Beschreibung:

Mary Swanzy HRHA (1882-1978)
Signature: signed lower right, inscribed label on reverse and with studio stamp on stretcher
Medium: oil on canvas
Size: 24 x 20in. (60.96 x 50.80cm) Framed Size: 31 x 27in. (78.74 x 68.58cm) Condition: This work appears to be in excellent condition. Canvas is taut and stable. No signs of cracking or flaking. Surface is clean. Provenance: The artist's studio; Estate sale, Christie's, 9 May 2007, lot 312; Private collection Exhibited: 'Mary Swanzy: Paintings of Samoa 1919-1925', Dawson Gallery, Dublin, 28 April to 12 May 1976, catalogue no. 13; 'Mary Swanzy: Voyages', Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 26 October 2018 to 17 February 2019 Literature: 'Mary Swanzy: Voyages', Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2018, p.80 (full page illustration); O'Mahony-Brady, Amelia, 'Markiewicz and The Modernist', Totally Dublin, #169 October, 2018, p.71 (illustrated) As a young woman of independent means, Mary Swanzy travelled widely throughout Europe in the years preceding the First World War. She attended a lycée in Versaille and a day school in Freiburg, Germany. Upon returning to Dublin she took art lessons f...Read more As a young woman of independent means, Mary Swanzy travelled widely throughout Europe in the years preceding the First World War. She attended a lycée in Versaille and a day school in Freiburg, Germany. Upon returning to Dublin she took art lessons from May Manning, who encouraged her to go to Paris. This she did in 1905, enrolling at Delacluse’s academy. In Paris she was a regular visitor to Gertrude Stein’s house, where she encountered works by Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse and Gauguin. She also spent periods painting in Grasse and in Florence, sending works back to Dublin for inclusion in the annual RHA exhibitions. In 1920 she joined her sister in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, where she helped with relief work in a Protestant mission. Swanzy also had relations in Hawaii, and around 1923 joined her aunt, Mrs F. M. Swanzy, at her home in Manoa, a suburb of Honolulu. In February 1924 she held a small exhibition of Czechoslovakian and Hawaiian paintings at her aunt’s house. The following month she ventured further west into the South Pacific, to visit Samoa, where she sketched and painted more than a dozen canvases. These were exhibited on her return to Honolulu in July 1924, and again in September 1924 at the Santa Barbara Art Club Gallery. Swanzy returned to Dublin early in 1925, in time to submit three of her Samoan scenes to the RHA, before continuing on to Paris, where she held an exhibition of fourteen Samoan paintings at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune. Whilst it is unknown whether Preparing the Meal, Samoa, was included in any of the three exhibitions in 1924 or ’25, it is certain that it was exhibited at the Dawson Gallery in 1976, at the last solo show to be held in Swanzy’s lifetime. Swanzy’s time in the South Pacific marked a watershed in her development as an artist. In the warmth of the tropics she shed the influence of her various painting masters from Paris, and evolved her own distinct style. Inevitably perhaps, her Polynesian paintings have been compared to Gauguin’s Tahitian scenes from thirty years previously. However, where Gauguin sought to evoke symbolic or mythical references, Swanzy tended to respond intuitively and spontaneously to the colourful exotic surroundings, painting them in a style, as Julian Campbell has noted, that is more akin to Matisse than Gauguin. Of all of Swanzy’s known South Pacific paintings, Preparing the Meal, Samoa is the most concerned with the painting of the human figure. The central figure of the woman is given a statuesque grace and calm as she prepares the eponymous meal, whilst her companions serve as decorative adjuncts, their tapa cloth skirts forming a visual triangle for the eye to follow around the canvas. The interlaced vegetation in the background provides as it were a flattened backdrop, returning the eye to centre stage. The paint is applied rapidly, with confidence, in a striking display of painterly bravura that is as arresting today as it must have been when painted eighty