in 1926. He also held two solo shows with the London Artist’s Association in 1930 and 1932, the latter of which featured the work offered here.
Between 1926 and 1931, he was also an active member of the 7&5 Society, despite living and working part of the decade in Paris and Italy. Wolfe’s bold use of colour invited comparison with the work of the Fauves, in fact he was often dubbed ‘the English Matisse’, although art historian and curator Mary Chamot likened him to ‘an English Gauguin’. Although naturalised in Britain, he continued to travel widely, spending long periods in North Africa, Mexico and the United States. He exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1951 to 1970 and was elected a Royal Academician in 1972. The Arts Council arranged a retrospective in 1967.

The Omega Workshops
The Omega Workshops Ltd. was a design enterprise founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group and established in July 1913. It was located at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, and was founded with the intention of providing graphic expression to the essence of the Bloomsbury ethos. The Workshops were also closely associated with the Hogarth Press and the artist and critic Roger Fry, who was the principal figure behind the project, believed that artists could design, produce and sell their own works, and that writers could also be their own printers and publishers. The Directors of the firm were Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.
Wolfe was still a teenager when he made the acquaintance of Nina Hamnett who asked him to join Omega Workshops, painting designs on furniture, lampshades and other household objects. It was Fry who was quick to acknowledge Wolfe’s natural abilities as a draughstman in the modern idiom and he included him in his 1918 article ‘Line as a Means of Expression in Modern Art’ alongside Matisse, Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska. Writing about Wolfe’s early drawings in The Burlington Magazine Roger Fry observed, “The calligraphy is of the new kind, far subtler, more discreet and unemphatic than the old, but it is the calligraphy that first of all strikes us. One is indeed surprised to find young artists drawing with such a delightful freedom from all self-consciousness, so entirely without bravura and display.”
Omega closed in 1919, after a clearance sale, and was officially liquidated on 24 July 1920. A series of poor financial decisions and internal conflicts all contributed to its decline. At the time of its closure, Fry was the only remaining original member working regularly at the workshop. Despite this, Omega became influential in interior design in the 1920s.

A pivotal friendship
Jim Ede, the founder of Kettle’s Yard, met Edward Wolfe in Florence in 1924, while Ede was researching his book on quattrocento drawings. In Florence, both had been guests of the art historian Bernard Berenson at the Villa I Tatti. Wolfe was actually one of the first contemporary artists who Jim befriended and was a frequent visitor to the home of Jim and Helen Ede at Elm Row in Hampstead in the late 1920s.
Early in 1930, Wolfe invited Jim and Helen to stay with him at a house he was living in just outside Tangier in Morocco. They were there for almost two months, and the trip provided the Edes with much-needed rest, as well as time for Jim to work on his biography of the sculptor Henri-Gaudier Brzeska, the first edition of which would be published later that year. A portrait by Wolfe made around this time shows Jim Ede reclining on a cane chair in a garden with the sea beyond. He holds a pen and paper on his lap, and to his right is a low table upon which are several red-bound volumes. The books in the painting appear to correspond to the 1930 and 1931 editions of Ede’s book, published by Heineman, which featured Gaudier-Brzeska’s signature in gold on a red cover.
Ede’s friendship with Wolfe was to prove significant, not just in introducing the young curator to the world of contemporary art, but also in introducing Ede to Tangier. Wolfe’s love of Morocco influenced the Ede’s to the extent that in 1936, following Jim’s resignation from his curatorial post at the Tate Gallery, where he had worked since 1921, they moved to Tangier. Where, with the help of a local architect, Jim designed a large house in the new Modernist style, which he called ‘Whitestone’. It was a few miles from the centre of Tangier, half way up a stretch of hills known as ‘the Mountain’. From its terraces were panoramic views across the bay and into the country. The Ede’s lived in Tangier for sixteen years, before moving first to Les Charlottières in the Loire Valley, and then in 1956 to their most famous home, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.

A life of colour
Known in his lifetime as ‘England’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe is now widely celebrated for his vibrant portraits, vivid still lifes and sweeping landscapes, enriched by his international travels. Anthony Blunt opined in his 1932 article in The Spectator, following Wolfe’s solo London Artist’s Association show “One of the mosrt striking features of the exhibition is the variety of moods which Mr Wolfe is capable of conveying. In general he is perhaps at his best in the brilliantly coloured Tangier scenes, or the figures studies, ‘Afternoon’ or ‘Bdsotd and Fatima”
In his monograph about the artist, John Russell-Taylor observed “Throughout his career, Wolfe used almost any graphic medium which came to hand. He was adept at painting in oils - his early career at the Slade ensured that - and his oils were perhaps the medium in which he showed to most advantage. But he was also a brilliant draughtsman, and a compulsive one: even at the last, given a ball-point pen or a fibre-tip, he would start sketching portraits of those around or make elaborate designs out of doodles.”
Whilst Wolfe had always been respected as an artist of international importance, his influence on his peers clear and enduring, his works have become extremely sought after in recent years, as evidenced by his intimate portrait of Pat Nelson, which following its starring role in Tate Britain’s popular 2017 exhibition ‘Queer British Art’ sold for £95,000 at Lyon & Turnbull Auctioneers in 2021.
The work offered here is considered Wolfe’s masterpiece by the artist’s biographer John Russell Taylor. A tour de force of colour and composition, the influence of Matisse obvious in places, but on the whole unmistakably Wolfe - a painting by an artist at the height of his powers. Executed in Morocco circa 1929, ‘Afternoon’ features a model regularly used by Wolfe, both in drawings and in another oil ‘News from Town’, now in the collection of Derbyshire & Derby School Library Service.

Paul Guillaume & Brandon Davis
Despite both enjoying relatively short lives, the legacies of Paul Guillaume and Brandon Davis in modern French and British art cannot be overestimated.
Guillaume, born in Paris in 1891, rose from modest origins to become one of the leading cultural players and art dealer-collectors of Paris in the early twentieth century, dealing in works by Henri Matisse, Constantin Brâncusi, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Amadeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine, before his untimely death from peritonitis in 1934.
Davis, like Wolfe a South African by birth, was an attorney by trade, but a voracious lover of art, becoming a dealer-collector himself, with a collection boasting 123 works by Matisse, mostly acquired through Bernheim Jeune or Paul Guillaume. Davis met Wolfe on a ferry bound for Cape Town in 1919, a meeting that would lead to Davis becoming Wolfe's principal patron.
Guillaume and Davis went into business together, trading as Guillaume & Davis Inc., with a gallery in Mayfair's Grosvenor Street, run by Freddy Mayor. The partnership, however, was short-lived and was dissolved when Mr. Davis refused to limit the exhibitions to Frenchmen, he being an enthusiast of the modern English school. Davis continued on his own, exhibiting the works of Augustus John, Richard Sickert and other notable, including Edward Wolfe. It is likely that Davis retained possession of 'Afternoon' following the closure of his partnership with Guillaume.
Davis was a familiar London figure, always carrying a tortoise-shell headed cane and a spyglass. He died in London in 1931, fatally injured in a fall from the fifth floor of Whitehall Court.
The brief partnership resulted in purchases of many notable works of art, such as Renoir's 1876 self portrait, now in the collection of Harvard College and 'Interior at Nice' by Henri Matisse, now with Art Institute Chicago. It is clear then, just how highly Edward Wolfe, and this work in particular, was thought of by the titans of the art world in the late 1920s and early 1930s.