Beschreibung:

Mary Swanzy HRHA (1882-1978) South of France Landscape (c.1915) Oil on canvas, 53 x 45cm (20¾ x 17¾'') Signed Provenance: Collection of Patrick and Antoinette Murphy; Gifted to the current owners by the artist in 1970. Literature: Patrick J. Murphy, 'An Art Lover's Guide to the French Riviera', Artisan House 2016, full page illustration page 174. Mary Swanzy 1882-1978 travelled extensively in Europe from childhood right up to her eighties. A visit to Valle de Grasse in the south of France in 1905 to attend an informal studio after her portrait studies in Paris changed her view on painting, allowing her to question and engage with the new modernist shifts that heralded Cubism. It was her fathers wish that portraiture might become her chosen profession however, landscape painting was to become the natural home for Swanzys brush. She planned to settle in Florence but the First World War forced a return to Dublin. In 1914 Swanzy exhibited for the first time in the Salon des Independents later becoming a committee member. She also regularly exhibited with the Beaux Artes.Visiting the Alpes Maritime on the border with Italy Swanzy records her delight at her fellow countrywoman, Sarah Purser challenging Gertrude Stein, noting that Miss Stein was not accustomed to having someone stand up to her. European landscapes with their intensity of colour informed many years of Swanzys lifelong obsession with painting. In this picture South of France c.1915 Swanzy is drawing with her brush, a technique that became central to her practice, retaining an immediacy and honesty to her modernist search for truth. Her response to the natural world is somewhat in the manner of an impressionist painter, she is in the moment and sensitive to her surroundings, using washes of pure colour much as a watercolourist would do. The result is fresh and lively. Swanzy feels nature through her brush, the surface is active, busy, taking her knowledge of divisionist colour theory, evidenced in some of her portraits from this period. Hard contrasts interrupt the picture plane sending the eye back and forth, questioning the perspective that Swanzy interrogates within the rules of formal composition. In this work as many others she selects dramatic high points to look down upon or low points which force the viewer to look upward, suggesting a narrative between the painter and her subject. The heavy prussian blue in the top corner creates a tension echoed in the black tree trunks and the path or bank along the bottom of the frame.The faded terracotta pink typical of buildings in the south of France and Italy, becomes a signature colour for Swanzy echoing classical uses of pink in Renaissance portraits and Mannerist painting. By 1923 when Swanzy travels to Hawaii, before visiting Samoa and New York, she is declared in the professions column of the SS Montcalms manifesto as a landscape painter; most of the women on board are recorded as wives, sisters or mothers.�ǿSafe to say she has made her decision and landscape rather than people, nature over society is her choice by this time. Liz Cullinane 2019 Mary Swanzy HRHA (1882-1978) South of France Landscape (c.1915) Oil on canvas, 53 x 45cm (20¾ x 17¾'') Signed Provenance: Collection of Patrick and Antoinette Murphy; Gifted to the current owners by the artist in 1970. Literature: Patrick J. Murphy, 'An Art Lover's Guide to the French Riviera', Artisan House 2016, full page illustration page 174. Mary Swanzy 1882-1978 travelled extensively in Europe from childhood right up to her eighties. A visit to Valle de Grasse in the south of France in 1905 to attend an informal studio after her portrait studies in Paris changed her view on painting, allowing her to question and engage with the new modernist shifts that heralded Cubism. It was her fathers wish that portraiture might become her chosen profession however, landscape painting was to become the natural home for Swanzys brush. She planned to settle in Florence but the Firs