Description:

Richard Harold Redvers Taylor
British, (1900-1975)
Enticement, 1958
watercolor on paper
Richard Taylor O.B.E. (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) served as a colonel in the British army. Stationed in British Somaliland, he also had the opportunity to travel around the world until his retirement from military service in 1937. Then by 1946 he had transitioned into an avant-garde painter, enjoying six art shows in London in the decade to come.

This beautifully shaded watercolor painting leaves the viewer with much food for thought relating to conflicting interests, different social worlds, and the idea of enticement. We see the backs of two workers dressed in drab grey pants and shirts who are in the act of dropping a shovel and a sickle behind them as they make a bee line toward the word CINEMA. The word appears faintly, as a sort of mirage in the middle of tens of small quaint fields. The lands beyond them appear ancient; the landscape has been divided into many small plots that are each cultivated in individualized ways, appearing to us in different shades of reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and purples and culminating on the horizon with several tall and not fully cultivated green hills. Part of the fantasy mirage includes outlines of a few buildings and a street lamp that have been superimposed over the fields and sky. In much of Taylor's work, critics have seen his leitmotif to have been the gate hinge and figures around it, people who witness the dissolution of ancient traditions and landscapes that gave way to industrial large-scale farming and change more generally. That contrast between two worlds is apparent here too: in the juxtaposition of the workers (and their old, physically hard-working traditional ways) with their desire for cinema--which could signify leisure, distraction, and intellectual pursuits or pleasure.

initialed lower right, framed.

Provenance:
Gimpel Fils
Estate of Raymond Keith Kissee

  • Dimensions: 14 1/2 x 16 1/4 inches (visible)
  • Medium: watercolor on paper

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September 16, 2023 10:00 AM CDT
St. Louis, MO, US

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