Wadsworth, Edward (1889-1949)

Quiet Outlook / Seaweed & Lighthouse, 1942

Tempera Signed and dated lower right 61 x 51 cm. (24 x 20 in.) Framed size 74 x 64 cm.

Provenance: Estate of the artist

Exhibited: Tate Gallery, London, February - March 1951 (no.45)

Literature: Edward Wadsworth, Form, Feeling and Calculation, the Complete Paintings & Drawings , by Jonathan Black, published by Philip Wilson, London 2005. No.422, illustrated colour p.130

This striking and yet subtly enigmatic composition, so redolent of the world of the seaside; characterful briny ports, beaches and harbours, was actually painted many miles from the sea - in Buxton in Derbyshire’s Peak District.

Wadsworth had been compelled by the Army to leave his home at Dairy Farm, Maresfield, near Uckfield in East Sussex - which was within easy reach of the south coast - in May 1940 as it lay within an area deemed to be threatened with the imminent German invasion. He at least found it easier to locate eggs in Buxton; painting in egg tempera had become decidedly problematic as eggs were strictly rationed, one a week, when he usually required several for one painting.

Wadsworth painted Quiet Outlook in his cramped top floor studio at Tolland House, Macclesfield Road, Buxton, during the summer of 1942 when he managed to find time from his duties as a sergeant in the local Home Guard. Wadsworth’s services were in particular demand at the time as his pre-war command of German was sufficiently fluent to enable him to qualify to interrogate shot down German pilots and aircrew. He found that painting a work such as Quiet Outlook, which harked back to images of Norman French ports such as Honfleur, Harfleur and Le Havre he had produced c.1938-39, had a ‘soothing effect on the mind.’ It is a testament to his talent that, despite his demanding wartime duties and straitened working environment, Wadsworth was still able to create a work imbued with all his trademark unsettling and enigmatic stillness.

Before the war he had often casually been labelled a Surrealist and, though he was never formally a member of the movement, his meticulously rendered compositions simultaneously beguile and unnerve as do the most effective examples of the Surrealist aesthetic by, for example, his pre-war friend Max Ernst. Quiet Outlook, combining stylised still life with a simplified rendition of a harbour jetty and lighthouse, is filled with a sense of glacial expectancy; a scrupulously clean stage set awaiting the entrance of the players. Though the composition is empty of human presence, this was 1942 and the height of the U-Boat onslaught on allied shipping in the seas around the United Kingdom. Wadsworth, an officer with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the First World War, followed the unfolding Battle of the Atlantic closely and it is not too fanciful to imagine the carnage taking place beyond the deceptively calm horizon depicted.

Quiet Outlook and its pendant works Silent Shore [1943, Private Collection] and Anticyclone [1943, Newport Gallery of Art] were greatly admired by the war artist Graham Sutherland when he saw them in May 1943 while passing through Buxton en route to paint lime quarries in the vicinity for the Ministry of Information. Sutherland was particularly impressed with how Wadsworth had succeeded in imbuing prosaic strips of seaweed and otherwise unexceptional everyday objects, such as the dangling rake, with such sinister and disturbing power.1

For his part, Wadsworth expressed himself pleased with how Quiet Outlook demonstrated his continuing efforts to develop the tempera medium in order to communicate the bewitching ‘magic of colour’ he had long sought as well as create harmonious compositions that were imbued with what he referred to as ‘Real mystery’; not the blatant and overtly contrived mystery so often associated with Surrealism but the much more elusive mystery of the apparently unimportant and easily overlooked.2

1. Edward Wadsworth to Richard Eurich,7 May 1943, Wadsworth Papers, TateGallery Archive, London.

2. Edward Wadsworth to MaxwellArmfield, 5 August 1942, WadsworthPapers, Tate Gallery, Archive, London. Dr. Jonathan Black FRSA