Lot 123: Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)

Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)
Ash Tree Farm
signed with monogram (lower left) and inscribed 'Miss Isabel Codrington/Wistlers Wood, Woldingham/Surrey/no.2/Ash Tree Farm' (on a label attached to the reverse)
oil on canvas
25 x 30 in. (63.5 x 76.2 cm.)

London, Fine Art Society, Paintings by Isabel Codrington, 1927, no. 17.
Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1927.
Derby Art Gallery, 1927.
Bradford Corporation Art Gallery, Cartwright Memorial Hall, Spring Exhibition, 1928, no. 1.
London, Walker Galleries, Campden Hill Art Club Exhibition, 1928.
Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1934.

Anonymous, 'A Country Lover', Westminster Gazette, 8 April 1927.
Anonymous, 'Sincerity in Paint - the Art of Isabel Codrington', Eve, 11 May 1927, p. 320 (illustrated).
G. St. B., 'Campden Hill Club - Good Works by Woman Artists', Daily Mail, 4 October 1928.

ISABEL CODRINGTON (1874-1943)

Isabel Codrington Pyke Nott was born at Bydown, Swimbridge, near Barnstaple in Devon (fig. 1), the daughter of the local squire. Both parents were artistic - her mother wrote and painted, and her father was an amateur playwright. In 1883 they and their three sons and two daughters moved to London and two years later Isabel and her elder sister, Evelyn Eunice, were sent to the Hastings and St Leonards schools of art where their drawing talents were nurtured. This was followed by a year at St John's Wood Art School, in preparation for the Royal Academy Schools, which Isabel entered in 1889, at the age of fifteen. The precocious Miss Pyke Nott won two medals for her work at the schools and began to exhibit. Despite the rise of the Slade School of Fine Art during the nineties under Steer and Tonks, the Academy Schools were to attract a generation of talented painters that included Harold Speed, G. Spencer Watson (see lots 117-122), Charles Sims, John and Mary Young Hunter, and her sister's future husband, John Liston Byam Shaw, all of whom shared Isabel's love of fantasy and folklore. Around this time Isabel met the ambitious young art critic, Paul George Konody (1872- 1933), then editor of The Artist, and later, a regular reviewer for The Observer and The Daily Mail. They were married on 27 October 1901, and during the next five years had two daughters, Pauline and Margaret. In these years Isabel continued to paint miniatures and imaginative watercolours for which she won a medal at the Exposition Internationale d'arte in Barcelona in 1907. The Konodys had a wide circle of friends as various as the poet Ezra Pound, the illustrator Dudley Hardy, the portrait-painter Philip Alexius de László (see lot 115) and the artist-traveller and former Whistler pupil, Mortimer Menpes. Konody was also a keen motorist and on one occasion Isabel and he drove down through Italy on an adventurous journey described in one of the first motor-travel books, Through the Alps to the Apennines (1910).

Around 1912 Isabel and Konody were divorced and the following year, she married Gustavus Mayer, (known as 'Dan'), a director in the London art dealership, P & D Colnaghi. The extraordinary flowering of her work occurred after the early years of motherhood, at the time of the Great War when she secured a commission to paint the Cantine Franco-Britannique, Vitry-le-Franois, 1919 (Imperial War Museum, London) and simultaneously began to exhibit at the Royal Academy.

Throughout the 1920s she showed regularly at the Academy and, after 1923, at the Salon in Paris where her La Fruitière received a 'Mention Honorable' from the jury. By 1925, her work was being discussed in newspapers and in The Studio, and reproduced in artistic monthlies such as Colour Magazine. Two solo exhibitions at the Knoedler Galleries in Paris and the Fine Art Society in London followed in 1926 and 1927, and works like Zillah Lee, Hawker (lot 127) were widely praised. Writing in the Fine Art Society catalogue, Frank Rutter likened Codrington to a 'straight' actor - but one whose work was 'fresh, direct and natural'. Being 'thrilled by the beauty of colour and texture she convinces us that humble, commonplace objects are lovelier than pearls and precious metals', he declared. At this time she was also an honorary member of the Campden Hill Club, a society established by former Academy students in memory of Byam Shaw, under the presidency of George Clausen that staged exhibitions at Walker's Galleries in Mayfair. In its 1929 exhibition she exhibited landscapes painted around the Mayer estate at Wistler's Wood, Woldingham in Surrey. Critics were quick to also notice the work of her talented daughter, Pauline Konody, prompting The Morning Post to remark upon the 'blood-is-thicker-than-water' relationship between them. During the thirties, Codrington felt that her colour sense had deteriorated and she concentrated on etching. An exhibition of her etchings was staged at Colnaghi's in 1933, and her last appearance at the Academy followed in 1935. Her final solo exhibition of 'Flower Paintings' was held at the Rembrandt Gallery in Vigo Street in November of that year. She returned to her native Devon during the closing years of her life and died there in 1943.
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