EDWARD BURRA (1905-1976) - photo 1
EDWARD BURRA (1905-1976) - photo 2
EDWARD BURRA (1905-1976) - photo 3

EDWARD BURRA (1905-1976)

Lot 201
20.10.2022 13:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Sold
£ 138 600
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 831270
Lot 201 | EDWARD BURRA (1905-1976)
Estimate value
£ 70 000 – 100 000
EDWARD BURRA (1905-1976)

Wye Valley No. 2

stamped with signature 'E. J. Burra' (lower right)

watercolour on paper

52 3/4 x 31 in. (134 x 78.8 cm.)

Executed in 1968-69.





Provenance

with Lefevre Gallery, London, where purchased by the father of the present owners in January 1973, and by descent.



Literature

Exhibition catalogue, Recent Works by Edward Burra, London, Lefevre Gallery, 1969, n.p., no. 2, illustrated.

A. Causey, Edward Burra Complete Catalogue, Oxford, 1985, n.p., no. 355, illustrated.



Exhibited

London, Lefevre Gallery, Recent Works by Edward Burra, April - May 1969, no. 2.



Special notice


Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.



Post lot text

Wye Valley No. 2 is a wonderful example of Edward Burra’s later return to the British landscape.

In his depictions of the landscape, Burra looked back to Romanticism and the search for grandeur and solitude, discovering many of his subjects in the sparsely populated peripheries of the British Isles. Viewed from a high vantage point, the present work depicts a passage through the Wye Valley, an area of outstanding beauty through which the Wye river travels and England and Wales meet. Burra’s practice of painting very large watercolours began in the 1930s and continued late into his career. His sparse drawing and broad swathes of colour give a commanding presence to the late landscapes, in complete contrast to his early smaller, crowded figure designs.

Andrew Causey writes about Burra’s late landscapes: ‘Burra increasingly preferred large-scale, empty places. He avoided scenes marked by the kinds of variety or complexity that might bring them within the eighteenth-century definition of the picturesque, but his interest in grandeur of scale and apparent limitless has much in common with the contemporary concept of the sublime. Burra had the sublime landscapist’s ability to show nature as overwhelming and awe inspiring. His isolation of houses and farmsteads as tiny white spots on a hillside or flat plain defined in effect the cultivated, civilised world as a series of enclaves in the midst of boundless nature. Even if the lonely farmhouse can be seen as a metaphor for the condition of the individual in an unfriendly world, it does not imply that Burra necessarily sympathised with the Romantics’ sense of nature as a divine manifestation, and landscape therefore as a bridge between man and cosmos. Burra clung to reality, painful though it was, rather than engage in building cosmologies he did not believe in, and landscape remained for him … a place of last resort for the disenchanted’ (A. Causey, Edward Burra: Complete Catalogue, Oxford, 1985, p. 78).

We are very grateful to Professor Jane Stevenson for her assistance in cataloguing this work.
Artist:Edward Burra (1905 - 1976)
Applied technique:Watercolor on paper
Auction house category:Paintings
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
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20.10.2022 – 20.10.2022
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