Lyon & Turnbull
Los 138
JOHN MAXWELL R.S.A. (SCOTTISH 1905-1962) BIRD AND DANDELION HEAD Oil on canvas 76cm x 63.5cm (30in x 25in) The Scottish Gallery, 28th November 1977 where acquired by the father of the current ownersExhibited: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, John Maxwell Memorial Exhibition, 1963, no.196. John Maxwell was both a devoted primitive painter and an exacting perfectionist. Perhaps it is this ostensible idiosyncrasy that makes his work so compelling. Across his career his subject-matter remained unusually consistent, and the focus with which he repeatedly painted plants, flowers and creatures suggests he felt he was drawing ever-closer to revealing an essential truth about the natural world. Yet in Maxwell’s hands the natural world undergoes a creative metamorphosis, becoming stranger, wilder and more vivid, as if bewitched. The Maxwell family owned a cinema in rural Kirkcudbrightshire, and one can speculate how, as a boy, John’s imagination was stimulated alternately by the awesome expansiveness of the Galloway landscape and the technicolour visions projected on the silver screen. (see McClure, D., John Maxwell, University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh, 1976, p.4) An Edinburgh College of Art travelling scholarship conveyed Maxwell to Spain, France and Italy in the mid-1920s, where he was awakened to new possibilities of expression by Byzantine Icons and the Italian Primitives. (McClure, D., op.cit., p.10)These formative influences come to fruition in Bird and Dandelion Heads, in which he pares forms to their most essential. The composition is carefully prepared with cool blues and pale greys, which is then disrupted by a rain of day-glo pigment applied in energetic strokes. Maxwell silhouettes the white bird - perhaps a dove - around a dandelion-head halo, transfiguring the common garden bird and weed into a fluorescent holy spirit and mandorla. The composition and subject-matter of Bird and Dandelion Head presents striking parallels with Maxwell’s important work Night Flowers, in the collection of the Tate (T00283). This was conceived as part of a series of four paintings inspired by activity in his back garden, which was executed over the course of 1959.
