Lot 124: Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)

Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)
Wild Thyme Farm
signed with monogram (lower left) and inscribed 'No.2 Wild Tyme Farm/£50/Isabel Codrington/Wistlers Wood/Woldingham, Surrey' (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. 34.
Derby Art Gallery, 1927.
London, Walker Galleries, Campden Hill Art Club Exhibition, 1928.

Anonymous, 'A Country Lover', Westminster Gazette, 8 April 1927.
Anonymous, (P.G. Konody), 'Art and Artists - Miss Codrington's Paintings', The Observer, 10 April 1927.
Anonymous, 'Sincerity in Paint - the Art of Isabel Codrington', Eve, 11 May 1927, p. 320 (illustrated).
Anonymous, 'Art - The Campden Hill Club, Walker's Gallery', The Spectator, 6 October 1928.
Anonymous, 'Campden Hill Club', The Times, 9 October 1928.

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
As a landscape painter, active at a time when artists such as Allan Gwynne Jones, Ethelbert White, Charles Edward Cundall, along with the Spencers and Nashes were seeking to re-invest the English countryside with emblematic power, Codrington occupied a central place in British art during the Twenties. Wild Thyme Farm in particular, with its foreground field of hay-stooks, recalls Gwynne-Jones' Fields near Ruan Minor, 1919 (Manchester City Art Galleries) and John Nash's Gloucestershire Landscape, 1914 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

With Ash Tree Farm (lot 123), Wild Thyme Farm typifies a series of downland landscapes painted by Codrington on the estate surrounding her home at Wistler's Wood in Surrey. Rolling hills lit from the left, casting long shadows, convey the atmosphere of early morning or late afternoon. The Westminster Gazette found these landscapes 'singularly joyous', while Frank Rutter went further, stating that art consisted in the ability to 'transmute the commonplace into an unfamiliar transcendence', and,

'...since her art is based on simple domestic commodities and the homely landscapes and barns of the southern counties, Isabel Codrington has little need of an interpreter. Her pictures speak for themselves, and speak simply but eloquently.'

K Mc