Lot Closes In:
Nevill Johnson WORKTABLE AND TWO CATS
Lot 16
Current Bid: €3,000
Bid History: 1 Bids
Estimate: €4,000 - €6,000
Ending: 18:12:00 on 28/05/2024
Nevill Johnson, 1911-1999
WORKTABLE AND TWO CATS
Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 36" (61 x 91.5cm), signed and dated 1978; signed, inscribed and dated 1978 verso.

Provenance: Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast (label verso).

Exhibited: 'Nevill Johnson', ... Read more
Lot 16 - WORKTABLE AND TWO CATS by Nevill Johnson Lot 16 Nevill Johnson WORKTABLE AND TWO CATS
Estimate: €4,000 - €6,000
Nevill Johnson, 1911-1999
WORKTABLE AND TWO CATS
Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 36" (61 x 91.5cm), signed and dated 1978; signed, inscribed and dated 1978 verso.

Provenance: Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast (label verso).

Exhibited: 'Nevill Johnson', Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, 1979, catalogue 13 (£500).

Despite the recognition Nevill Johnson had achieved in the post-war period, when he was represented by the Victor Waddington Galleries, in the late 1950s he abandoned painting and returned from Dublin to England, where he had grown up. Around 1962 he received an inheritance that enabled him to buy a smallholding in Suffolk, and it was here that he began to work again as an artist.

Throughout the 1960s he maintained a professional connection with Ireland, showing twice at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and continuing to sell work through the Dawson Gallery, but it was only in 1978 that Johnson held his first one-person exhibition with Tom Caldwell, who was to represent him for the remainder of his career in Belfast and Dublin. The Ulster Museum and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland acquired works from this first exhibition, and in the same year he was awarded the Silver Medal at the annual exhibition of the Royal Ulster Academy.

In the mid-1960s, Johnson experimented with printmaking and collage, and these influences fed back into his painting, which became increasingly linear and began to introduce fragments of pasted material, or at times used techniques to give the illusion of collage elements. The mood of his work had also changed from the post-war period, and even after he had left Suffolk and returned to London the gentler and more lyrical, even bucolic mood is often present. Work Table and Two Cats contains a sense of autobiography, with the empty chair, a canvas on an easel and painting tools representing the absent artist, as do the cats, animals to whom Johnson always felt strongly connected. Whether it is a memory of Suffolk in the 1960s, or of a cottage where he had lived in Ticknock in the 1950s, there is a sense of peace in this reminiscence and an assertion of Johnson's creative identity.

Dickon Hall, April 2024
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