Lot 127: Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)

Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)
Zillah Lee, Hawker
signed with monogram (lower right)
oil on canvas
48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm.)

Paris, Salon des Artistes Français, 1928, no. 503.
London, Royal Academy, 1929, no. 603.
Liverpool, 57th Autumn Exhibition, 1929.
Bradford, Corporation Art Gallery, Cartwright Memorial Hall, Spring Exhibition, 1930, no. 350.
Oldham, Oldham Art Gallery, 1931.

Rene Jean, 'Salons, 1928', Comoedia, 26 April 1928.
Paul Feirans, 'Salons', Journal des Debats, 27 April 1928.
Guy de Montcailhard, 'Salons', Express du Midi, 11 May 1928.
J. Peumery, 'Salons', Phare, 23 May 1928.
Anonymous, Artistes d'Aujourd'hui, June 1928.
Anonymous, 'The Royal Academy - Most Popular Pictures', The Morning Post, 8 May 1929.
Royal Academy Pictures, 1929, p. 115 (illustrated).
The Daily Mail, 4 May 1929 (illustrated).
The Times, 4 May 1929, p. 15 (illustrated).

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Costers, hawkers and gypsies have a distinguished lineage in British art stretching back to William Hogarth's Shrimp Girl, a work acquired for the National Gallery in 1884. Thereafter, in the Nineties, artists such as William Rothenstein, Philip Wilson Steer, William Nicholson, William Orpen and Ambrose McEvoy drew inspiration from Hogarth for their own depictions of London life. By the Great War, the theme had come to typify British painting, and the young Eric Kennington's Costermongers 1914 (Centre Pompidou, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris) was acquired by the French government.

By the 1920s this vibrant strand of proletarian subject matter drew upon wider sources in the work of Codrington's most distinguished teacher, George Clausen. Writing on her Old Tramp (Oldham Art Gallery) in Colour magazine a critic alluded to the plein air tradition of Clausen and Bastien-Lepage and concluded,

'At the present time Miss Codrington is among its ablest exponents as can be seen in this outdoor character study which is remarkably naturalistic and full of descriptive detail.' (Colour, April 1926, p. 11).

Similar points were made about the formidable Zillah Lee, Hawker, when it appeared at the Paris Salon des Artistes Français of 1928. This was Codrington's fifth year as a Salon exhibitor and her works were, in the words of an unidentified French critic, 'sobres, très observés, traduites avec une grande simplicité de moyens'. When it was shown a year later in the Royal Academy, few pictures were as challenging. At this point Forbes and Munnings had abandoned their scenes of gypsy life and Orpen and Nicholson had become well-established portrait painters. Laura Knight, who later borrowed Codrington's motifs in works such as Gypsy Splendour 1929 (Nottingham Castle Museum), was at this point still engaged on backstage circus and theatre themes.

Back in 1925, an anonymous writer in The Studio, signed as 'LGRH', had claimed that Codrington's work was 'as essentially masculine in its sincerity and determination as [that] of Brangwyn and Epstein'. The contemporary comparisons were inappropriate, but the writer found his or her feet with historical comparisons - thus:
'...but it [Codrington's work] is profoundly classic in its style - classic, that is to say, in its carrying on of the tradition of all the greatest masters such as Rembrandt and Van Dyck.' (LGRH, 'The Art of Isabel Codrington', The Studio, vol. XC, October 1925, p. 217).

K Mc