An Abstract Composition (c.1926) – Mainie Jellett Canvas

An Abstract Composition (c.1926) by Mainie Jellett – Canvas Print

Oil on canvas, 39 x 115 cm. A long sweeping curve carries across the whole width of the panel, reading unmistakably as a reclining figure once you see it — shoulder, hip, the turn of a limb — worked in ochre, umber and burnt orange against olive green, deep blue and blush pink. Stippled passages of dotted colour suggest flowering ground, stepped and zigzag forms break the curves, and a dark band scattered with orange dashes runs along the lower edge.

Despite the title, the picture belongs to landscape. Jellett drew on the Italian Renaissance painters she admired — Botticelli's Venus and Mars and Piero di Cosimo's Venus, Mars and Cupid — echoing their long horizontal format and their figures reclining in nature, then rebuilding it through the cubist method she had learned in Paris.

It belongs to a group of 1920s works in which Jellett began applying cubist principles to landscape, foreshadowing her mature treatment of the Irish countryside. Its companion piece, A Composition - Sea Rhythm, gives the same idea an aqueous form. A related gouache of 1926 is also in the National Gallery of Ireland, which holds this painting, bequeathed by Miss R. Kirkpatrick in 1978.

Mainie Jellett (1897-1944), born in Dublin, studied under William Orpen before training in Paris with Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes. With Evie Hone she exhibited the first abstract paintings shown in Ireland in 1923, and went on to found the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Her work hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Sizes & Format

• 30x90 cm / 12x36″ — panoramic canvas

Canvas Details

Printed on artist-grade canvas and stretched on a slim wooden frame — arrives ready to hang.

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