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Artist: Mainie Jellett (1897-1944) Title: Fountain and Loggia (c. 1935) Signature: signed lower right Medium: gouache on paper Size: 47 x 27½cm (18.5 x 10.8in) Framed Size: 62.2 x 42.5cm (24.5 x 16.7in) Provenance: Dawson Gallery, Dublin (label verso); Private Collection a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} With its echoes of the art of Fra Angelico and twentieth-century metaphysical artists such as Giorgio de Chirico this gouache rendering of a classical architectural loggia reveals Mainie Jellett's love of the Italian Renaissance, which continued even as she was forging her own style of Modernist a... Read more Mainie Jellett Lot 22 - 'Fountain and Loggia (c. 1935)' Estimate: €800 - €1,200 With its echoes of the art of Fra Angelico and twentieth-century metaphysical artists such as Giorgio de Chirico this gouache rendering of a classical architectural loggia reveals Mainie Jellett's love of the Italian Renaissance, which continued even as she was forging her own style of Modernist abstraction. The painting depicts in the distance a fountain, seen in extreme perspective through five round arches of a loggia. The black-and-white chequered floor adds to the impression of perspectival depth. The painting may have been a study for a theatre set, or an exercise in interpreting and re-creating the art of the Renaissance in a more contemporary form. Born into a middle-class Dublin professional family, from the outset Jellett was determined to excel, and, focusing on her career with dedication, she succeeded in becoming one of Ireland's leading artists of the twentieth century. Her father, William Morgan Jellett, was a leading barrister; her mother, Janet Stokes, a talented musician. Jellett's childhood was spent in Fitzwilliam Square, and she attended Alexandra College and the Metropolitan School of Art, before going on, aged twenty, to London, where she studied at Westminster School of art. There she met Evie Hone and together the two artists went to Paris in 1921. Initially they furthered their studies with André Lhote but then badgered the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes into giving them lessons. An important theorist of the Cubist movement, Gleizes' 1912 book Du Cubisme was, for many years, the most important theoretical study of the movement that had been pioneered by Picasso and Braque in Paris in 1907. He somewhat reluctantly agreed to take on Jellett and Hone as students, but found the experience of teaching two ambitious and talented students was helpful to his own art practice, and together the trio worked on developing a form of Synthetic Cubism that was to become Jellett's essential artistic language for the rest of her life. During the years following 1930, Jellett developed a systematic approach to painting in which flat geometric patterns of colour predominate. From 1932, she exhibited in Paris with Abstraction-Création, a group of abstract painters formed the previous year. Although by now a fully abstract painter, she continued to be inspired by the religious altarpieces of Fra Angelico and other Renaissance artists, and translated the general elements of these Renaissance masterpieces, rendering them as geometric abstract patterns. In Ireland, Jellett had first exhibited her Cubist paintings at a group show of the Society of Dublin Painters in the autumn of 1923. Although her work was initially disparaged by George Russell and other critics, over the years she was ably defended, most notably by Bruce Arnold, with recent museum exhibitions confirming her position as one of Ireland's great Modernist painters of the twentieth century. Peter Murray, March 2021